A big sacrifice for a small country

The stunned outrage that Norwegians feel over the deaths of four of their servicemen in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan yesterday is about what you would expect in the United States if 260 or so American soldiers were killed in a single attack. That's the equivalent scale of loss when population is taken into account. And that makes yesterday's explosion a bigger event, for Norway, than the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed 241 American marines, leading then-President Reagan to pull all U.S. troops out of war-torn Lebanon.