In recent days, liberal blogs have been attempting to manufacture a controversy over a comment where Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) referred to the investment the U.S. has made in Iraq in both blood and treasure as "a small price to pay." There have been howls of outrage from seemingly every nook and cranny of the anti-war body politic.
I guess I'll be the contrarian.
Boehner is pretty much right. Historically, our losses in Iraq are small. The Coalition has barely breached 4,000 dead -- that's getting our hair mussed, at worst. Moreover, the number of U.S. dead is irrelevant to whether we are losing or winning or whether the war in Iraq is just or not just.
The Republicans are responsible for ratcheting up the super jingoist "support the troops" atmosphere over the past several years. When they underfunded VA hospitals, cut troop pay, extended tours, cut benefits, had no plans for the Iraq occupation post invasion, didn't send them body armor and other equipment which they needed, and pretty much treated them like shit, that was a large weakness in the GOP armor which the Democrats have somewhat exploited. As usual, they could've been a million times more effective, but they more or less did it. And rightly so.
But now some Democrats and the anti-war left in general are trying to take the "support the troops" cudgel they've stolen from the GOP and use it in a manner which make no sense. In many ways, this fascination and exploitation of the amount of U.S. dead has been the central pillar of the anti-Iraq war campaign for almost two years now, in commercial after commercial. It's nearly always the first thing out of the mouth of an anti-war speaker in any media discussion, usually followed immediately by how much the occupation has cost in dollars. Presumably, if we had lost only 100 soldiers so far everything would be dandy and we wouldn't be having all this commotion. The funny thing is, it seems to work pretty well with the public. This is most likely because the American people had no idea what they were getting into and didn't even really believe in or understand the mission, the region, or really anything about war, it was just chanting "USA! USA!" and watching green cities be bombed on CNN while eating potato chips.
I understand why we've done this. It's good politics. We've found ourselves in a "Support the troops!" environment and using it against the GOP in this manner is smart. You have to be ruthless and appeal to primitive emotions because the public doesn't have a command of the facts to sit at the table of an actual discussion on almost any issue, especially when it comes to Iraq. But I would just like to point out that it's intellectually lazy, and reading the recreational outrage in so many comments and diaries is a little perplexing.
Rule 1 of propaganda: don't believe your own propaganda.
Either the mission is worth it or it's not. Either the logic of the war makes sense or it doesn't. It's either moral or immoral as you understand the world.
You support the war, 4,000 dead or no. You're against the war, whether it's four, 4,000, or 40,000 dead. You certainly don't take a "Well, let's see how this works out, I'm not really sure" approach. Maybe when you're buying breakfast cereal -- certainly not when you back a fucking war.