- The Scramble for Access to Libya’s Oil Wealth Begins
[Not that dogs aren't important, but...]
American Dogs Count More Than Afghan People
Helicopter Shootdown Story Unmasks Bigoted Media
by Ted Rall
Published on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins couldn't help liking the young American soldiers with whom he was embedded in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Recognizing that, Filkins tried to maintain some professional distance. "There wasn't any point in sentimentalizing the kids; they were trained killers, after all. They could hit a guy at five hundred yards or cut his throat from ear-to-ear. They had faith, they did what they were told and they killed people," he wrote in his book of war vignettes, "The Forever War."
Alas, he was all but alone.
All wars demand contempt for The Other. But the leaders of a country waging a war of naked, unprovoked aggression are forced to rely on an even higher level of enemy dehumanization than average in order to maintain political support for the sacrifices they require. Your nation's dead soldiers are glorious heroes fallen to protect hearth and home. Their dead soldiers are criminals and monsters. Their civilians are insects, unworthy of notice. So it is. So it always shall be in the endless battle over hearts and minds.
Even by these grotesque, inhuman rhetorical standards, the ten-year occupation of Afghanistan has been notable for the hyperbole relied upon by America's compliant media as well as its brazen inconsistency.
U.S. and NATO officials overseeing the occupation of Afghanistan liken their mission to those of peacekeepers--they're there to help. "Protecting the people is the mission," reads the first line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander's Counterinsurgency Guidance statement. "The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy. ISAF will succeed when the [Karzai government] earns the support of the people."
Of course, actions speak louder than words. Since 2001 ISAF has been doing precious little protecting of anything than America's geopolitical interests, using Afghanistan as a staging ground for thousands of drone attacks across the border in Pakistan. Protecting Afghanistan civilians has actually been a low ISAF priority, to say the least. They've been bombing civilians indiscriminately, then lying about it, sometimes paying off bereaved family members with token sums of blood money.
The verbiage deployed by American officials, dutifully transcribed by journo-stenographers at official press briefings, sends nearly as loud a message as a laser-guided Hellfire missile slamming into a wedding party: Afghan lives mean nothing.
The life of an American dog--literally, as we'll see below--counts more than that of an Afghan man or woman.
In the worst single-day loss of life for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters shot down a Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter in eastern Wardak province with a rocket-propelled grenade on August 6th.
(I lifted that "worst single-day loss of life" phrase from numerous press accounts. The implication is obvious--the U.S. isn't accustomed to taking losses. But tens of thousands of Afghans, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been killed in the war that began in 2001.)
Western media's attitude toward the Afghans they are supposedly trying to "assist" was as plain as the headlines. "U.S. Troops, SEALs Killed in Afghanistan Copter Crash," reported Timemagazine. (SEALS are U.S. Navy commandos.) "31 Killed in Afghanistan Chopper Crash," said the ABC television network. "31 Dead in Afghanistan Helicopter Crash," shouted Canada's National Post. (The number was later revised to 30.)
Eight Afghan government commandos died too. But dead Afghans don't rate a headline--even when they're working for your country's puppet regime. As far as the American press is concerned, only 30 people--i.e., Americans--died.
An initial Associated Press wire service report noted that the dead included "22 SEALs, three Air Force air controllers, seven Afghan Army troops, a dog and his handler, and a civilian interpreter, plus the helicopter crew."
The dog. They mentioned the dog.
And the dog's handler.
After 9/11 American pundits debated the question: Why do they [radical Muslims] hate us [Americans] so much? This is why. It is official Pentagon policy not to count Afghan or Iraqi or Pakistani or Libyan or Yemeni or Somali dead, civilian or "enemy." But "our" guys are sacred. We even count our dogs.
Lest you think that I'm exaggerating, that this was merely another example of a reporters larding his account with excessive detail, consider this maudlin missive by Michael Daly of the New York Daily News, one of the biggest newspapers in the United States:
"Among the SEALs were a dog handler and a dog that would remind outsiders of Cujo [a rabies-infected beast in one of Stephen King's horror novels], but held a special place in the hearts of the squadron," wrote Daly "SEALs have a soft spot for their dogs, perhaps partly because a canine's keen senses can alert them to danger and give them a critical edge. A dog also allows resolutely reticent warriors to express a little affection; you can pet a pooch, if not another SEAL."
