A thought

Alan Ramsey:
Ignore an issue and it fades. Look at Iraq. People are still dying there, every day, Iraqi and American alike. Yet who cares? Not many. The "war" has become routine.
He's half-right - the war has become routine, because we know full well what the reports will be. They've been the same for about 24 months: Iraqis dead this, US soldiers dead that. But these issues haven't been ignored by anyone except the public, and they're only ignoring it because the media have thrashed the issue to death.

Every night, I listen to the BBC's World Service as I go to sleep. And every second night, their lead story is violence in Iraq - the other nights it's either their second story or there was obviously no violence. I am yet to hear a positive story out of Iraq from their headlines - it's all death, death, death. After a while, people become immune to what society deems as bad things if they're just tossed around liberally.

But the media still thinks it's 1971 and Vietnam, and they can influence everything with a saturation of dead American soldiers and dead Iraqi children. That's why they touted The Lancet's statistically deficient "study" of dead Iraqis over and over again. However herein lies problems for the defeatists:

The Vietnam comparison just doesn't stick with the average person, because they don't think in percentages. Here's a monthly death toll for American troops in Vietnam. Those numbers are mostly in the 450-550 range per month. Yet only two months in Iraq have resulted in over 107 US troops dying - and most months in the 45-75 range. With one-tenth of the casualties in numbers, and success on the ground through the capture of Saddam and the elections, the effect of continual "Iraqis dead this, US soldiers dead that" reporting is nullified.

(Cross-posted to The House Of Wheels.)

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