There is an e-mail making the rounds which claims military deaths during Bush's presidency are less than they were under Bill Clinton.   The irony of our military experiencing more deaths during a period with no open conflicts than it has during the evil Bush years (with two somewhat major conflicts going on) is obvious.   The e-mail cites a report on the web site of the Federation of American Scientists.   That supposed report has evaporated and the page now forwards interested visitors to a page on Army Times which in turn debunks the mythical "factual report."   I took a look at the Army Times "correction" and found what was there to be at least as interesting as the original e-mail.

The Army Times article says, "There's just one problem: The figures listed in the email are wrong.   They vary markedly from the figures published in the cited CRS source document."   It then goes on to analyze the actual figures saying:

In reality, according to the CRS report, 7,500 service members died on active duty in the eight years from 1993 through 2000, compared to 8,792 in the six years from 2001 through 2006.

The Pentagon has not yet released data on total active-duty deaths for 2007, but 1,014 service members died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that year, and more than 100 have died in the wars so far in 2008, pushing the known total under Bush to more than 9,900.

The report does not address the ratio of active-duty deaths to force size; the active-duty force shrank significantly during the drawdown of the 1990s, from more than 1.7 million in 1993 to about 1.3 million by the early years of this decade.

The first issue which strikes me from the foregoing is even with two conflicts ongoing and hundreds of thousands of fighting men and women in harms' way, the mortality ratio is very similar during the terms of the two presidents.   Yes, more were killed under Bush and each one is a tragedy.   But the difference during the "peace dividend" years and the period since we were attacked is not very large.

Any man's (or woman's) death diminishes me and you.   But let's be rational here.   The media, the peaceniks, and even the very liberals who voted to engage in the two actions in the Middle East have been screaming about how evil George Bush has been killing our sons and daughters en masse through his shameful invasion of a country run by a secularist dictator (not a religiously driven Islamic fundamentalist one).   Let's get a grip.   The mortality figures are not even close to any conflict this country has ever engaged in, let alone Vietnam or Korea.

These conflicts, together, are comparable only to ... The War of 1812!

The second observation is finally a recognition that our military was badly bruised under Clinton.   The "drawdown of the 1990s" occurred not after a major conflict but in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union.   And it was a reduction of forces of almost 25% at a time during which we were in fact being attacked, such attacks becoming more and more frequent as the Clinton presidency wore on.

That was just the reduction in raw numbers of people.   It says nothing about the reduction in talent which was extremely significant.   Many career military people dropped out of the armed forces because they could see the writing on the wall.   We lost more than 25% of our braintrust during the Clinton years.

The reduction in raw numbers of people and talent isn't nearly comparable to the size of reduction in equipment, technology development, etc. we experienced under Clinton.   That was the bigger travesty.   The Clinton years left our military in shambles and totally reliant upon reserve forces, many of whom signed up just to get money for college since during those years college costs got really out of sight.

Do I need to remind anyone that the purpose of our military has never been to provide college scholarships for those whose parents are less wealthy and who otherwise do not qualify for aid given to underprivileged people?   The Clinton presidency gave us much, much more than don't ask, don't tell.   It gave us a smaller, largely demoralized, under-equipped military lacking in mid-level leadership.

I had an argument with a liberal from Minnesota a couple years back.   He was praising the brilliance of Clinton because he had "balanced the budget."   I said, "yes, he balanced the budget in terms of what gets reported out to the people but he very much did so ON THE BACKS OF THE MILITARY."   This guy disputed that.   He was wrong.   He used the old liberal standby debate winner by saying, "I've read a lot on the subject, have you."   I laughed in his face and said, "yes, you read a lot on the subject, a lot of BULLSHIT.   If you don't know or deny that Bill Clinton balanced the budget on the backs of our military, you REALLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT BECAUSE THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HE DID."

You can't win this debate by using the talking points issued in the liberakl code of conduct field manual.   The facts are Clinton decimated the military in order to present cleaner books to Congress and the public.   He even called it "The Peace Dividend" and the Clinton-adoring, leftist mainstream media published it as fact.   Then things got complicated.

Turns out this "drawdown" wasn't such a great idea after all since it we were certainly NOT at peace.   Oh, Clinton only had to fire a few million dollar missiles here and there to remain in office and keep his Democrat party doing OK.   But the enemy was shooting real bullets back at us and planting bombs of every type in our bases, in boats aimed at our ships, etc., etc., and so forth.   We were at war but we didn't know we were at war.   We let our soldiers go out on furlow and retired our officer corps while the enemy was putting our CIVILIANS in its sights.   Some freakin' peace dividend!

So, that's my take on the bogus spam e-mail making the rounds and the correction.   We hacve a serious disagreement in this country between those who do not see the invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent one of Iraq as the worst travesty foisted upon the American people and those who believe it is demonstrative of the "worst presidency in the history of the country."

I say history will be clear in its interpretations and judgments of the past and following 20 or 30 years.   Nobody alive today will view those interpretations and judgments.   They'll be published in the history books of students 100-150 years from now.   The whole period of 1960 - 2020 will be a relatively minor one in the history books of American school children, if there is still a United States of America in 2150.   They'll find this period somewhat boring.   They'll laugh at the primitive technology we lived with.   They'll study the slanted journalism of our times - no liberals not O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, but rather all the slanted media including 60 Minutes, NBC, CBS, New York Times, Washington Post, etc.

School kids in 2150 will have a sentence or two in their testbooks (something which will be on the test!) describing how the media openly attacked Bush and propped up Democrats by distorting the facts, to the detriment of the country.   They'll read how Clinton drew down the military while we were under attack.   They'll read that the Bush presidency was not nearly as bad as the media made it out to be.   They'll read how the Clinton presidency was not nearly as good as the media made it out to be.   They'll read how the candidacy iof inexperienced Obama was not nearly what the media made it out to be.   They'll be encouraged to critically question media reports about the current President, a Republican woman, part black, part white, part hispanic who was born into relative poverty and pulled herself up to prominence without any governmental assistance.

What the kids of 2150 won't learn about is how bad of an idea it was to invade Afghanistan or Iraq, or about how many people GW Bush killed, because 100-150 years from now, it won't look that way.

Labels: media bias