As Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic. The fact that America’s dead in Iraq are not yet statistics, that they’re still small enough in number to be individual tragedies Ted can milk for his show tells you the real cost of this war. In Afghanistan, the numbers are even lower, which is why ”Nightline” hasn’t bothered pulling this stunt with America’s other war. . . .
Here’s where it’s worth considering the cost of Ted Koppel in the broader sense. Our enemies have made a bet — that the West in general and America in particular are soft and decadent and have no attention span; that the ”sleeping giant” Admiral Yamamoto feared he’d wakened at Pearl Harbor can no longer be roused. . . .
It’s unbecoming to a great power, and very perilous. The cost of war is the cost of losing it measured against the cost of winning it. We can reach our own conclusions about which the coalition’s dead would opt for.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: ABC also seems to have double-counted.