Ten percent of soldiers injured in Iraq have died from their war wounds, the lowest casualty fatality rate ever, thanks in large part to technological advances and the deployment of surgical SWAT teams at the front lines, an analysis to be published today has found.This story should be used to give hope and confidence to families that have sons, daughters, husbands, and wives fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. This news should be used by recruiters to get keep young people from being scared of dying should they sign up for the marines. This news should be trumpeted as an historic acheivement. We have spread democracy in a place that has suffered through brutal theocratic rule for decades, and we have done it with "lowest casualty fatality rate ever".
But it takes this reporter exactly one paragraph to descend into the fever swamps:
But the remarkable lifesaving rate has come at the enormous cost of creating a generation of severely wounded young veterans and a severe shortage of military surgeons, wrote Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.This reporter and the MSM in general will not ever see anything related to the war as good news. The reason "largest burden of casualties" is not a valid concern is because the reason for this war is the same thing that caused this phenomenon.
The war in Iraq has produced the "largest burden of casualties our military medical personnel have had to cope with since the Vietnam War," said Gawande's report in the New England Journal of Medicine. By contrast, 24 percent of soldiers wounded in the Vietnam War or the Persian Gulf War did not survive.
In the first Iraqi war under Bush Sr, we neglected to go in to Bahgdad and completely remove Saddam. Something that would have caused a lot more casualties and probably deaths. We didn't finish the job we undertook and as a result Saddam could stay in power, corrupt the UN, and spawn Bill Clinton's fighting from 3000ft style of combat. That is only dropping bombs from planes, or only launching cruise missles without ground support where nobody can get hurt. This strategy was completely ineffective, indeed counter productive when viewed in light of 9/11. We are in the process of paying for those mistakes and correcting that situation. And this news is good news in that struggle.
This reporter, Ceci Connolly, however chooses to see this as bad news and another feather to stick in the cap of the anti-war movement. The reason given for seeing this as bad news is that the efficency of our field sugeons will create "a generation of severely wounded young veterans". Is this better than letting them die? What possible motivation could there be for obscuring this story in casualty numbers? Rush Limbaugh wonders also:
.... we have been feverishly discussing among ourselves, what in the world could this tone in this story be? The fact that more lives are being saved and fewer lives are being lost is a problem. It's "obscuring a problem." Uh, Diana Schneider, who is the editrix of the Limbaugh Letter, I think, has come up with the answer. The answer to this is they're just livid -- the press, the leftists in this country are just upset that there are not enough deaths to get people outraged and protesting in the treats against the war. They're mad that these doctors are saving lives. They want deaths! They've been counting deaths up to 1,000, they hoped that would get Bush out of office. They still want Bush out of office; make no mistake about it. They still want Bush discredited and it's all part of coming back in '06 and '08, and so there are too many lives being saved over there. These lives in old wars, they would have died.At this point the left's disregard for the sanctity of life becomes blatantly obvious. Anyone who would wish for bad news in the form of death of his countrymen has serious problems. We can't have disabled people walking around. That's not humane, what if they breed? That wouldn't be fair to the kids they produce. Seig Heil! Right Ceci?
