1 Dang. Thanks for the link.

2 BTW...Can't wait to hear how Will and Pericles argue this one.

3 I too would like to think that my country isn't interested in getting into wars it isn't sure it can win. Sadly, the reality seems to be somewhat different.

4 By the way, I thought that the LGF statistics about casualty rates were silly. I'm not one to harp on the casualty rate too much, because we'd be justified in staying in a war with a much higher casualty rate if the reasons for going to war in the first place were stronger. Still, this is just playing with numbers. The implication is that you're safer fighting in Iraq than here. The problem is that the numbers for the U.S. death rate includes people dying of old age. To make it meaningful, let's see the death rate for people in the prime of their life, as the troops are. Also, let's throw in not just death numbers, but also numbers for serious injuries. How about a statistic for the number of amputations in the U.S. versus the number for troops in Iraq? One of my conservative friends was scoffing at the civil war talk after the mosque bombing, saying that the number of people killed in sectarian violence after the bombing was not much more than a bad month in Detroit. Maybe he was right, but this was a week after the bombing, i.e., a week versus a month. I'm not saying that no liberal has ever played with numbers the same way, but if they did, LGF would be all over it.

5 Well, hell must have frozen over because Pericles and I agree on the statistics. I think the better comparison would be to past conflicts. Yes, each life is precious and an unbelievable heartache to families who love them. But as military equipment improves, casualties and deaths decrease. Those statistics would be more meaningful than a comparison to the public at large.

6 "But as military equipment improves, casualties and deaths decrease." Unfortunately, as the enemy's military equipment improves, casualties and deaths can also increase.

7 Damn pericles, you hit the obvious before I even got a chance.

8 http://www.redstate.com/story/2006/3/20/21940/0381

9 What do numbers prove, exactly? If the war is just and good, then endless sacrifices are justified. If the war is illegal and immoral, than just one death is a crime.

10 Will, The numbers don't really prove anything, but you already knew that. But I'm confused. Who determines the legality of war? What makes the war immoral? I'm so sick of hearing people use these words to describe the conflict in Iraq! The immorality of this war isn't absolute just because people like you say it is. I'm sure I can pretty much predict what you might respond with, but seriously. I want to know how you can justify calling this war illegal and immoral (try to do it in 100 words or less...I have a low attention span).

11 Prove a controversial legal and moral position in 100 words: good luck with that, Will! I think the trick is to say that any time you are talking about shooting people and blowing them up, the initial assumption should be that this is illegal and immoral. It is up to to those who think that law and morality permit war in this particular case to prove otherwise. War is guilty until proven inncocent. One can argue that Saddam's failure to comply with the cease fire agreement is a legal justification for the war. Morally, it would be harder to justify. Traditional just war theory allows for preemptive but not preventive war; you can shoot first when you're about to be attacked, but not just because you speculate that years down the road a country might attack you. My own moral criticisms would center on the President's obligation to the troops not to put their lives at risk when no important objective justifies it. I'd also say that it was a moral failure to ignore the generals' advice about the number of troops. The Bushies ignored our moral obligation to be rsponsible for order in the country after we overthrew its government.

12 Erin, The initial cause for war was the imminent danger posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The American people and congress agreed to the war because we didn't want Saddam perpetuating his own 9/11 with a nuclear bomb. This threat didn't turn out to be try. Moreover, it seems as if intelligence was skewed by the administration to create a cause for war rather than detect one. Colin Powell, a man who survived two tours in Vietnam morally intact, calls it a 'blot' on his record. So what are we left with? Taking out Saddam was right just because he was a dictator? When this war started, human rights were only a very minor reason to enter Iraq. Human rights became more of an after-the-fact justification only when it turned out that there were no WMD or prewar links to international terrorism. The extreme measure of military invasion should be reserved for stopping ongoing or imminent mass slaughter, and that wasn't happening in Iraq in March 2003. Humanitarian intervention might have been justified to stop the Anfal genocide in 1988 against the Kurds, but there was nothing like that going on in 2003. Clearly, Saddam was an awful dictator, but there are many awful dictators in the world, and toppling an awful dictator, in my view, does not justify military intervention. And even if you did want to justify this war based on the human rights issue, the fact is that Saddam is charged with killing 148 Shiites, illegal imprisonment and torture in a crackdown launched after an assassination attempt against Hussein in the Shiite village of Dujail in 1982. Killing 148? Shit, the green river killer almost has that topped. And how many civilians have been killed as a direct result of Operation Iraqi Freedom? 20 000? 30 000? How ten of thousands are maimed for life? But let's remember that this is called Operation Iraqi FREEDOM! So then there's the freedom angle. Allright, fair enough. Let's see how it plays. I hope they are all free and democratic at the end of the day. But I'll say this: When Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, the Iraqi people better be the free-est people on the face of the planet. They better have so much freedom they can fucking fly. And so I will end with a quote from Richard Hass, former aide to President George H.W. Bush, and president of the Council on Foreign Relations: "The war has absorbed a tremendous amount of U.S. military capacity, the result being that the U.S. has far less spare or available capacity to use in the active sense or to exploit in the diplomatic sense. It has weakened our position against both North Korea and Iran. It has exacerbated U.S. fiscal problems. The war has also contributed to the world's alienation from the U.S. and made it more difficult to galvanize international support for U.S. policy toward other challenges. Iraq's legacy could also lead to renewed American public resistance to international involvement." I'm going to go outside now and do a cart-wheel. A cart-wheel for freedom.

