by Patrick J. Shanahan
09/16/04
“Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground,
Mother Earth will swallow you,
Lay your body down.”
The mournful strains of this succinct Neil Young lyric seem especially meaningful today, as we hear of the 1,000th man killed in the fight to exterminate terrorism. Two things are certain about the fight for freedom: It is never cheap, and it never ends.
This song seems especially relevant because one never hears the deaths of our soldiers framed by our media superstars as the price paid to purchase and defend freedom. One would think that these thousand men died for nothing. Nothing but George Bush’s petulance and Halliburton’s gain, that is.
The reality is far more remarkable. We have been engaged in a battle against radical Islam and totalitarian terrorists for 3 years now. We have significantly reduced the threat against the United States, have brought unimagined freedom to the people of Afghanistan, and have liberated Iraq from the yoke of a hideous dictator. This has been purchased at the cost of 1,000 lives.
While each of those lives represents a father, brother, or husband (or in a few cases, daughter, sister, wife) who is lost forever to his loved ones, that does not minimize the truly amazing fact that 1,000 lives for these results represents an almost unprecedented success in the annals of freedom. Never has dear freedom been purchased with fewer lives.
The charts below show the relative cost of freedom through out country’s major wars. I have also included, for contrast purposes, the deaths for all Americans age 15-24 in 2002. Thirty times more Americans in that young and healthy age group died in 2002 than all Americans have died in the entire War on Terror to date. 400 times more died in World War II. It is an undeniable fact that the two George Bushes have conducted the two least-deadly wars in American history. Fewer dead than in The War of 1812, the Mexican War, even the Spanish-American War. The second chart shows the rate of deaths in action by month. Once again, the Current War is among the lowest on record. This should be cause for celebration! We have fought hard against an enemy dedicated to killing as many Americans as possible, and have won stunning victories at the lowest imaginable cost in human life.
I fear that those who value freedom the least are the least likely to understand what a wonderful achievement this is. If freedom if of little worth to you, you are not likely to see any loss of life as “worth it”. Those who value freedom are much more likely to understand that the Cost of Freedom is eternal vigilance and occasional bloodshed, and that’s just the way it is. One of the benefits of being the dominant world power is that we are now able to defend freedom with hundreds of lives, rather than hundreds of thousands of lives. This is what “preemptive” strategy has bought us – tens of thousands of lives not lost later at a price of a thousand lost now.
It’s not cheap. But it has never been less expensive. I suspect that the Cost of Freedom would go up quite a bit under a “Kerry Doctrine.”
