The casualty-figure coverage and round-number obsession is not limited to merely American troops, as the media and anti-war folks are now using the sad century mark for British deaths in Iraq.
Two British soldiers have died in southern Iraq this week, bringing the number of the UK force to die during the conflict to 100, a Ministry of Defence statement said.
On Tuesday morning, an explosion killed a solider in Basra province. Three other soldiers were wounded in the same incident — one seriously.
Another British soldier died Monday morning after his patrol came under fire in Maysan province.
The defense ministry did not give the identity of the 100th soldier, nor of the others hurt in Tuesday’s blast, all from the 7th Armoured Brigade, the main British force in Iraq. The three injured soldiers were being treated at a British base.
Anti-war campaigners in Britain seized on the 100th death to once again demand Britain pull out of Iraq.
The Stop The War Coalition was due to hold a vigil at parliament Tuesday evening to read out the names of the dead.
Left-wing Member of Parliament George Galloway, one of those reading out the names, told CNN it was a “melancholy milestone.”
“We have just sent thousands of new soldiers to Afghanistan, if anything an even more dangerous mission. Events are marching in the direction of the vindication of the anti-war movement.
I’m afraid Galloway is unsurprisingly confused. Simply put, dangerous does not imply wrong. Had the likes of Galloway held sway in the Great Britain of the ’40s, well, red armbands would be all the rage in London today and reality TV would still suck.
As to the media attention to casualties at the expense of true war coverage, I’ll again quote Power Line‘s Paul Mirengoff, who blogged the following:
Have you ever read a history of war that focused almost entirely on casualty figures (with an occasional torture story and grieving parent thrown in), to the exclusion of any real discussion of tactics, operations, and actual battles? I haven’t. But that’s what our self-proclaimed “rough drafters†of history are serving up with respect to Iraq.