November 4, 2003: Conservative Columnist Says Losses in Iraq Far Outweighed by Number of Americans Killed in Auto Accidents

William F. Buckley. [Source: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters]In his weekly column “On the Right,” syndicated columnist William F. Buckley writes of the recent shootdown of an American Chinook helicopter near Fallujah (see November 2, 2003). Buckley writes that although the losses are undoubtedly devastating to the families of the slain soldiers, “one does endure such losses. Consider Jackie Kennedy [widow of the assassinated President Kennedy]. She survived it; so will the mothers, fathers and spouses of the victims of the Fallujah missile. What is one shade less than absolutely predictable is whether our foreign policy will survive that anti-helicopter missile.” Buckley compares the Fallujah attacks to the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968, a military offensive mounted by the North Vietnamese that was a military failure but a public relations success that pushed the US irrevocably towards what Buckley calls “the retreat of 1972 and the surrender of 1975.” The US cannot let such attacks drive them precipitously from Iraq, Buckley writes. “[T]he idea is that US aircraft should be safe wherever they fly, and we are in Iraq because of its infestation.” Iraq still reels from the effects of what Buckley calls “a Stalinist dictatorship,” and is still plagued by insurgents and rebels who want to reintroduce some form of post-Hussein dictatorship. Besides, Buckley writes, one must consider the losses in Iraq in perspective. “Our casualties since the beginning of the war have reached 400. Last year, 16,000 Americans were murdered within the boundaries of the United States. That same year, 43,000 Americans were killed in automobile accidents.” He concludes: “If all surveillance of the Iraqi theater were to end today, and begin again when Iraq is a settled state, governed by its own people making their way toward freedom, it is inconceivable that the losses sustained during the hiatus would appear to Americans as disproportionate to the ends achieved. What’s needed is to nurture that moral perspective that the idiot children of Fallujah were deprived of.” [Universal Press Syndicate, 11/4/2003]