4000 american military deaths in Iraq

While no one like seeing anyone die, I want to discuss the 4000 military dead in Iraq that is being covered throughout the news today. 4000 dead in the last 5 years is not a really high number. I know that the family members of the soldiers that died do not want to hear that, but it is not. More people die every year drinking and driving on "safe" American highways ("In 1995, traffic fatalities involving a drinking driver represented 42 per cent of road fatalities [17,732 deaths]; in 2000, they represented 41 per cent [17,380 deaths]" http://www.safety-council.org/info/traffic/impaired/stats.html). That being said, it is actually safer to walk around Iraq with an American flag tee-shirt than to drive home Saturday night on RT 95.

I found the following from another blog (http://mpinkeyes.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/military-casualties-during-the-bill-clinton-administration/):

"As I write this there have been about 3100 soldiers killed in Iraq fighting for and defending this country. This is from 2003 until now. I know this because we are constantly barraged with the death toll on the news every day. Can you image fighting WWII with the coverage as it is today?
Our enemy killed about the same number of us in one day on our soil, but sadly that has been forgotten.

Here is a list of how many US soldiers were killed when Bill Clinton was in office. We didn’t get constant death tolls the way we do now, so you probably haven’t seen these numbers before.
1993-1,245
1994-1,109
1995-1,055
1996-1,008

That is a total of 4,417 military deaths during the Clinton years."

Remember during the Clinton years the military was in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti and the Sudan. We any of these campaigns successful? It can be argued that Bosnia and Haiti were successful. But that is a high American military loss of life for those small campaigns, compared to the fall of Afghanistan (which even communist Russia spent ten year in and still failed) and Iraq.

Like I said the loss of human life, any human life is tragic. Any of these brave men and women after their military tour could have found a cure for cancer or built cost efficient space travel.

We just have to put things in perspective before we make judgements based on the news coverage.