13 Will: No.

14 No cart-wheel?

1 Gotta sell newspapers though, right? From the BBC: "By the middle of Day Two, the operation had already been scaled down to 900 men. US military pictures showed troops involved in the operation Operation Swarmer clearly bore no comparison in scale to the initial attack which brought down Saddam Hussein's regime, or to the massive assault on the insurgent stronghold in the city of Falluja in November 2004. Nor did it appear to match a series of counter-insurgency operations involving air strikes and ground forces in remote areas near the Syrian border in western Iraq last year. In one four-day campaign last May, the US military said it had killed 125 insurgents for the loss of nine of its own men killed and 40 injured. So how and why did this latest apparently routine combing operation, yielding a few arms caches and netting some low-grade suspects, manage to win stop-press coverage around the world? The use of the phrase "the largest air assault operation" was clearly crucial, raising visions of a massive bombing campaign."

2 Exactly. My husband called it in the first 30 seconds. When we saw that first news report, he said two things: 1) it's an assault, not a strike, and 2) it's just a bunch of bravado so that someone can say he led the biggest air assault. Hubby wasn't far off the mark.

1 I had no idea about the difference between an "air assault" and an "air strike". I had assumed it was the latter and thought, "wow, the US is getting tough." Not that an air assault is exactly a knock on the door either. Maybe the MSNBC graphics person couldn't find a striking enough image of troops being dropped and went with this image. Dramatic but inaccurate.

2 I realize you didn't say this, but this isn't just some antiwar ignorance on MSNBC's part. Journalists can't know everything, though the better ones try. One would think that MSNBC had a dedicated military affairs editor* by now who'd catch these sorts of errors, but maybe that person took the day off ... *Mistakes in, say, occasional science articles are one thing. No journalist can be expected to get all the details right about some specialized field they briefly encounter for one article only. But mistakes in an ongoing topic like the war are another.

3 Yeah, I too don't think that journalists should know everything, but I think *someone* should've spelled out that they shouldn't call it a strike. And the military analyst (a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel) corrected the anchorwoman, but it apparently went right over her head because she continued to use the word "strike". I just think someone should've corrected her in her earpiece before she said it umpteen times...

4 Who in their right mind watches that lame network? Their hoping the assault fails miserably so they can tell us how “it’s turning into Vietnam”. “It’s a quagmire”, “What’s our exit strategy?”, blah, blah, blah… Idiots.

5 The station I was watching got it right. Although does it have to be one or the other? AC-130s are involved, and I thought I saw pictures of Apaches, so isn't it an air strike and an air assault both? And if the vast majority of the audience doesn't know the difference anyway, does it matter?

6 ****** And if the vast majority of the audience doesn't know the difference anyway, does it matter? ****** Oh Pericles, that's such an irresponsible statement. Isn't that what journalists are actually for???? Their whole raison d'etre is to explain the news to people in language they can understand so that they know what's going on in the world. That's the Whole Point of the news! I'm not trying to just argue semantics here about the difference between "strike" and "assault". The more important issue is that the anchorwoman was doing a TERRIBLE job of explaining what was going on. For the first 40 seconds of watching, I too thought that we were dropping bombs. Even if she didn't use the right term, she should've been explaining that soldiers were riding in Blackhawks (definitely not Apaches) to the destination and being inserted into the situation from the air to provide them with a tactical advantage. As it was, her reporting was in Panic Mode, claiming that we were currently in the middle of air strikes, which is going to make any American think that it's Shock & Awe II. It most certainly is important for journalists to get their facts and terms straight so that they can explain the news to us viewers. That means that they need someone in their newsroom who has knowledge about the military so the anchorpeople understand what they're trying to explain!

