FH,

I had not one single comment on the following post.
Good luck with yours.
Most TPMers just want to howl about Barack & (still) HRC.

Yours is a good, important piece...so don't expect much.

From: Cafe
Bringing the Iraq War Home, Mathematically
June 6, 2008, 7:58PM
The mainstream, and of course the right-wing, media have seemed as of late to be jumping back on the Iraq-War-Is-Winnable train again.

The so-called Surge, merely an increase in troop levels long resisted by the Bush Administration and a temporary change in the tactical objectives of the US military presence, have produced some recent casualty numbers indicative of a certain pacification in the Iraq theater.

Those numbers are: pre-Surge, Iraqi violent deaths had reached 3000 per month; current Iraqi violent deaths are running at 1000 per month. Better? Yes.

But one simple arithmetic notion to keep in to keep in mind , one which gives more meaning to the "raw," absolute numbers that are cited is the following:

Iraq is (was) a country of 25 million people; the United States is a country of 300 million people. Our population is 12 times theirs. To appreciate what casualty-rate in Iraq would "feel" like if that casualty-rate were duplicated in the United States, one must multiply each Iraqi casualty by a factor of 12. So the rate of 1000 Iraqi deaths per month is the equivalent of the United States sustaining 12000 war deaths a month on our own soil.

That formula should give anyone who thinks things are under control in Iraq pause to rethink his or her position.

MyBlog: http://ProteanPerspectives.blogspot.com

When do you ever hear that being mentioned by the talking heads?

The information black hole is frightful.

Whether it's true or not, the numbers people at the networks believe Americans have too-short of attention spans to keep on reporting about Iraq. They've got to keep it moving, keep it new, keep us buying.

The problem I see with lowered expectations is that too many people will adjust to meet them. A short attention span is learned behavior, except in the few cases of mental incapacity or synaptic misfires.

Ever read Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron? He presents an America so equalized to the lowest common denominator that anyone who exceeds that baseline is handicapped with whatever it takes to bring him or her down to that level. A talented dancer is chained to an iron ball, and a genius must wear earpieces that blast intrusive noises at regular intervals, so as to interrupt coherent thought.

News in other countries is very different from American news. Yes, there's the MTV influence in how some stories get presented, but the nightly national broadcast on the CBC is an hour long and treats subjects in depth. Both the BBC and Deutsche Welle have radio and television news broadcasts in English, and they, too, favor depth over speed.

If American viewers were to complain to our news outlets that we are not getting the news that we need, there might be a change, but there'd have to be the threat of boycotting advertisers. But what a lot of trouble to go through. I know it's a lot of trouble, because I've bothered to go through it.

There's much to be said for media that doesn't depend on advertising revenue for its survival. But the last thing that this government has wanted in recent years is for a long, free discussion about foreign and domestic policy decisions to get on the air.

The truth is out there, but you have to work to find it.