Thursday, February 16, 2006
Who's Counting the Dead?
In the last 4 posts, I yammered on and on about how we Americans express the different values we place on different lives. This will be short.
We know with great precision exactly how many American lives have been lost in Iraq. We have no clue how many Iraqi lives have been lost. President Bush estimated the figure at 30,000. It could easily be three times that number.
We carefully counted the dead civilians from September 11th. All we know about civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan is that they vastly outnumber the deaths of our solders and September 11th combined.
We take "every reasonable precaution" to prevent civilian deaths as a result of our combat operations. But during the early days of the Iraq war, we read of many horrible tragic deaths of women and children at the hands of US forces. Read in the Kansas City Star, not some leftist, fringe publicaiton. And, in the last month, we killed as many as a dozen bystanders when we used a remote controlled aircraft to strike at a terrorist in Pakistan. (The terrorist got away.)
What is the value of an Afghan, Pakistani or Iraqi life? How do our actions square up with our rhetoric?
If you were God, what judgment would you pronounce on the United States?
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We know with great precision exactly how many American lives have been lost in Iraq. We have no clue how many Iraqi lives have been lost. President Bush estimated the figure at 30,000. It could easily be three times that number.
We carefully counted the dead civilians from September 11th. All we know about civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan is that they vastly outnumber the deaths of our solders and September 11th combined.
We take "every reasonable precaution" to prevent civilian deaths as a result of our combat operations. But during the early days of the Iraq war, we read of many horrible tragic deaths of women and children at the hands of US forces. Read in the Kansas City Star, not some leftist, fringe publicaiton. And, in the last month, we killed as many as a dozen bystanders when we used a remote controlled aircraft to strike at a terrorist in Pakistan. (The terrorist got away.)
What is the value of an Afghan, Pakistani or Iraqi life? How do our actions square up with our rhetoric?
If you were God, what judgment would you pronounce on the United States?