7 P.S. From the article I linked to: "the U.S. military said there was no firing or bombing from the air." So it was never "both", and there wouldn't have been any need for Apaches. It was only an air assault.

8 The international BBC website has the best news coverage, in my opinion: "The operation was described as an air assault, a term the US military uses for bringing in troops by helicopter, although many people initially took the phrase to mean aerial bombing. However, it involves more helicopters airlifting American and Iraqi troops into the target area than any similar campaign in the three years since Saddam Hussein was toppled."

9 Why does it matter that they get it right? BECAUSE WE LISTEN TO THEM!!! There is a hell of a difference between being in the air and being on the ground kicking in doors. Keep them in your prayers people....

10 Sarah- I take your point. I wasn't talking about anything beyond the two terms "air strike" and "air assault." I do sort of question whether enough people know the difference that it is worth getting bent out of shape over an occasional misuse. Of course the substance of their remarks should be accurate, though. I think that I'm starting to feel about the media like you probably do about the military. Of course I can see real problems there. At the same time, bashing them has become such an automatic reflex for so many people that my automatic reflex is now to look for ways to defend them. Sometimes it is possible, sometimes it isn't. An example of what I mean about bashing the media reflexively: The other day ABC reported that the head of the Department of Health and Human Services is advising that Americans stockpile three months of food and water for the bird flu. This came right from the government. An acquaintance of mine started going off on the media for being alarmist. The MEDIA? All they did was report what a member of Bush's cabinet said. But when he saw something in the news he didn't like, his first thought was to criticize the networks.

11 Yeah, you're right: I don't like the media as a rule. But this time is not just that I think they spin left or anything; I really think they did the public a disservice. The BBC quote from above is MUCH better at explaining the events in Iraq as they happened. I talked to my mom on the phone today. She has been on the road for work and hasn't been online in a few days. She said, "Did you hear something about how we're bombing in Iraq?" The overall impression about what happened the other day is WAY OFF, entirely because the media didn't report it accurately.

12 That could well be true, although someone without much background knowledge hearing just a little bit of a completely accurate report could also be confused. I don't know about your mother, but if my mother heard "air assault" she would assume bombing, because she doesn't know from Blackhawks. I know you dislike the media because they are too critical of the war. Part of my problem is just the opposite. I don't think they've been critical enough, if not of the war itself, then of the Bush Administration's decision-making process. Who said this, do you reckon? "If you're going to go in and try to topple Saddam Hussein, you have to go to Baghdad. Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that's currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists? How much credibility is that government going to have if it's set up by the United States military when it's there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?" Answer---it was Dick Cheney, in 1991. No reporter, though, has put a mike in front of his face and said "What has changed, Mr. Vice President? If a regime put in power by the American military would have lacked legitimacy in 1991, what is going to give it legitimacy now?" I've never heard officials like Rumsfeld grilled over their previous support for Saddam. Maybe at root we've got the same problem with the media, though. Too much sensationalism, not enough intellectual content. I want to see the media asking tougher questions all of the time, regardless of who is in charge, and then let us hear the answers. The American people can listen to the answers, and decide what to think. Pro-sensationalism is the media's real bias, much more than any political bias right or left.

13 As a Soldier who earned his Air Assault Badge, I am thankful to have someone point out the difference between air assualts and air strikes. An air assault is very unique in the amount of firepower and troops that can be brought into a fight very quickly. It is an important weapon in any army's arsenal, and the 101st does it amazingly. Thanks for pointing out the error of the media, and giving credit to the brave Soldiers carrying out this important mission.

14 Actually, Pericles, having a son-in-law in the military has made me learn as much as possible, not only about the military itself, but also what is going on in Iraq, aside from the fact that I have always kept up on news events (politics, war, world events, etc.,). I get most of my news from the internet, but because I was traveling I relied on the TV and radio for information. I do know that airstrike means bombing, and I had heard there were "the biggest airstrikes occurring north of Baghdad since the war had begun." Consequently, I thought they were dropping bombs. As important a topic as the war is, one would think the media would have made this call correctly. Sarah's Mom

15 I had to go back and check my own post on the subject to see if I got it right. I did, whew. So did the AP reporter I quoted, btw. Thanks for encouraging accuracy, Sarah.