Over the summer, it wasn’t unusual to hear pundits predict that worsening conditions in Iraq would change the dynamics of the Bush-Kerry race. High American casualties, we were told, would throw the campaigns, especially Bush’s, off-message and bump campaign news from the headlines. It seems the opposite is now true.
Consider Saturday’s tragedies.
Nine U.S. Marines were killed and nine wounded in violence on Saturday, the deadliest day for American forces in Iraq in almost six months. At least 25 Iraqi civilians were killed by a car bomb, an insurgent rocket and what news reports called reckless fire by Iraqi security forces.
Eight of the Marine deaths and the nine injuries occurred when a car bomb detonated next to a truck southwest of Baghdad, Maj. Clark Watson of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force told the Associated Press. The attack took place in Anbar province, which extends west from the capital to the borders of Syria and Jordan. A ninth Marine was also killed Saturday, officials, who gave no other details, said.
The single deadliest day for our troops in months, and one of the worst of the year, but yet, the story seems to have been quickly forgotten. I couldn’t find references to the killings on the Sunday morning shows, there are no op-eds in the major dailies today asking what the nine Marine casualties “will mean” for Bush and Kerry, and the public’s attention has already shifted away from the tragedies, if it ever shifted towards them in the first place.
Iraq hasn’t bumped the campaign from the public’s attention; it’s the other way around. As I wrote about over a month ago, deadly days in Iraq are the “new normal” and hardly seem shocking anymore. That, in and of itself, is a tragedy.