November 8, 2006 5:57 AM

Another DUMB@$$ AWARD wiener

Murdoch says US death toll in Iraq ‘minute’

DUMB@$$ AWARD wiener #467: Rupert Murdoch

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.

Sure, when it’s not your loved ones doing the fighting and dying, it’s easy to be sanguine about the bloodshed. After all, it’s someone else burying their son or daughter, or husband or wife. Someone else is doing the grieving while Murdoch, the ultra-Conservative owner of Fox News Channel, philosophizes about numbers. What he clearly fails to realize is that each number represents a life cut short- a father who will never see his children grow up, a husband who will never have the opportunity to grow old with his wife. To Murdoch, war is about little more than political and policy goals, and soldiers shipped home in flag-draped boxes are merely a cost of doing business.

Murdoch’s problem is that he is so far removed from reality that he seems to lost his humanity. The war in Iraq is not some abstract exercise in political philosophy or foreign policy by other means. Iraq is this generation’s Vietnam, a pointless meatgrinder of a conflict whose days are measured in blood and tears. Murdoch fails to understand this because he is simply too far removed from even remotely being impacted by 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.”

Sure…and it’s much easier to treat this generation’s Vietnam as some sort of abstract theoretical construct. It’s not your loved ones who are dying to prop up Our Glorious and Benevolent Leader’s lies and failed policy, eh?

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on November 8, 2006 5:57 AM.

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