Get a grip, Mike. Lots of people like dogs.
"Many of the SEALs have a dog stateside," continueth Daly. "To take one on a mission may be like bringing along something of home."
Or maybe they just come in handy for Abu Ghraib-style interrogations.
Daly tortures and twists his cheesy prose into the kind of savage propaganda that prolongs a war the U.S. can't win, that is killing Afghans and Americans for no reason, that most Americans prefer not to think about. Soon a group of elite commandos--members of Team Six, the same outfit that assassinated Osama bin Laden--become helpless victims of the all-seeing, all-powerful Taliban of Death. In Daly's bizarre world, it is the Afghan resistance forces and their 1980s-vintage weapons that have all the advantages.
Note the infantile use of the phrase "bad guys."
"The bad guys knew when the Chinook helicopter swooped down into an Afghan valley that it would have to rise once those aboard were done. All the Taliban needed to do was wait on a mountainside. The Chinook rose with a SEAL contingent that likely could have held off thousands of the enemy on the ground. The SEALs could do nothing in the air against an insurgent with a rocket."
Helpless! One could almost forget whose country these Americans were in.
Or what they were in Wardak to do.
Early reports had the dead Navy SEALs on a noble "rescue mission" to "assist" beleaguered Army Rangers trapped under "insurgent" fire. Actually, Team Six was on an assassination assignment.
"The American commandos who died when their helicopter crashed in eastern Afghanistan were targeting a Taliban commander directly responsible for attacks on U.S. troops," CNN television reported on August 7th. "Targeting" is mediaspeak for "killing." According to some accounts they had just shot eight Talibs in a house in the village of Jaw-e-Mekh Zareen in the Tangi Valley. Hard to imagine, but U.S. soldiers used to try to capture enemy soldiers before killing them.
Within hours newspaper websites, radio and television outlets were choked with profiles of the dead assassins--er, heroes.
The AP described a dead SEAL from North Carolina as "physically slight but ever ready to take on a challenge."
NBC News informed viewers that a SEAL from Connecticut had been "an accomplished mountaineer, skier, pilot and triathlete and wanted to return to graduate school and become an astronaut."
What of the Afghans killed by those SEALs? What of their hopes and dreams? Americans will never know.
Two words kept coming up:
Poignant.
Tragedy (and tragic).
The usage was strange, outside of normal context, and revealing.
"Of the 30 Americans killed, 22 were members of an elite Navy SEAL team, something particularly poignant given it was Navy SEALS who succeeded so dramatically in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden," said Renee Montaigne of National Public Radio, a center-right outlet that frequently draws fire from the far right for being too liberal.
Ironic, perhaps. But hardly poignant. Soldiers die by the sword. Ask them. They'll tell you.
Even men of the cloth wallowed in the bloodthirsty militarism that has obsessed Americans since the September 11th attacks. Catholic News Service quoted Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, who called the Chinook downing a "reminder of the terrible tragedy of war and its toll on all people."
"No person of good will is left unmoved by this loss," said the archbishop.
The Taliban, their supporters, and not a few random Afghans, may perhaps disagree.
This isa war, after all. Is it too much to ask the media to acknowledge the simple fact that some citizens of a nation under military occupation often choose to resist? That Americans might take up arms if things were the other way around, with Afghan occupation forces bombing and killing and torturing willy-nilly? That one side's "insurgent" "guerillas" are another's patriots and freedom fighters?
Don't news consumers have the right to hear from the "other" side of the story? Or must we continue the childish pretense that the Taliban are all women-hating fanatics incapable of rational thought while the men (and dog) who died on that Chinook in Wardak were all benevolent and pure of heart?
During America's war in Vietnam reporters derided the "five o'clock follies," daily press briefings that increasingly focused on body counts. Evening news broadcasts featured business-report-style graphics of the North and South Vietnamese flags; indeed, they immediately followed the stock market summary. "The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 16 points in light trading," Walter Cronkite would intone. "And in Vietnam today, 8 Americans were killed, 18 South Vietnamese, 43 Vietcong."
Like the color-coded "threat assessment levels" issued by the Department of Homeland Security after 2001, the body counts became a national joke.
