MSM Harms the War Effort

It's no secret that I and many others believe that the way the mainstream media portrays the war in Iraq is harming the war effort and endangering the troops who are fighting there. In the above linked article, General Steven Blum explains that the skewed coverage the media is presenting is harming the recruiting efforts for the National Guard. The way things are portrayed, one would think that the mortality rate for Guardsmen serving in Iraq is inordinately high. According to the figures General Blum quotes, 250,000 guard troops have been mobilized for service in Irag and of that number there have been only 262 casualties. That's a casualty rate of one tenth of one percent! For a small comparison let's protract a single battle out of another war and contrast that casualty rate to this one. On Iwo Jima in the Secord World War, 2,400 men of the the 28th Regiment, 5th Marine Division were involved in the 25 days of fighting. When all was said and done, only 600 were left standing. That's a whopping 75% casualty rate!

Further the MSM likes to portray the war as a whole as particularly deadly. Thus far our forces have lost a total of 1,757 over the entire duration of the war. Let's compare that to a few other wars we've fought:

War	Total Casualties
World War I	116,516
World War II	405,399
Korea	36,940
Vietnam	58,000

Clearly the 1,757 casualties we've suffered this far pale in comparison to these numbers. On June 6th 1945 alone at the battle of Normandy we lost 2,500!

I don't want anyone to think that I hold the lives of any of our miltary cheap. I rue the loss of every single one! I am simply attempting to place the current numbers in their proper context.

What if there were another Kaiser or Hitler? Would our nation have the fortitude to fight the wars it has in the past? I doubt it. There are far too many pacifist liberal whimps these days that haven't the balls to do what's required to win the war. The first time we suffered any appreciable casualty count, the liberals would be in standing on their soap boxes screaming "why is it our responsibility to save the Jews from extermination!" The mainstream media would be highlighting the casualty rates and playing the mouthpiece to the liberal pacifists. Simply put if Pearl Harbor happened today, the liberals ould most likely prefer to turn the other cheek. Interestingly enough as I've already mentioned before... We lost more people of 9/11 than we lost at Pearl Harbor!

So let's wrap this up. Although the initial impetus that led the US into the war was LARGER than Pearl Harbor, our forces are suffering unprecedentedly LOW casualty rates in the prosecution of the war. In fact (hearkening back to my post titled "Iraq IS the war on terror") if we calculate the numbers out on a murders per 100,000 rate a National Guardsman is less than twice as likely to be murdered in Iraq as he or she is walking the streets of New Orleans Louisiana! Therefore the way the media is portraying the war is wrong. This impedes recruiting efforts which damages our ability to prosecute the war and endagers those who are fighting it!