A Little Perspective on the Iraq Death Toll

Alicia Colon, writing in the New York Sun, offers come numbers that I haven't seen elsewhere in the media (h/t The Corner):

The last Marine funeral I attended was for Adam Ogbu, a 19-year-old Nigerian-American who was my son's best friend. Young Ogbu died while on a Special Forces training run in Texas. He was in perfect health, and the cause of his death was never fully investigated. This was in 2000, and I mention this because the mainstream press is constantly bombarding us with the number of military casualties, and it is clear that the reports are meant to incite anger about the Iraqi war. How refreshing it would be if partisan politics could be set aside and reporters put news in the proper perspective without bias.

The total military dead in the Iraq war between 2003 and this month stands at about 3,133. This is tragic, as are all deaths due to war, and we are facing a cowardly enemy unlike any other in our past that hides behind innocent citizens. Each death is blazoned in the headlines of newspapers and Internet sites. What is never compared is the number of military deaths during the Clinton administration: 1,245 in 1993; 1,109 in 1994; 1,055 in 1995; 1,008 in 1996. That's 4,417 deaths in peacetime but, of course, who's counting?

The sad reality is that deaths in the military due to training accidents and other unfortunate events are the price we pay for having the best trained forces in the world (regardless of what John Murtha thinks). When you examine those numbers, which were racked up at a time when we were not engaged in active combat, the toll from Iraq, though sad, does not look as disastrous as many on the left would have you believe.

At the end of the piece, Colon adds this story of an anti-war protester seeing the light:

Perhaps the most touching reappraisal of an anti-war position was penned by Pat Conroy, author of "The Great Santini," who wrote, "An Honest Confession of an American Coward." He admitted being a draft dodger and an antiwar demonstrator to an old college teammate, Al Kroboth, whom he was interviewing for a book he was writing. Mr. Kroboth had been a POW and Mr. Conroy learned the details of his experience. Mr. Kroboth endured unspeakable pain while being tortured by his captors, yet he was saved by the extraordinary camaraderie among his fellow prisoners. As Mr. Conroy was demonstrating against Nixon and the Christmas bombings in Hanoi, the POWs were holding hands and singing "God Bless America" under the full fury of the bombs. It was those bombs that ultimately led to the release of the POWs.

After that night in Mr. Kroboth's New Jersey home, Pat Conroy researched the history of world totalitarianism during what he calls "the unspeakable century we just left behind." He concluded about our country: "I knew then in my bones but lacked the courage to act on: America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong."

The "bring 'em home" Democrat majority and the 17 Republican turncoats who voted for that resolution apparently disagree.

Read the whole thing.