In many ways America's next major conflict, the 1991 Gulf War, was a political reaction to the Vietnam experience. Conscription had been replaced by a professional army composed of de facto mercenaries recruited from the underclass. Overkill supplanted the war for hearts and minds that defined the late-Vietnam counterinsurgency strategy. And reporters who had enjoyed near total freedom in the 1960s were frozen out. Only a few trusted journos were allowed to travel with American forces in Kuwait and Iraq. They relied on the Pentagon to transmit their stories back home; one wire service reporter got back home to find that the military had blocked every single account he had filed.
Citing the five o'clock follies of Vietnam and declaring themselves incapable of counting civilian or enemy casualties, U.S. military officials said they would no longer bother to try. (Covertly, the bureaucracy continued to try to gather such data for internal use.)
Meanwhile, media organizations made excuses for not doing their jobs.
The UK Guardian, actually one of the better (i.e. not as bad) Western media outlets, summarized the mainstream view in August 2010: "While we are pretty good at providing detailed statistical breakdowns of coalition military casualties (and by we, I mean the media as a whole), we've not so good at providing any kind of breakdown of Afghan civilian casualties…Obviously, collecting accurate statistics in one of the most dangerous countries in the world is difficult. But the paucity of reliable data on this means that one of the key measures of the war has been missing from almost all reporting. You've noticed it too--asking us why we publish military deaths but not civilian casualties."
No doubt, war zones are dangerous. According to Freedom Forum, 63 reporters lost their lives in Vietnam between 1955 and 1973--yet they strived to bring the war home to homes in the United States and other countries. And they didn't just report military deaths.
There's something more than a little twisted about media accounts that portray a helicopter shootdown as a "tragedy."
A baby dies in a fire--that's a tragedy. A young person struck down by some disease--that's also a tragedy. Soldiers killed in war? Depending on your point of view, it can be sad. It can be unfortunate. It can suck. But it's not tragic.
Alternately: If the United States' losses in Afghanistan are "tragedies," so are the Taliban's. They can't have it both ways.
"Tragedy Devastates Special Warfare Community," blared a headline in USA Today. You'd almost have to laugh at the over-the-top cheesiness, the self-evident schmaltz, the crass appeal to vacuous emotionalism, in such ridiculous linguistic contortions. That is, if it didn't describe something truly tragic--the death and mayhem that accompanies a pointless and illegal war.
On August 10th the U.S. military reported that they had killed the exact Talib who fired the RPG that brought down the Chinook. "Military officials said they tracked the insurgents after the attack, but wouldn't clarify how they knew they had killed the man who had fired the fatal shot," reported The Wall Street Journal.
"The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy." But destroying the enemy is more fun.
- The fighting is not yet over in Tripoli, but the scramble to secure access to Libya’s oil wealth has already begun.
- I'm genuinely astounded at the pervasive willingness to view what has happened in Libya as some sort of grand triumph even though virtually none of the information needed to make that assessment is known yet, including: how many civilians have died, how much more bloodshed will there be, what will be needed to stabilize that country and, most of all, what type of regime will replace Gadaffi?
- A new report finds that replacing old lightbulbs with light-emitting diodes offers more energy savings than installing photovoltaics... [recently, in an effort to stir up their ignorant and naturally angry and paranoid base of voters, Republicans have been attacking calls to phase out energy inefficient lighting citing the "freedom to chose" when buying light bulbs. MORONS]
- An investigation by the National Science Foundation has found no evidence of wrongdoing or misconduct by Penn State climate-change researcher Michael Mann.Mann, Penn State professor of meteorology, was the target of accusations from climate-change skeptics after thousands of e-mails exchanged between climate-change researchers were hacked from the University of East Anglia and made public.
- Nearly six years before an earthquake ravaged Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, U.S. regulators came to a sobering realization: seismic risks to nuclear plants in the eastern two-thirds of the country were greater than had been suspected, and engineers might have to rethink reactor designs.
- U.S. regulators knew for years that seismic risks to some nuclear reactors are greater than anticipated when built. But regulators haven't settled on new safety standards for the plants...
