Most of the time, they are pretty much the whole of media reporting. US kill ratios were obscenely favorable in Vietnam, but LBJ lost America with Cronkite because we had nothing to show for it after years of combat.

People talked about being spread too thin because of stop-loss and guys doing half a dozen combat tours; that does not reflect a surplus of troops, but a military trying to do too much with too little. There is a saying along those lines, yes? In terms of media impressions (and thus reporting) lower is considerably better. Maybe it is naïve or outright ignorant, but when the media compares 2000 slain soldiers over 2.5 years with the same number over a decade, they will inevitably conclude the latter operation is going better. Particularly when it began before the other one, so all the same issues of logistics and combat experience applied to it also, and for longer.

In other words, we invaded Afghanistan a year and a half before invading Iraq, and remain there six months (so far...) after leaving Iraq, yet have lost half as many troops there as in Iraq. Along the way, we eliminated the Taliban government that sheltered and aided the 911 hijackers, and executed the Al Qaeda leader responsible for the attack, while in Iraq all we did was lure Al Qaeda into a country toward which they had been hostile and remove a leader who was no threat to us. Those operations are night and day in terms of both cost and effectiveness. If anything, the media should be criticized for underreporting success in Afghanistan, but with running gun battles still common I can see why they do not.


If it was simply a matter of needing a few years to acquire combat experience, the year and a half of Afghanistan fighting before the Iraqi invasion should have provided it. Regardless, the rate is very critical to public perception of progress. When we lost our 2000th soldier in Iraq we had only been there two years, the Taliban and Al Qaeda were still strong, Saddam and bin Laden were still alive and active and most people were understandably asking what we had to show for 2000 dead soldiers and thousands of more severly wounded or permanently disabled. When we lost our 2000th soldier in Afghanistan, the Taliban was out of power and on the run, Al Qaeda fleeing with them, Saddam and bin Laden were dead, our troops had already left Iraq and were set to leave Afghanistan in two years. Again, night and day in terms of cost/benefit analysis.


I assume the media reports its understanding of the situation, accurate or not; what else would it report? I assume current and former commanders of combat theaters have a good understanding of those combat theaters; who would know better? Bush should not have put up "Mission Accomplished" banners when we had not accomplished anything but the death of 2000 US soldiers (with even more deaths in Iraq to come,) but now Obama HAS accomplished his mission.

To be blunt, I feel it nauseatingly partisan for people who demanded both wars, accused anti-war groups of unpatriotically helping terrorists and condemn Obamas unmanned drone strikes as violations of UN treaties they despise to ALSO bust Obamas chops for our Afghan casualties, particularly when most of those occurred on Bushs watch, too. I would have far more respect if they just said, "we hate him because he is a Democrat." At least that is honest and leaves our soldiers out of it. The GOP has been waving that bloody shirt since 1865: Is it not long past time they stopped?


Obviously I was being figurative when I spoke of Mideast McDonalds: We have not remade the region in our image, but that would not be right, was not what we signed for and exceeds our current military capacity regardless. We did, however, end a threat to Americas security and bring those most responsible for 911 to the only justice possible (I still worry about Al Zawahiri, but with any luck a Hellfire will find him soon.) We accomplished our mission and it is time to come to home, which we are doing, putting the 2000 US soldiers slain in 11 years of Afghan fighting in a very different context than the 2000 US soldiers slain in 2.5 years of Iraqi fighting.


I could not care less about Saddam, but have cared very much about bin Laden since long before 911. If Senate Republicans had let the Commander-in-Chief BE the Commander-in-Chief in 1998 the man who plotted and financed the '93 WTC bombing would have never had the chance to plot and finance the worst terrorist attack in US history. The government that provided him sanctuary and a training ground is also gone, and that is another big win. If you disagree, and do not care about Saddam either, my next questions are: 1) Should we have invaded either country in the first place? 2) If not, how do you justify the 2004 re-election of the man who sent us?