Yes, it became an annual Nightline Ceremony
Now that the first battlefield casualties of ‘Trump’s Iran War’ have been recorded (6 as of 3/2/26), Ivan hear the bells tolling on the soundtrack of the Alphabet News networks lamenting the names of dead military personnel they don’t care about in any other respect. Soldier deaths are one more cudgel that can be used to beat the America First crowd with.
We’ve been here before. The article reproduced below is one I wrote for the original Instapunk blog almost exactly 20 years ago. The occasion was a forthcoming — and much promoted — edition of Nightline dedicated to intoning all the names, one by one, of American military personnel killed in Iraq. A not so subtle undermining of ‘Bush’s Iraq War,’ by a TV program that began as a nightly update on the American hostages taken by Iran in November 1979 after Jimmy Carter handed that nation over to the Ayatollah Khomeini. The ironies abound. Nightline was outraged by the plight of the hostages in 1979, enraged by military action against the sponsors of Islamic terrorism in 2004. Nightline is no longer with us. But its sequels are probably already being organized to play Taps to death on teevee if it will embarrass and isolate Trump with his own pointless war.
The article below is not re-litigation of the Iraq War or American policy regarding terrorist states. It is about how the Death Card Has been played to death in domestic politics, now to the point of absurdity. We look at death all the time and try not to see it. Why a cold light is necessary.
Am I done yet? No. Let me show you a military casualty list summarizing the last hundred years.
World War II - 440,000 killed in 4 years
Korean War - 50,000 killed in 2 years
Vietnam War - 60,000 killed in 10 years
Iraq War 2 - 4,600 killed in 8 years
Afghanistan - 2,400 killed in 15+ years
Notice anything? The trend in combat deaths is dramatically downward, although the weeping and wailing is in this context actually trending dramatically upward.
Several comparisons worth making here. How about Iraqi/Enduring Freedom campaigns vs the American Revolution? Looked up some numbers for you:
This gets more interesting when you factor in differences in population. Given the indeterminate length of the Afghanistan War, we are probably safe in guesstimating the U.S. population as 300 million plus during the ‘Freedom’ campaigns over the 15+ year span of engagement. How about the U.S. population between 1776 and 1783.
You can do the comparison calculations for yourselves. The 21st century population is ~120 times the 18th century population, factoring that into casualty equivalencies, the Revolution’s death toll would equal more a million in today’s numbers.
Looking for more recent kill boxes? The deadliest 20th century kill rates were in World War I, not World War II. 100,000 ‘doughboys’ died in just three months of ‘major combat engagement’ in 1918.
Weirdly the math of 100,000 / 90 days =1,111 deaths per day. (November 11 ring any bells? Nah. Coincidence…)
Populations matter here too. The U,S. population in 1918 was ~100 million. In WWII, it was ~135 million. Anyone want to multiply WWI/II casualties by a factor of 3? Doubt it.
Americans aren’t very good with numbers anymore, big or small. The media have trained us to pay attention only to those number totals that can be used to make some political point we agree with. There’s hardly anyone alive who can conceptualize the difference between a million and a billion or billion and a trillion. Why even Columbia J School reporters and Harvard Law senators frequently mistake one for the other in their public communications.
Why people (women, I’m looking at you in particular here) can screw the scenery and bare their breasts in anguish on the high moral ground about adult a couple hundred fashion models exploited into sexy slavery by the Epstein conspiracy and exhibit zero interest in the fate or salvation of 290,000 minor children who have gone missing in the nation’s years with no borders. Why they can do the same melodramatic playacting about the fantasy victims of court hanger abortions before 1973 (about 200/yr) and dismiss all attempts to imagine the missing lives associated with 30 million post-Roe abortions — or even count them at all in the statistical record.
Numbers are nothing but a meme now. Can’t wait for Netflix and HBO to launch rival streaming series featuring 60-minute documentaries about every single military casualty in “Trump’s War of Choice.” How about you?
Surely the ghost of Ted Koppel is smiling fondly upon us from wherever he has come to roost in Lib Heaven…
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