"The left nags us about the bloodbath; the right ignores it. Pro-war or anti-war, however, both sides are the same in one respect: Death only matters when it happens to Americans.
It's a cliché of journalism: a single murdered blonde scores screaming headlines while "2,000,000 Chinese Die in Floods" gets a column inch under the fold on page 19. But chronically insular Americans have become so myopic since 9/11 that they only mourn their own soldiers--they don't even care when their allies bite the dust.
---snip
Respecting one's wartime adversaries, dead and alive, distinguishes civilized societies from barbarians. Architects of the war on terrorism, casting POWs as "enemy combatants" unentitled to Geneva Conventions protections and refusing even to count the enemy dead and wounded, have discarded this fundamental precept of honor. Dead Americans count; those they kill do not.
---snip
No one, even Michael Moore, talks about the dead Taliban and Iraqi government soldiers, many of them conscripts. Yet the these tens of thousands, every bit as much as U.S. celebrity war heroes like Pat Tillman (killed, it turns out, by "friendly fire") died performing their duty, defending their countries against enemy forces. The fact that their side lost cannot diminish the horror of their destruction, wipe away the grief of their wives and children, or dishonor their sacrifice. God knows we try. We pretend that our 880 dead soldiers, followed at a distant second by civilians reduced to "collateral damage," are the only losses that matter out of nearly 100,000."
http://www.uexpress.com/tedrall/index.html?uc_full_date=20040601
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