Large Numbers and Liberal Lies
I like to stick to basics in teaching my children. I believe in phonics in reading and rote memorization of multiplication tables in math, and -- much underestimated -- we keep a globe handy for geographical questions and often just get it out to look at the world to try to understand where stuff is and how big things are.
These basics seem lost on much of the liberal media. A case in point is the current flap over 380 tons of high explosives that have gone missing in Iraq.
First, the evidence now shows that the HE went missing before Americans ever got to the facility. NBC, in this regard, has done itself momentarily proud by taking out a fraudulent story foisted on us in the last week of the campaign by CBS and the Old York Times. Good for them; shame on CBS and the Times.
Second, and more importantly in my opinion, there was no story to begin with. Four hundred tons sounds like a lot -- unless you can think with numbers. When you also learn that we've already captured and destroyed a thousand times that much in Iraqi explosives, the missing explosives don't seem like that big a deal. But you wouldn't have learned that extra fact -- the hundreds of thousands of tons we've captured and destroyed -- from CBS and the Times. That's how demogoguery works... you state a fact that you present as a scandal without giving any context that would show to any reasonable person that it's a non-story.
Third, and most important for my present point, the premise of these stories, and the complaints about the insurgency generally, is that the coalition forces could have secured every possible location in Iraq, captured every single bad guy, and rounded up every pound of ordinance immediately as part of, presumably, the perfect "plan" the omnicompetent John Kerry would have devised.
That's just silly as a matter of basic geography. Iraq is a country about the size of California... about 430,000 square kilometers. A square kilometer for those of the liberal media who don't understand such things, is 1000 meters by 1000 meters, or about 1 million square meters, or 100 hectares. That's about 40 acres. If we assigned every one of the 150,000 or so coalition troops who were part of the invasion force to search and secure an area of Iraq, they would each have had to search and secure around 100 acres. In my area of Milwaukee, that would be around 500 houses. One guy. Do the freaking math.
The notion of the perfect plan that could have accounted with perfection for every contingency and effortlessly secured all high explosives in a country that was basically just a big ammo dump -- not to mention taking time out to secure the supposedly missing priceless Iraqi Museum artifacts that the Left was exercised about in the spring of 2003 -- is just silly. Are we a silly people? Will we buy this stuff? I hope not. We'll see in a week.
UPDATE: Oak Leaf is a must-read on Polipundit beating up Kerry's use of this story.
These basics seem lost on much of the liberal media. A case in point is the current flap over 380 tons of high explosives that have gone missing in Iraq.
First, the evidence now shows that the HE went missing before Americans ever got to the facility. NBC, in this regard, has done itself momentarily proud by taking out a fraudulent story foisted on us in the last week of the campaign by CBS and the Old York Times. Good for them; shame on CBS and the Times.
Second, and more importantly in my opinion, there was no story to begin with. Four hundred tons sounds like a lot -- unless you can think with numbers. When you also learn that we've already captured and destroyed a thousand times that much in Iraqi explosives, the missing explosives don't seem like that big a deal. But you wouldn't have learned that extra fact -- the hundreds of thousands of tons we've captured and destroyed -- from CBS and the Times. That's how demogoguery works... you state a fact that you present as a scandal without giving any context that would show to any reasonable person that it's a non-story.
Third, and most important for my present point, the premise of these stories, and the complaints about the insurgency generally, is that the coalition forces could have secured every possible location in Iraq, captured every single bad guy, and rounded up every pound of ordinance immediately as part of, presumably, the perfect "plan" the omnicompetent John Kerry would have devised.
That's just silly as a matter of basic geography. Iraq is a country about the size of California... about 430,000 square kilometers. A square kilometer for those of the liberal media who don't understand such things, is 1000 meters by 1000 meters, or about 1 million square meters, or 100 hectares. That's about 40 acres. If we assigned every one of the 150,000 or so coalition troops who were part of the invasion force to search and secure an area of Iraq, they would each have had to search and secure around 100 acres. In my area of Milwaukee, that would be around 500 houses. One guy. Do the freaking math.
The notion of the perfect plan that could have accounted with perfection for every contingency and effortlessly secured all high explosives in a country that was basically just a big ammo dump -- not to mention taking time out to secure the supposedly missing priceless Iraqi Museum artifacts that the Left was exercised about in the spring of 2003 -- is just silly. Are we a silly people? Will we buy this stuff? I hope not. We'll see in a week.
UPDATE: Oak Leaf is a must-read on Polipundit beating up Kerry's use of this story.
posted by PDB at 10:44 AM
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