CNSNews.com has long been trying to disparage the war in Afghanistan under President Obama, presenting monthly body counts as alarmingly high even though they are still far lower than they were at the height of the Iraq war (a fact typically ignored).
That continues in a Nov. 2 article by Edwin Mora, in which he writes that “One-third of the total 1,259 U.S. military deaths reported since the beginning of the nine-year Afghan war have taken place this year, with two months still to go,” adding that “In November, at least 49 U.S. soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.” The word “Iraq” appears nowhere in Mora’s article, let alone the fact that this number is less than half of the peak casualty numbers in Iraq.
Mora continues his disparagement of the Afghanistan war in a Nov. 24 article, in which he plays up a report claiming that “About 20 percent of Afghans perceive the condition of their country’s security as ‘bad’ and approximately 80 percent believe ‘corruption affects their daily lives.”
As with his body counts, Mora makes no effort to relate this to perceptions of security at the height of the Iraq War. Millions of Iraqis — including an estimated 40 percent of the its middle class — fled the country during the war, which arguably is a severe judgment on the sense of security at the time. There are other examples of the sense of security that was largely absent in Iraq during the war.
But Mora, bizarrely, makes no effort to draw the most logical comparison. Why? Perhaps because his body-count alarmism would fizzle when placed in context of the war waged by a Republican, which runs the risk of making Obama’s war strategy look good.
Mora and CNS clearly can’t have that.