Topic: CNSNews.com
A Dec. 31 CNSNews.com article by Edwin Mora continues CNS' selective obsession with counting U.S. troop fatalities by declaring "In the past year, U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan were killed at a rate of about one every 18 hours."
As before, no comparison is made with military casualties in Iraq. Mora makes a big deal out of the 496 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan, ignoring that troop deaths in Iraq far outstripped that number.
According to iCasualties, U.S. troop deaths in Iraq exceeded the 2010 Afghanistan number in four separate years: 849 in 2004, 846 in 2005, 822 in 2006, and 904 in 2007. The total of 1,357 U.S. deaths in Afghanistan is also far outweighed by the 4,432 U.S. deaths in Iraq.
Indeed, the word "Iraq" appears only once in Mora's article, and that was only in noting that President Obama said during the 2008 presidential campaign that "President Bush had wrongly shifted the focus in the war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq."
Mora wrote a Jan. 3 follow-up claiming that "Eighty-two percent of the U.S. casualties in Afghanistan in 2010 took place in Afghan provinces adjacent to the Pakistan border," but his numbers aren't consistent. This time, Mora claims that 497 U.S. troops died last year and 1,358 overall in Afghanistan. He doesn't explain the discrepancy between the two articles.
