In an op-ed column in today’s (October 27, 2005) in New York Times, classicist and Hoover Institute commentator Victor Davis Hanson tries to put the reaching of 2,000 American military casualties in Iraq “in context.” “Compared with Iraq,” he argues, “America lost almost 17 times more dead in Korea, and 29 times more again in Vietnam – in neither case defeating our enemies nor establishing democracy in a communist north.” For those of us who think 2,000 is 2,000 too many, Hanson suggests we remember the 400,000 dead in World War II. “If our enemies similarly believed in the obsolescence of war that so heartlessly has taken 2,000 of our best young men and women, then we could find solace in our growing intolerance of any battlefield losses. But until the nature of man himself changes, there will be wars that take our youth, and we will be increasingly vexed to explain why we should let them.”
But why stop with World War II? Continue reading Numbers in Context