I call it 'perspective', but 'context' works too

The guys at Powerline weigh in with a great post about casualties in Iraq. So good in fact, that I may use it in a post I'm developing on the concept of heroes and heroism. But I digress...the money quote, far as I'm concerned is this found near the end:

Sometimes it becomes necessary to state the obvious: being a soldier is a dangerous thing. This is why we honor our service members' courage. For a soldier, sailor or Marine, "courage" isn't an easily-abused abstraction--"it took a lot of courage to vote against the farm bill"--it's a requirement of the job.

Even in peacetime. The media's breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq--now, over 1,800 deaths--is generally devoid of context. Here's some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one.

That's right: all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present.

I've made this point repeatedly in the real world. Sadly, most of the time it falls on deaf ears. People fixate on the numbers, especially if they're prone to believing that we shouldn't have gone to Iraq.

Problem is, fixating just on the number precludes any context, any sense of perspective and ignores everything that helps you understand what the numbers mean. I fear that in the case of anti-everything-Bush types, that said focus trumps any other concern.

Meanwhile, ask yourselves why nearly 1,300 dead U.S. service members a year is okay when we're living in peace and prosperity but when we're actually at war, 600 combat deaths a year is unacceptable.