Three Wars, Little News: We’ve ignored the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Mexico long enough.

From National Review online - by Victor Davis Hanson - It is a busy time in America. The Major League Baseball playoffs are competing with the upcoming midterm elections for the public’s attention. The rescue of courageous miners in Chile has for a time overshadowed even the latest psychodramas of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. There is endemic fear among Americans that continual $1 trillion–plus annual deficits and near–10 percent unemployment are about to destroy the vaunted American standard of living. Who has time to worry about much else?
That said, we have been sleeping through three major wars that will soon wake us up. This summer, Americans were dying in combat in Afghanistan at rates not seen since the summer of 2007 in Iraq. In congressional hearings that year, furious legislators grilled Gen. David Petraeus and cited the high number of monthly combat deaths to prematurely declare his surge a failure. MoveOn.org ran ads calling Petraeus a traitor (“General Betray Us”) for continuing the war amid such losses. No such furor surrounds Afghanistan today. Yet more Americans have been killed so far this year in Afghanistan than during the entire six years of fighting there from 2001 through 2006. U.S. combat fatalities in Afghanistan in just the first 19 months of the Obama administration exceeded U.S. combat fatalities in Afghanistan in eight years under George W. Bush. Read more

Three Wars, Little News: We’ve ignored the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Mexico long enough.