- The killing of Osama bin Laden did not put cuts in national security spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did. And mild as those projected cuts might have been, recently minted Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was already digging in his heels and decrying the modest potential cost-cutting plans as a "doomsday mechanism" for the military. Pentagon allies on Capitol Hill were similarly raising the alarm as they moved forward with this year's even larger military budget.None of this should surprise you. As with all addictions, once you're hooked on massive military spending, it's hard to think realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for the first time in years, let me offer some little known basics about the spending spree this country has been on since September 11, 2001, and raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has actually bought Americans.
- Weeks after the invasion of Iraq began, Fox News Channel host Brit Hume delivered a scathing speech critiquing the media's supposedly pessimistic assessment of the Iraq War.
- "The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong," Hume complained in the April 2003 speech (Richmond Times Dispatch, 4/25/04). "They didn't get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong."
Hume was perhaps correct--but almost entirely in the opposite sense. Days or weeks into the war, commentators and reporters made premature declarations of victory, offered predictions about lasting political effects and called on the critics of the war to apologize. Three years later, the Iraq War grinds on at the cost of at least tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.
Around the same time as Hume's speech, syndicated columnist Cal Thomas declared (4/16/03): "All of the printed and voiced prophecies should be saved in an archive. When these false prophets again appear, they can be reminded of the error of their previous ways and at least be offered an opportunity to recant and repent. Otherwise, they will return to us in another situation where their expertise will be acknowledged, or taken for granted, but their credibility will be lacking."
Gathered here are some of the most notable media comments from the early days of the Iraq War.
- The most recent illustration of this three-decade reversal of nearly a century of American economic advances for employees is the numerous demands by Verizon [phone company].
[Not that dogs aren't important, but...]
American Dogs Count More Than Afghan People
Helicopter Shootdown Story Unmasks Bigoted Media
by Ted Rall
Published on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins couldn't help liking the young American soldiers with whom he was embedded in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Recognizing that, Filkins tried to maintain some professional distance. "There wasn't any point in sentimentalizing the kids; they were trained killers, after all. They could hit a guy at five hundred yards or cut his throat from ear-to-ear. They had faith, they did what they were told and they killed people," he wrote in his book of war vignettes, "The Forever War."
Alas, he was all but alone.
All wars demand contempt for The Other. But the leaders of a country waging a war of naked, unprovoked aggression are forced to rely on an even higher level of enemy dehumanization than average in order to maintain political support for the sacrifices they require. Your nation's dead soldiers are glorious heroes fallen to protect hearth and home. Their dead soldiers are criminals and monsters. Their civilians are insects, unworthy of notice. So it is. So it always shall be in the endless battle over hearts and minds.
Even by these grotesque, inhuman rhetorical standards, the ten-year occupation of Afghanistan has been notable for the hyperbole relied upon by America's compliant media as well as its brazen inconsistency.
U.S. and NATO officials overseeing the occupation of Afghanistan liken their mission to those of peacekeepers--they're there to help. "Protecting the people is the mission," reads the first line of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Commander's Counterinsurgency Guidance statement. "The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy. ISAF will succeed when the [Karzai government] earns the support of the people."
Of course, actions speak louder than words. Since 2001 ISAF has been doing precious little protecting of anything than America's geopolitical interests, using Afghanistan as a staging ground for thousands of drone attacks across the border in Pakistan. Protecting Afghanistan civilians has actually been a low ISAF priority, to say the least. They've been bombing civilians indiscriminately, then lying about it, sometimes paying off bereaved family members with token sums of blood money.
The verbiage deployed by American officials, dutifully transcribed by journo-stenographers at official press briefings, sends nearly as loud a message as a laser-guided Hellfire missile slamming into a wedding party: Afghan lives mean nothing.
The life of an American dog--literally, as we'll see below--counts more than that of an Afghan man or woman.
In the worst single-day loss of life for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Taliban fighters shot down a Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter in eastern Wardak province with a rocket-propelled grenade on August 6th.
(I lifted that "worst single-day loss of life" phrase from numerous press accounts. The implication is obvious--the U.S. isn't accustomed to taking losses. But tens of thousands of Afghans, possibly hundreds of thousands, have been killed in the war that began in 2001.)
