QandO

May 03, 2004

The Cost of War
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Mark Steyn, the Internet's one-man content factory, comments on the Ted Koppel imbroglio.

According to Ted Koppel, dragging his gravitas like a ball and chain, "The most important thing a journalist can do is remind people of the cost of war..." Is reminding people of the ''cost of war'' really the most important thing a journalist can do? Costs don't exist in a vacuum, but relative to their benefits...The cost of war is the cost of losing it measured against the cost of winning it.

Take a good long look at that last last sentence.

We see the flag-draped coffins of our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen, and we attach to them the cost of the war. But in reality, they are the price we pay not for the cost of war, but for avoiding defeat.

Every month, I watch my bank account dwindle when I pay my premiums for car and life insurance. I don't particularly like paying them, but I would like it even less if I had to pay the full cost of being T-boned by a drunk driver. Without them, I'd have to pay full freight for my car, damages, and injuries. Even worse, if I were to die, Chris might find that she is unable to keep our house.

Those premiums I pay prevent me from having to come up with the full cost of a disaster, or, even worse, making my family pay it without me.

By the same token, our soldiers are the insurance premium our country pays against the horrific cost of defeat. It's a stiff price, but it's a far lower price than we'd all have to pay under the subjugation of Islamofascism.

When we pulled out of Vietnam, and left them to die on the vine, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese paid for it. Millions of Cambodians followed. And of course, for the remainder of the 1970s untold numbers of people in Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Nicaragua paid as well.

There are horrific costs to defeat, and they are, as a general rule, far worse than the price we pay in blood and treasure to prevent it.

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