On Jan 14, 11:17 am, "Sandy" <
[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Actually, your thinking is far from critical; it is basically closed-loop,
> Washingtonian, numbers-mean-what-I-say-if-they-are-justifiable.
>
> None of the numbers, not the first Iraqi nor the first American who died in
> this conflict, not the latest deaths or numbers, do more than reduce human
> lives to picayune chess pieces on a board of complexity and topology that
> obscures genuine moral compromises, contradictions, inferences that preceded
> the current milennium by a vast stretch of time. There is no break-even
> strategy conceivable, nor does the actual number help figure out how much
> land is devoted to burials instead of productive human industry.
>
> If the academic in you revels in having better numbers, it doesn't add to
> the resolution of conflict, except perhaps in the tiny world of numbers
> theology. Each time you add a "1" to the list, it was a human life lost.
> An irreplaceable, unique human life. To think otherwise, one has started to
> side with the enemy. I am sure that Al Qaeda wanted big numbers, too. They
> salivated when the count was reported as 10,000, whined when it dropped to
> 5,000 and were really ****** off when the final tally came in. Right - not
> the final final final tally. I babbled. Sorry.
This is a fine-sounding sentiment in a perfect world.
In an imperfect world, it's hooey, and some idea of
this can be drawn from the reasons that Kunich cheered it.
In our imperfect world, we say that every life is sacred,
but in practice we don't shed tears each time someone
dies in a faraway country, so we might as well count
to understand the magnitude of what is happening.
Most cultures have elaborate rituals that are performed
to remember the dead. Societies that can spend the
effort go to great lengths to recover the bodies of
victims of disasters (drowning, mine collapse, air
crash, and so on). This gives some idea of the value
placed on remembrance.
In the case of the casualties in Iraq, we (meaning
people outside the families of the disappeared, from
the Iraqi government to the US govt to you and me)
don't know their names, the dates they vanished, the
dates of their demise, or what the hell happened.
The least we can do, however, is count them as
previously having existed. If we don't do that, we
are saying it doesn't matter, regardless of fine
talk about the preciousness of life.
Functioning societies know who lives in them and
make a census, crudely or accurately, of their
inhabitants. When someone disappears or dies, the
fact is reported to and noted by the civil authorities.
The fact that we are even having this discussion, and
that 5 years after the invasion, civil structures
in Iraq are still so dysfunctional that nobody can
accurately say who got killed or died of disease
or fled or previously existed and now does not,
is evidence on its face of the failure of the
American misadventure in Iraq.
Ben
Bush _said_ he didn't believe in nation-building.
