From a reader in the military:

Have you seen the new piece in the New Yorker by George Packer about how Obama’s rhetoric regarding Iraq is out of date in light of the dramatic improvements in the last year? I saw it referenced at Instapundit and Ace of Spades HQ with commentary to the effect of, “When even the New Yorker thinks Obama’s Iraq plan doesn’t mesh with the facts on the ground, you know he’s got a problem.” That’s all terrific and everything, but the first line really stuck in by craw:
“In February, 2007, when Barack Obama declared that he was running for President, violence in Iraq had reached apocalyptic levels, and he based his candidacy, in part, on a bold promise to begin a rapid withdrawal of American forces upon taking office.”
Apocalyptic?!?! Really?!?!? That’s the most appropriate adjective this guy can think of? I just checked iCasualties.org, a pretty leftward-tilting source, and it put US casualties for February ‘07 at 81, with the Brits and the rest of the coalition bringing it up to 85. That’s about an understrength company’s worth. For Iraqi deaths, they came up with 3014 for “Iraqi Security Forces and Civilians,” presumable rolling up dead insurgents in that number along with their victims. So that’s the level of fighting that, according to Mr. Packer, could give one the impression that the world is coming to an end. Wow.
I wonder what kind of verbiage he would use to describe the level of violence in March of 1945, during which 20,325 US troops lost their lives around the globe among countless civilians and enemy troops, almost 5 times as many as the 4113 we’ve lost in Iraq in roughly the last 63 months? How about the Battle of the Somme where the Brits lost 20,000 in a day? What word would be adequate to describe the carnage on the Eastern Front, where, in roughly the same amount of time as we’ve been in Iraq, fighting, disease, and deprivation claimed the lives of 27 million Russians, around 9 million German troops, and I don’t even know how many German civilians? I’m really curious to find out what kind of adjectives this guy could bring to bear on a level of violence several hundred or several thousand times more lethal than the level that he believes carries the whiff of the End of Days. How much room is there on the far side of “apocalyptic?”
I know more than most that every death in war is a tragedy. I’ve lost friends. But I’m constantly staggered by the sheer hysteria of the anti-war left, and absolute absence of historical perspective in the bubble they seem to live in, where every rocket attack is Iwo Gima, and every block of Baghdad is the Kasserine Pass. I remained convinced that if in WWII we were saddled with the same crew of bedwetters running Congress and the media that we have now, we would have gotten crushed.
Apocalyptic. Sheesh.