Murdoch says US death toll in Iraq 'minute'
Rupert Murdoch runs Newscorp/Fox 'news' as the propaganda or PR arm of the Republican Party.
He fulfills the same service in Communist China, where another of his media empire companies has the monopoly to broadcast from satellites China's official state-run 'news' (propaganda).
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Technically, Rupert Murdoch is 'right' as in "correct": by the standards of the great battles of the World War II or the US Civil War (or countless other wars in history), the US military death toll in Iraq is, indeed, "minute."
BUT! the US death toll there (swiftly approaching 3,000) does NOT include the US wounded, disabled, and traumatized, a statistic that is approaching 30,000 or more soldiers and Marines.
Worse still, the US quagmire in Iraq has all the hallmarks of a classic "professional army vs. entire population" insurgency. that is, a US combat military in Iraq facing some portion of active insurgents out of Iraq's population of over 20 million. (We can discount the more than 5 million Kurdish nationals who support the US presence there.)
It is the classic guerrilla war: Professional army vs insurgents. In South Korea, the western (American) friendly government quickly eliminated (or never had) any insurgency against the US presence. In Vietnam the South Vietnamese government was not created until 1954, that is, until after the expulsion of the French from their attempts to reestablish an imperial colony in all of Vietnam. Vietnam just happened to have a thousands-year legacy of guerrilla warfare against outside conquerors. Korea actually had a similar resentment of Chinese and Japanese occupations, but the American presence in South Korea was so much more benign than the brutal Japanese occupations there, that Americans were welcomed as friends and allies. In Vietnam, by contrast, the French actively sided with the brutal Japanese occupation during WWII, leading to a massive famine of over one million Vietnamese during WWII as French and Japanese troops extorted local rice stocks to supply the Imperial Japanese army. Not only did America aid and supply the hated French occupation (colony) in Vietnam after WW II ended, but when the Vietminh finally expelled the despised (French) overlords, the Americans stepped right in where the French, Japanese, and Chinese had left off. Thus when comparing a classic insurgency (VC in Vietnam) to a classic neo-colonial industrial relationship (e.g. US "capitalism" in South Korea), it is extremely critical to pay attention to history and details.
IN IRAQ, we (Americans) have a situation where BOTH Arab secular nationalities detest the American occupation- up to 80% want America out. As American troops continue to suppress both sides of this Arab proto-civil war (Sunnis vs. Shiites), they will continue to kill large numbers of insurgents and military-aged men. In Vietnam, US/CIA "Phoenix" death squads ultimately considered ALL men, from boys to elders, and large quantities of women and children, to be "enemy combatants." See Mai Lai massacre, and even former Navy SEAL and US Senator Bob Kerrey's combat record. (When on an assassination mission in a given village, the SEAL teams would routinely kill ANY villagers who could give a warning of the team's presence; i.e. women and children as well as young and older males.) To see the logical extensions of these "covert" policies, search for "Anfal", Saddam's genocidal 'ethnic cleansing' campaign against Iraqi Kurds during the 1980s, with full US government approval and assistance. (Besides committing to the rather insane policy of aiding Saddam's specific WMD programs with "WMD precursor technologies" (which google) during the 1980s, the Bush-Reagan administrations also funded millions of dollars worth of the regime's wars and more general policies via US "agricultural credits" during this period.)
ALL THE ABOVE to say that, indeed, the US KIA rate of the Iraq war to date is small compared to most great wars. BUT the American WIA toll continues to mount, and the mere presence of US troops EMPOWERS unemployed males to become guerrilla fighters, that is feared if not respected members of the local communities. Even under THE BEST US leadership of the war, this trend - empowering Iraqi males to take the risk of killing Americans - will not dissipate quickly. But of course the singular distinction of the Bush administration's "leadership" of the Iraq occupation is to be as arrogant, brutal, secretive, dictatorial, ruthless, and unopposable as possible.
Under this scenario, Mr. Murdoch's "MINUTE" death toll of American military in Iraq probably isn't going to go down any time soon.
Murdoch says US death toll in Iraq 'minute'
6 Nov, 2006
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/342795.cms
TOKYO: Media mogul Rupert Murdoch said on Monday he had no regrets about supporting the US-led invasion of Iraq and argued that the US death toll in the conflict was "minute" from a historical perspective.
The conservative News Corp chief spoke on the eve of US elections where President George W Bush's Republican Party was expected to lose seats in part due to a backlash over the war.
"The death toll, certainly of Americans there, by the terms of any previous war are quite minute," Murdoch told reporters at a conference in Tokyo.
"Of course no one likes any death toll, but the war now, at the moment, it's certainly trying to prevent a civil war and to prevent Iraqis killing each other."
A total of 2,832 US troops have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Thousands more Iraqis have died.
Murdoch -- whose News Corp empire includes the New York Post and Britain's most widely read newspaper, The Sun tabloid -- said while the United States made mistakes in the war its intentions were good.
"I believe it was right to go in there. I believe that certainly the execution that has followed that has included many mistakes," Murdoch said.
"But that's easy to say after the event. It's much easier to criticize the conduct of the war today in the media than it was in previous wars. I'm sure there were great mistakes made in the past, too."
"I think that one forgets that American foreign policy for the whole of the (20th) century saved the world from terrible things three times," he said, "for which they certainly got no thanks and for which they never had imperial ambitions at all."
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