Yes, there are people that seriously believe Bin Laden’s navy is going to come and invade us. I’ve never understood why people think terrorists are an existential threat to the nation. As horrible as it sounds, the most they can do is blow up a few more buildings or maybe set off a small nuke. On a macro level, they are no threat to our way of life.
Stryfe, not a joke, just pure sarcasm.
Well, except, for a lot of people, “our way of life” is to live in the equivalent of a gated community, where our walls prevent any of that nasty outside world from ever affecting us in the slightest, and we can completely ignore the consequences of our actions. They definitely threaten that.
I suspect that, for a lot of fine citizens who do/did take the “fight them over here” rationale seriously, their gullibility/trust in the argument finds support in the ever-growing swarms of “those people” invading the country/immigrating, legally and illegally – you know, Muslims and Mexicans and East Asians and, and, and – well, them. Those people – the fifth column of swarthy foreigners just waiting for the signal to rise up and unleash terror upon a helpless nation. God help us – they’re everywhere these days!
Bolding mine.
I blame Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche…
Touche.
Damn straight. Better watch yourself, whitey- our day is coming. 
I’m a bit confused here. Are people saying that the loss of American lives is the only measure of success of this war? Please tell me that’s not what you guys are saying.
I’m saying nothing of the sort, for myself. For the people who needed to be sold on the surge, though- ie. the American electorate- that really is the only number that matters.
Invariably any story about “the rising death toll” in Iraq describes, in detail, exactly how many soldiers have been killed, what states they came from, and so on, and includes a few juicy quotes from the grieving families. Somewhere near the end, all but footnoted, there will be a brief mention of the million or so Iraqi dead.
This phenomenon isn’t isolated to war reporting, though, and it certainly isn’t isolated to Americans. A minor disaster in your own country is always bigger news than a historic tragedy in somebody else’s.
I wasn’t making this argument, but if you buy the premise that we’re only there to spread piss and dumocracy, and only terrorists would oppose this, then by that measure any reduction in the deathcount of American soldiers surely means we’re approaching our goals of extinguishing Global Terra. Wait, I misspoke; our goals actually seem to be to fight Global Terra. “Winning” is a condition as yet undefined.
It’s an incredibly oversimplified way to measure the success of an enterprise. But you know, what other metrics have we ever been given by this secretive administration?
This is a whoosh, right? The loss of Iraqi lives, maybe? I mean if we take as a given that we already are involved in Iraq, then certainly the best metric of the success of The Surge (or any other strategy) is the total death toll, and not just whether American soldiers get killed. That’s the point I was trying to make, anyway.
Fish asked what other metrics we’d been given by the administration, not whether reasonable people would, you know, think Iraqi lives might have value too.
I think what he’s (she?) saying is there are other metrics, but the admin has conditioned the public that the death count is the only one that matters. That and they’ve been real stingy is releasing the real metrics. Hmmm, come to think of it, forget releasing them, they haven’t even defined them.
/now depressed
Sure. Tie it to whatever you want. Tie it to the price of oil, to the pollution index, to the prime rate. Tie success in Iraq to voter turnout.
The point is, our mission there is so ill-defined that George Bush & Co. haven’t bothered to tell us how we know when we’re done, much less how we’re doing at the moment. We get ambiguous phrases like “death throes” and “turning the corner” and, if you can believe it, “Mission Accomplished.” What mission? What corner? Whose death throes?
Americans are still dying over there. Isolated though it is, it is a fact we can grasp. And if Americans are dying, then whatever the hell it is we’re doing must not yet be done.
You could even tie our success in Iraq to pollution and the rate of piracy in the Caribbean and you’ve got a religion. That’s about what we have now.
Not ill-defined; just constantly redefined.
As trite as it has become,
:::golf clap:::
Wow, that’s a lot of posts. 
If I hear pundit claim that “the statistics don’t reflect the reality on the ground” I’m gonna hit somebody with a stick. All the while I’ll be cackling madly, “Then why don’t you produce some statistics that do!”
I swear, it’s like a cult. Truuuuust the gubmint. They wouldn’t lie to us. Everything is going fiiiiine in Iraq. [Jedi handwave] There weeeeere weapons of mass destruction. Tacos ruuuuule.
Ooh, I can’t wait for various apologists on here to tell me the difference between that and a timeline and a deadline and a schedule!
-Joe
Our way of life also didn’t used to involve torturing people and locking people up without charging them. So the terrorists have affected our way of life, but only thanks to their allies in the White House.