Some Fictional Horrors Of War (Mark Steyn: MSM Goes Berserk Over Low Iraq War Costs Alert)

Orange County Register ^ | 1/19/2008 | Mark Steyn

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In other words, we don't have their excuse. Our war has one of the lowest fatality rates of any war ever, and, when they get so low that even Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid temporarily give up the quagmire bleating, the Times invents bogus stories to suggest that the few veterans lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive are ticking time-bombs ready to explode across every Main Street in the land.

A few days before the Times series began, The National Journal published the latest debunking of a notorious survey: In 2006, the medical journal The Lancet reported that the Iraq war had killed over 650,000 civilians, over 90 percent victims of the U.S. military. That's 500 civilians a day. Which is quite a smell test. The figure was over 10 times the estimates even of hard-core anti-war groups. Who are these 500 daily victims? Why aren't there mass riots by Iraqi civilians protesting the daily bloodbath?

Because it's fake. It didn't happen.

Yet it's indestructible. I picked up a local paper in New Hampshire the other day, and a lady psychotherapist was twittering about our "mentally wounded" troops returning home after killing gazillions and bazillions of Iraqi civilians.

In 1933, the debaters at Oxford were horrified by the real cost of war. In 2008, the editors of the Times, our college professors and Hollywood celebrities, are horrified by a fiction. Faced with a historically low cost of war, they retreat into fantasy. Who's really suffering from mental trauma? Who needs the psychotherapy here?

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The MSM's line has subtly evolved. From American GI's being losers in Iraq to American GI's being losers at home. With the Iraq War death toll the lowest of any historical military conflict, one would think it a source of pride and appreciation so many lives have been saved at so little cost. But the Left has retreated into the fiction the war the war has been a futile exercise and still needs to hang its hat on some trope to sustain belief in the fiction the Iraq War was wrong from Day One. Namely, the troops have come home transformed into crazed killers of kith and kin. And these are the people who claim to support the troops.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

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Jay Leno allows Bill Maher to degrade our military on his show while the audience claps. What a disgusting bunch of Americans.