Pre-emptive Responses

Piggy-backing of my essay this morning, here is my first pre-emptive link to someone writing about the media's inevitable exploitation of the 2,000th soldier death in Iraq. This one comes from Ralph Peters:

WE'LL soon reach a total of 2,000 dead American troops in Iraq. You won't miss the day it happens. The media will pound it into you. But no one will tell you what that number really means — and what it doesn't.

Unable to convince the Bush administration or our troops to cut and run, the American left is waging its campaign of support for Islamist terror through our all-too-cooperative media. And you're the duck in the anti-war movement's shooting gallery.

Breathless anchors and voice-of-God columnists will suggest that 2,000 dead is an exorbitant price to pay in wartime, that reaching such a threshold means we've failed and that it's time to "support our troops and bring them home."

All lies. Certainly, the life of every American service member matters to us. But the left's attempt to exploit dead soldiers and Marines for partisan purposes is worse than grave-robbing: Ghouls only take gold rings and decaying flesh; the left wants to rob our war dead of their sacrifices and their achievements, their honor and their pride.

Those who died in Iraq have not died in vain. Even should Iraq fail itself in the end, our courageous effort to give one Middle-Eastern Muslim population a chance to create a rule-of-law democracy has been worth the cost — for their sake, but also for ours. Without a transformation of the Middle East, we shall see no end of terror.

Ralph adds some very useful historical perspective following this intro. Go read the rest of the article which only gets better.

*Via Security Watchtower