So Sad

UPI on today's downing of a Chinook:

Minutes later an ambulance pulls up to the chopper with a very badly wounded young soldier inside. We happened to have on board this mission a visiting Air Force Flight Surgeon. He and the medic quickly start working on the wounded man, whose head wound is clearly serious. Within minutes, the doctor's performing CPR and the medic is trying to clear breathing tubes, which have filled with blood. This soldier is barely alive.

Under normal circumstances, the team would have flown to the 28 CSH Hospital in Baghdad, where there's a state-of-the-art medical facility for U.S. troops. But a Chinook filled with wounded had run out of fuel while landing there just moments before, leaving the landing pad unable to take any new helicopters until the crippled chopper was moved.

The soldier is dying. The flight commander, Capt. James Hannam, calls a surgical team at a field station near his airbase and decides to drop him there. As the medical team pulls the wounded soldier out of our chopper, his pulse stops, but he continues to breathe somewhat on his own.

We still don't know if he made it.

According to our honorable SecDef [Update: full transcript now available.]:

In a long, hard war, we're going to have tragic days, as this is. But they're necessary. They're part of a war that's difficult and complicated.

From a Logic 101 POV, Rummy's right: war (sufficient condition) implies tragic days (necessary condition). Alas, he starts with the wrong premise: the war he and his gang are waging.

I saw him on "This Week" (who doesn't provide free, online transcripts). He mentioned that winning the "war on terror" meant more than having the best military. Again, he's right. But he went on to observe we must infiltrate the religious schools that are churning out jihadists. Again, a faulty premise. Instead, why don't we address the root causes of terror, the causes that inspire these madrasas to create killers?

So the sufficient premise we should be starting from is "constructive engagement". The necessary conclusion will then be "peace". When war is your premise, tragedy is the only result.

ntodd  ¶ 3:21 PM