The tears of a mother are not something you compare to others.
He once said 17 × 6 was 112. Now he wants Americans to compare four months of deaths in Iran with wars that lasted decades.
In 2006, Howard Stern gave Donald Trump and his children what should have been an easy arithmetic question:
What is 17 multiplied by 6?
The correct answer is 102.
Trump eventually insisted the answer was 112. His children did not rescue him. You can watch the exchange here: Donald Trump and his children try to multiply 17 × 6 on the Howard Stern Show. (YouTube)
Nearly twenty years later, Trump’s arithmetic has not improved. The numbers are larger now, and instead of embarrassment, the price of getting them wrong is measured in American lives.
A graphic circulating in defense of Trump’s Iran war lists the deaths from several American wars:
Afghanistan: 2,459 Americans killed over 20 years.
Iraq: 4,492 over nine years.
Vietnam: 58,220 over more than nineteen years.
Korea: 36,574 over slightly more than three years.
Iran: 18 over four months.
Trump’s defenders apparently want Americans to look at the number 18, compare it with the thousands killed in earlier wars, and conclude that Trump’s war has been relatively harmless.
That is not mathematics.
That is hiding the calendar.
Using the graphic’s own four-month figure, 18 deaths equals 4.5 American service members killed per month. Continue that rate for twenty years—the length of the Afghanistan war—and the projected death toll becomes:
1,080 AMERICAN DEAD
That would still be fewer than Afghanistan’s final total, but it would not be the tiny number the graphic invites readers to see. More importantly, those deaths are occurring without an American ground invasion of Iran. Reuters reports that the war has already killed 18 U.S. service members and wounded more than 450 since it began in February. (Reuters)
The more honest comparison is not with Vietnam, Korea, Iraq or Afghanistan, where large American ground forces fought for years. It is with other limited American air and naval campaigns.
NATO’s 1999 Kosovo air campaign lasted 78 days and ended without a single Allied combat fatality, although two American Army aviators died in a training crash in Albania. (UNT Digital Library)
American operations over Libya in 2011 lasted from March through October. They were conducted without committing American ground troops and resulted in no U.S. casualties, according to a RAND history of the campaign. (RAND Corporation)
Operation El Dorado Canyon, the 1986 American airstrike against Libya, cost the lives of two American airmen when their F-111 was lost. (Air Force History)
Operation Praying Mantis, the one-day 1988 naval battle with Iran, killed two Marines when their helicopter crashed while pursuing Iranian boats. (Naval History and Heritage Command)
None of those conflicts is identical to the present war. Iran is larger, better armed, and capable of striking American bases throughout the Middle East. That is precisely why Americans deserve honest numbers rather than a political graphic comparing four months with twenty years.
Eighteen deaths do not become insignificant because Vietnam killed 58,220.
Eighteen flag-draped coffins do not become lighter because Afghanistan produced thousands more.
And eighteen families will not be comforted by being told that Trump’s number is smaller than another president’s number.
The Howard Stern multiplication problem was funny because nothing depended on Trump getting the answer right. He could guess 112, laugh, and go home.
This time, he is counting the dead.
And the question is no longer whether Donald Trump can multiply 17 × 6.
The question is:
IF 18 DEAD IN FOUR MONTHS IS HIS IDEA OF SUCCESS, HOW MANY WILL HE CALL SUCCESS NEXT YEAR?
Trump’s chart on the link below
Donald Trump torched as ‘disgusting little man’ over ‘new low’ about dead troops