The Post runs a silly item today fact-checking the claim by Fred Thompson that,
“our people have shed more blood for other people’s liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world.”
The Post proceeds to compare the losses of U.S. forces over the last 100 years to the losses of the Soviet Union and the British commonwealth, and they “reveal more of their bias than of Fred’s,” says Ed Morrissey at Captain’s Quarters. He goes on:
Thompson specifically mentions that we shed our blood for “other people’s liberty”, not our own. That excludes any nation that fought to defend its own territory. The Soviet Union had allied itself with Nazi Germany — right up to the moment of Hitler’s invasion of June 1941. The Soviets did not fight the Germans to liberate anyone except themselves. True, they bled massively in their defeat of the Nazis, but they didn’t do it out of love of liberty or selfless devotion to France or Britain. Their effort certainly helped the West in achieving victory on Hitler’s Western front, but that wasn’t why Joseph Stalin insisted on crushing the Nazis. Had Hitler not launched Operation Barbarossa, Stalin wouldn’t have lifted a finger for anyone’s liberty, let alone those of his own people — which he proved in the post-war Iron Curtain he imposed on Europe. Anyone who can’t figure this much out has no business writing for a professional newspaper. It’s a ludicrous, almost ghoulish argument in the face of what followed World War II in Europe. It’s worthy of Walter Duranty, the disgraced Soviet apologist of the 1930s New York Times. The rest of the piece is almost as bad. The unidentified writer uses the conquests of the Alexandrian Greeks (actually Macedonians, to be accurate) as a counter-example to Fred’s claim, as well as Napoleon. The Post seems to have some trouble distinguishing imperial acquisition from liberty, a lost distinction that explains quite a bit of what appears on the pages of its newspaper.
Jules Crittenden also picks apart the Post‘s anonymous “bean-counting” excercise:
It is distasteful to measure the sacrifices of Soviet, Commonwealth and American soldiers against each other against such evils as they faced in World War II, as the Washington Post has bizarrely chosen to do in a feature of the sort normally devoted to candidates’ campaign promises, attacks and platforms. This kind of bloody bean-counting, I’ll hazard, in no way reflects the intent of Thompson’s remark, or ultimately, its bare facts. The United States has led the world, sometimes reluctantly, usually in response to outrages, always in its undeniable self-interest, in offering up its youth for the liberation of others. For a free world. Going in with the intention of freeing nations, and walking away as soon as possible, leaving democracies in its wake, encouraging others to do the same. The United States wrote the book and set the gold standard. Europe, twice, plus a lengthy guard and rebuilding effort. Asia, repeatedly since 1941, with similar guard and reconstruction. Now the Middle East. The world is a better place as a result of the purposeful actions of the United States and the sacrifice of our soldiers to that end. All history is muddy, as the Washington Post itself seems to suggest as it delves ridiculously into the contests of empires in the time of Alexander and Napoleon. You can argue about the motives and effects of what the United States has done in any particular war or campaign. People do, and the Washington Post dabbles here. But this kind of snarking by the anonymous Claim/Fact lickspittles of the Washington Post says more about their distorted view of history and current events than it does about Thompson. And it disparages the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of American soldiers in the course of the last century.
