Brian Gifford, from UC-Berkeley (oh lovely), writes in the Washington Post about how we are doomed to fail in Iraq because of the casualties, which will inevitably cause the home front Americans to withdraw support for the reconstruction, just like the Vietnam War. One slight problem; he quotes casualty figures from Iraq relative to World War II and Vietnam. He must have thought these would somehow reinforce his argument. Instead, they make him look stupid, paranoid, and alarmist over nothing. U.S. casualties are lighter in Iraq than in any comparable war we've ever fought. Even if you factor out all the advances made in technology, tactics, and medicine we've made since Vietnam in warfare, casualties would still be quite low in comparison to World War II or Vietnam. Don't get me wrong, every single U.S. serviceman killed in Iraq or Afghanistan is a tragic loss, and regrettable, but the price we are paying to stamp out terrorism and completely reshape the Middle East is relatively light compared to previous wars. During World War II, when the U.S. was engaged in a huge, global conflict, with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, against an enemy that represented PURE EVIL, the price of victory was 405,000 dead American boys. That's 300 dead EVERY DAY for four years. We've lost a little over 1,400 in both Iraq and Afghanistan in three years, a little over one a day. "More than 1,200 U.S. military personnel have died in Iraq so far. In the face of rising casualties, polls taken throughout the election season revealed the public’s discomfort with our progress in Iraq but gave little indication of weakening support for the mission. This ambivalence about the war’s human costs reflects perhaps both a belief in the cause for which our troops are fighting and a perception that in the aggregate their sacrifices — while always tragic on an individual level — are historically light. A glance at earlier wars seemingly confirms this latter sentiment. Compared with the more than 405,000 American personnel killed in World War II and the 58,000 killed in Vietnam, Iraq hardly seems like a war at all. But focusing on how few military deaths we’ve suffered conceals the difficulty of the mission and the determination of the forces arrayed against the American presence in Iraq. A closer look at these deaths — 1,232 as I write — reveals a real rate of manpower attrition that raises questions about our ability to sustain our presence there in the long run. To better understand the difficulty of the fighting in Iraq, consider not just the current body count but the combat intensity of previous wars. During World War II, the United States lost an average of 300 military personnel per day. The daily figure in Vietnam was about 15. Compared with two per day so far in Iraq, the daily grinds of those earlier conflicts were worse than what our forces are currently experiencing. On the other hand, improved body armor, field medical procedures and medevac capabilities are allowing wounded soldiers to survive injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars. In World War II there were 1.7 wounded for every fatality, and 2.6 in Vietnam; in Iraq the ratio of wounded to killed is 7.6. This means that if our wounded today had the same chances of survival as their fathers did in Vietnam, we would probably now have more than 3,500 deaths in the Iraq war."
:thumb: Good Post! Going back to your first paragraph, that won't happen because Bush is still CIC and he does not base the hard decisions on which way the public wind is blowing.
The price we paid in Afghanistan is worth it because it was directly against the 9/11 terrorists. The price we are paying in Iraq gains us little. The very notion that our mission is to "completely reshape the middle east" is far-fetched. Where has the US ever claimed that as a goal? I thought we were there to keep Saddams nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. Why should we spend American lives and money on the unreachable goal of reshaping the middle east? Why should we care about the ragheads that much? Let them stew in their own kettle. The US should be focusing on fighting the covert terrorists cells that are our enemy, not trying to defeat and "reshape" every dictatorship in the middle east, a hopeless task. Why take on new enemies that offer no significant threat to us? Denial is the first stage in coping with a tragedy. Next will come anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. A better comparison would be between the Iraq war and the Kosovo War, our last military conflict. The US defeated Yugoslavia in a matter of weeks using high-technology robotics and overwhelming airpower. All without a single American casualty. No ground troops were sent in to occupy a hostile citizenry, yet the enemy surrendered the military struggle, submitted to diplomatic initiatives, and Milosovich is now in jail and being tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. There are smarter ways for America to deal with dictators by using our overwheming technological and airpower resources than to try to "reshape" a hostile country with too-few grunts on the ground in Humvees getting killed every day with the security situation no better than it was a year ago. What constitutes victory in this war? We defeated their military and sacked the capital in 21 days, so technically the war has already been won. Just how do we get out of this occupation now? We're in a guerrilla war between natives on one side who hate us and are trying to kill our soldiers and our native "friends" are militarily incompetent and collaborate with the enemy. Sound familiar? Just like in Vietnam, the US will not actually be defeated, but we are going to take daily casualties for years without anything to show for it, dissent at home will continue to grow, and eventually we will just leave because it is in our best interests to do so. Just like we did in Vietnam, only it took eight years and 58,000 casualties before everybody agreed it was time to quit. We would be fools to take eight years to make the same decision here. There is no democracy anywhere in the Arab world. A Jeffersonian democracy is just not going to break out in the middle east. Japan and Germany accepted military defeat and cooperated with the US in the rebuilding of their country. We should be very proud of what we did to turn those occupied nations into the steady democracies that they are today. But these Iraqis are not cooperating with us, they looted their own country, are fighting all our efforts to fix their problems, and they are enmeshed in a religious civil war that has been going on for centuries and involves Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well. We can't win by taking either side nor can we take them all on and have them unite against us. People will continue to ask: What are we really gaining by taking these casualties and wasting these billions? You can't just say, "Well, World War II was worse." It doesn't address the problem.