Western media's attitude toward the Afghans they are supposedly trying to "assist" was as plain as the headlines. "U.S. Troops, SEALs Killed in Afghanistan Copter Crash," reported Timemagazine. (SEALS are U.S. Navy commandos.) "31 Killed in Afghanistan Chopper Crash," said the ABC television network. "31 Dead in Afghanistan Helicopter Crash," shouted Canada's National Post. (The number was later revised to 30.)
Eight Afghan government commandos died too. But dead Afghans don't rate a headline--even when they're working for your country's puppet regime. As far as the American press is concerned, only 30 people--i.e., Americans--died.
An initial Associated Press wire service report noted that the dead included "22 SEALs, three Air Force air controllers, seven Afghan Army troops, a dog and his handler, and a civilian interpreter, plus the helicopter crew."
The dog. They mentioned the dog.
And the dog's handler.
After 9/11 American pundits debated the question: Why do they [radical Muslims] hate us [Americans] so much? This is why. It is official Pentagon policy not to count Afghan or Iraqi or Pakistani or Libyan or Yemeni or Somali dead, civilian or "enemy." But "our" guys are sacred. We even count our dogs.
Lest you think that I'm exaggerating, that this was merely another example of a reporters larding his account with excessive detail, consider this maudlin missive by Michael Daly of the New York Daily News, one of the biggest newspapers in the United States:
"Among the SEALs were a dog handler and a dog that would remind outsiders of Cujo [a rabies-infected beast in one of Stephen King's horror novels], but held a special place in the hearts of the squadron," wrote Daly "SEALs have a soft spot for their dogs, perhaps partly because a canine's keen senses can alert them to danger and give them a critical edge. A dog also allows resolutely reticent warriors to express a little affection; you can pet a pooch, if not another SEAL."
Get a grip, Mike. Lots of people like dogs.
"Many of the SEALs have a dog stateside," continueth Daly. "To take one on a mission may be like bringing along something of home."
Or maybe they just come in handy for Abu Ghraib-style interrogations.
Daly tortures and twists his cheesy prose into the kind of savage propaganda that prolongs a war the U.S. can't win, that is killing Afghans and Americans for no reason, that most Americans prefer not to think about. Soon a group of elite commandos--members of Team Six, the same outfit that assassinated Osama bin Laden--become helpless victims of the all-seeing, all-powerful Taliban of Death. In Daly's bizarre world, it is the Afghan resistance forces and their 1980s-vintage weapons that have all the advantages.
Note the infantile use of the phrase "bad guys."
"The bad guys knew when the Chinook helicopter swooped down into an Afghan valley that it would have to rise once those aboard were done. All the Taliban needed to do was wait on a mountainside. The Chinook rose with a SEAL contingent that likely could have held off thousands of the enemy on the ground. The SEALs could do nothing in the air against an insurgent with a rocket."
Helpless! One could almost forget whose country these Americans were in.
Or what they were in Wardak to do.
Early reports had the dead Navy SEALs on a noble "rescue mission" to "assist" beleaguered Army Rangers trapped under "insurgent" fire. Actually, Team Six was on an assassination assignment.
"The American commandos who died when their helicopter crashed in eastern Afghanistan were targeting a Taliban commander directly responsible for attacks on U.S. troops," CNN television reported on August 7th. "Targeting" is mediaspeak for "killing." According to some accounts they had just shot eight Talibs in a house in the village of Jaw-e-Mekh Zareen in the Tangi Valley. Hard to imagine, but U.S. soldiers used to try to capture enemy soldiers before killing them.
Within hours newspaper websites, radio and television outlets were choked with profiles of the dead assassins--er, heroes.
The AP described a dead SEAL from North Carolina as "physically slight but ever ready to take on a challenge."
NBC News informed viewers that a SEAL from Connecticut had been "an accomplished mountaineer, skier, pilot and triathlete and wanted to return to graduate school and become an astronaut."
What of the Afghans killed by those SEALs? What of their hopes and dreams? Americans will never know.
Two words kept coming up:
Poignant.
Tragedy (and tragic).
The usage was strange, outside of normal context, and revealing.
"Of the 30 Americans killed, 22 were members of an elite Navy SEAL team, something particularly poignant given it was Navy SEALS who succeeded so dramatically in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden," said Renee Montaigne of National Public Radio, a center-right outlet that frequently draws fire from the far right for being too liberal.
Ironic, perhaps. But hardly poignant. Soldiers die by the sword. Ask them. They'll tell you.
