Reply #4: This topic is soooo important ... [View All]

[HamdenRice]

I'm outraged that somehow the daily death toll in Iraq has fallen off the media radar! It makes me sick to my heart that a daily death toll has been "normalized" so that it is not big news. We are now used to several American soldiers being killed each day, as part of normal reality. Soon we will be able to tolerate -- not even blink -- if the toll is 15, 20 or 50 dead each day as the cost of protecting the empire.

It reminds me of the Vietnam era -- but at least in those days the media had the decency to scroll the "honor roll" on local news each night of the names of the dead.

Another horrible, dehumanizing aspect of this war is that we are never, never told how many Iraqis have died. Yes, we occasionally hear estimates of the civilian death toll of about 5,000 to 10,000, but how many Iraqi soldiers and insurgents have died?

At the beginning of the war some military spokesman-prick said "we don't do body counts," -- probably because people were so horrified by the slaughter of Popie's first war (estimates of between 100,000 to 250,000 Iraqi soldiers) and they don't want that info out.

But even in the Civil War, WWI, WWII, etc, simply as a matter of record we always knew how many "enemy" were killed. Now our government acts as though these fighters, whatever their motives, aren't even people.