Two Questions.

(This post by The Anchoress prompted my thoughts on this post)

Here are two questions for all of you.

1) Within 100, can you tell me how many American soldiers have been killed in Iraq since March, 2003?

2) Within 100, can you tell me how many of our enemy (whether they be terrorists or “insurgents” or “foreign fighters”) American forces have killed since March, 2003?

Well, for the first question, you can easily find the number on CNN, from the Washington Post, broken down by state on MS-NBC, searchable by date killed, last name, home, or age when they died thank to the New York Times, or a roster that’s sorted by date of death on Fox News.

If you want to know how many soldiers were killed on July 18, 2004 you’ll have no problem at all finding that within a matter of seconds. If you want to know how many soldiers were killed from Maine, it’s at your fingertips. If you want to know how many 24 year-old soldiers have been killed in Iraq, you can get it with amazing ease.

But how about that second question. How many terrorists, Ba’athist dead-enders, and imported fighters from Syria and Iran have our soldiers killed in battle. How many of them have died trying to kill our brave soldiers?

I went Google-searching to find out if any news service had listed a total number of terrorists killed by our soldiers. I couldn’t find a single one that had. The closest I’ve found is this news article from the Knight-Ridder News Service.

Brookings’ Iraq Index estimates that 50,000 insurgents have been killed or captured since the insurgency began after the invasion in 2003.

That’s it – an estimate from the rather liberal Brookings Institution.

When was the last time you read an article or saw a news story about US soldiers killed that mentioned how many terrorists died in the same engagement? Let’s look around the net today.

Here’s an article from the Washington Post that mentions several suicide bombers, is careful to say how many soldiers and civilians dies, but doesn’t mention how many terrorists died in the bombing. Here’s another article in the same paper that – glory be! – actually gives a casualty figure but that’s because there was a possibility that one of them was Zarqawi – a special case. The came Mosul incident gets the same treatment from ABC News.

Read carefully, though. Even in the articles that list the eight casualties, the reporters are very sure to mention the total number of Americans killed in Iraq since March, 2003. There are no mention whatsoever of total enemy casualties.

What does that say to you?

These are wartime reports – dispatches from the battlefront where our soldiers every day engage the enemy. Would it not be newsworthy to mention in every dispatch how many of the enemy our soldiers killed? Might it give you true sense of how the war is going to know (if the Brookings’ estimate is correct) that our soldiers are killing the enemy at a rate of nearly 24-1? Would reading a report that said that 4 Americans had died in a battle that also claimed 94 dead terrorists tell you something about how we’re fighting this war?

I certainly think it would.

You’re not getting that from the MSM, though. You’re hard pressed to find one article a week that mentions enemy casualties, though every single one of them will tell you how many Americans have died in more than 2 years of fighting. Why are they so determined to drill the 2100 American dead into your minds, but they ignore the 50,000 enemy dead? Why is it do very important to give you the “faces of the fallen” every single day, yet they can’t even begin to show you the “faces of the enemy” or, for that matter, the “faces jumping out of the World Trade Center” or the “faces of Hussein’s mass graves”?

Why the constant drip-drip-drip of American dead without a single hint of the torrent of enemy dead that would surely tell you that perhaps things in Iraq aren’t nearly as dire as opponents of the war would have you believe?

Do they realize that we’re fighting a war. Do they understand the value of their news reports on the morale of our soldiers and those of us here at home praying every day for their sure victory? Do they care in that what and how they report has a very definite effect on the support of the war here at home?

Yes, I believe they do know we’re fighting a war. I believe they know very well how their reports can influence the morale of our soldiers and public opinion at home. I believe they know this very well and they simply don’t care. These outlets have a narrative to advance every single day and they’re going to advance it just a little farther down the road, no matter how much it damages morale or turns us against the war.

I see the dispatches from Iraq and I honestly wonder whose side the MSM is on. More and more I doubt very much that they’re on our side.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media.