Stardate 20031231.1849

(On Screen): This is an amazingly unsurprising news item:

Citizen Soldiers Dying More in Iraq

Citizen Soldiers of Army National Guard and Reserve Suffering Increasing Share of Deaths in Iraq

Citizen soldiers of the Army National Guard and Army Reserve are suffering an increasing share of American military deaths in Iraq, according to Pentagon statistics.

Of the 39 deaths in December for which the Pentagon has released the victim's name, 10 or about 26 percent were citizen soldiers, according to an Associated Press review of Pentagon reports. That is up from 14 percent in November, the deadliest month of the war with 81 American deaths.

First off, the headline is bizarre. Did someone change the rules so that Americans serving in the regular Army ceased to be citizens? That's certainly what this seems to imply, given that they are using the term Citizen Soldier to refer to members of the National Guard and the US Army Reserves.

But it's also a non-story. As a result of the use of NG and Reserve formations to relieve regular Army units in Iraq, they have made up an increasingly large percentage of our forces in Iraq. All other things being equal, it's hardly surprising that they are also suffering a rising percentage of the casualties.

That doesn't make it good, of course. I certainly wish none of our soldiers were being hurt at all, but I know that isn't possible unless we pull out of Iraq entirely, which I have always contended would in the long run lead to even more Americans dying.

However, there's been an ongoing drone of news reports attempting to evoke the specter of the much dreaded (or much hoped for) "quagmire" by emphasizing American casualties in Iraq. The only problem has been that they've ceased to have the effect it was hoped they'd have, because they all seemed to have the same headline and story. So this reporter has found, he thinks, a different way to package the same story. By concentrating on a statistically-inevitable change in the mix of American casualties, he hopes to once again pound the "Let's pull out" drum.

And if you think that this is paranoid raving on my part, and that the press has no such bias, read this (and my response to it).

Update: I must say that this is an even more bizarre headline: "New Year is cancelled". Apparently we're going to stay in 2003 rather than to move into 2004.