Even men of the cloth wallowed in the bloodthirsty militarism that has obsessed Americans since the September 11th attacks. Catholic News Service quoted Archbishop Timothy P. Broglio, who called the Chinook downing a "reminder of the terrible tragedy of war and its toll on all people."
"No person of good will is left unmoved by this loss," said the archbishop.
The Taliban, their supporters, and not a few random Afghans, may perhaps disagree.
This isa war, after all. Is it too much to ask the media to acknowledge the simple fact that some citizens of a nation under military occupation often choose to resist? That Americans might take up arms if things were the other way around, with Afghan occupation forces bombing and killing and torturing willy-nilly? That one side's "insurgent" "guerillas" are another's patriots and freedom fighters?
Don't news consumers have the right to hear from the "other" side of the story? Or must we continue the childish pretense that the Taliban are all women-hating fanatics incapable of rational thought while the men (and dog) who died on that Chinook in Wardak were all benevolent and pure of heart?
During America's war in Vietnam reporters derided the "five o'clock follies," daily press briefings that increasingly focused on body counts. Evening news broadcasts featured business-report-style graphics of the North and South Vietnamese flags; indeed, they immediately followed the stock market summary. "The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 16 points in light trading," Walter Cronkite would intone. "And in Vietnam today, 8 Americans were killed, 18 South Vietnamese, 43 Vietcong."
Like the color-coded "threat assessment levels" issued by the Department of Homeland Security after 2001, the body counts became a national joke.
In many ways America's next major conflict, the 1991 Gulf War, was a political reaction to the Vietnam experience. Conscription had been replaced by a professional army composed of de facto mercenaries recruited from the underclass. Overkill supplanted the war for hearts and minds that defined the late-Vietnam counterinsurgency strategy. And reporters who had enjoyed near total freedom in the 1960s were frozen out. Only a few trusted journos were allowed to travel with American forces in Kuwait and Iraq. They relied on the Pentagon to transmit their stories back home; one wire service reporter got back home to find that the military had blocked every single account he had filed.
Citing the five o'clock follies of Vietnam and declaring themselves incapable of counting civilian or enemy casualties, U.S. military officials said they would no longer bother to try. (Covertly, the bureaucracy continued to try to gather such data for internal use.)
Meanwhile, media organizations made excuses for not doing their jobs.
The UK Guardian, actually one of the better (i.e. not as bad) Western media outlets, summarized the mainstream view in August 2010: "While we are pretty good at providing detailed statistical breakdowns of coalition military casualties (and by we, I mean the media as a whole), we've not so good at providing any kind of breakdown of Afghan civilian casualties…Obviously, collecting accurate statistics in one of the most dangerous countries in the world is difficult. But the paucity of reliable data on this means that one of the key measures of the war has been missing from almost all reporting. You've noticed it too--asking us why we publish military deaths but not civilian casualties."
No doubt, war zones are dangerous. According to Freedom Forum, 63 reporters lost their lives in Vietnam between 1955 and 1973--yet they strived to bring the war home to homes in the United States and other countries. And they didn't just report military deaths.
There's something more than a little twisted about media accounts that portray a helicopter shootdown as a "tragedy."
A baby dies in a fire--that's a tragedy. A young person struck down by some disease--that's also a tragedy. Soldiers killed in war? Depending on your point of view, it can be sad. It can be unfortunate. It can suck. But it's not tragic.
Alternately: If the United States' losses in Afghanistan are "tragedies," so are the Taliban's. They can't have it both ways.
"Tragedy Devastates Special Warfare Community," blared a headline in USA Today. You'd almost have to laugh at the over-the-top cheesiness, the self-evident schmaltz, the crass appeal to vacuous emotionalism, in such ridiculous linguistic contortions. That is, if it didn't describe something truly tragic--the death and mayhem that accompanies a pointless and illegal war.
On August 10th the U.S. military reported that they had killed the exact Talib who fired the RPG that brought down the Chinook. "Military officials said they tracked the insurgents after the attack, but wouldn't clarify how they knew they had killed the man who had fired the fatal shot," reported The Wall Street Journal.
"The conflict will be won by persuading the population, not by destroying the enemy." But destroying the enemy is more fun.
Sean
