'Nam vs iraq

[Guest Astro]

Nam vs Iraq

 

 

By Evan Thomas April 19 issue - While U.S. soldiers battled to regain control of Iraqi cities, President George W. Bush was on his ranch last week in Crawford, Texas, giving a tour of the local flora and fauna to a group of conservationists. He was uncharacteristically late for his tour guests because he wanted to watch his national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, testify before the 9/11 commission. (One of the reporters covering Bush joked that the president hasn't watched anything that long that wasn't a baseball game.) The president did not have much to say about the mess in Iraq, and aides said that he had no plans to give a major speech. A White House official explained that Bush wanted to hold off and let the military-operations spokesmen do the talking, though it has not gone unnoticed by Bush's aides that the president's recent nationwide addresses have been largely panned.

 

Earlier in the week Bush did surprise reporters by appearing before them after meeting with the family of Army infantryman Chris Hill, killed by a bomb in the Iraq town of Fallujah. "We've got to stay the course and we will stay the course," said Bush, who appeared teary-eyed. Hill's father-in-law, Douglas Cope, had not been eager for the meeting with the president because, he told NEWSWEEK, he was concerned that the encounter would be "political." But Cope reported that Bush was emotional and that the president told the dead soldier's family, "I promise this job will be finished over there." Cope added: "That really was what I wanted to hear. We cannot leave this like Vietnam."

 

It's the war that never seems to go away. Perhaps we should feel comforted that Bush had time for nature tours and wasn't hunched over a map in the White House basement like Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam, picking bombing targets at 2 a.m. But, having bet his presidency on Iraq, Bush knows that if the war spins out of control, he may end up like Johnson, a political casualty of war. Bush wants to be seen as a "war president" who is decisive and acts. But now comes the real test: can he persuade the American people to make the sort of sacrifices and long-term commitments that go with being the world's sole superpower in what increasingly looks like a clash of civilizations?

 

Hard questions—and public opinion—reflect the complexities and ambiguities facing the president and his team. According to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, a majority (57 percent) of Americans still believe that going to war with Iraq was the right thing to do. But close to half (46 percent) say they are not confident that the United States will ever bring the country stability and democracy. And four in 10 Americans are very concerned that Iraq will become another Vietnam.

 

Sen. Robert Byrd is now calling for a "road map out of Iraq" and mournfully alludes to the "echoes of Vietnam." Another liberal warhorse has weighed in, too. "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam," said Sen. Edward Kennedy. "Iraq has developed into a quagmire." Measured objectively, the comparison to Vietnam is something of a stretch. That war dragged on for more than a decade and cost 50,000 lives. There were times during the Vietnam War when America was losing 500 men a week. A year in, the death total in Iraq stands at 458 soldiers killed in action. In some ways, a more accurate analogy might be to Lebanon, where Israel plunged into a power vacuum of feuding religious factions during the 1980s and was trapped in a hellhole of bombings and kidnappings. Last week Islamic extremists in Iraq began hijacking foreign civilians, including three Japanese, and appeared to capture and hold hostage several American contractors. Bush could face a full-fledged hostage crisis—and confront the sort of dilemma Jimmy Carter did in Iran in 1980.

 

And yet to most Americans, Vietnam is the recurring nightmare. To anyone over the age of about 50, last week felt a little like the end of February 1968, when the Tet offensive was raging through the cities of South Vietnam and Americans were starting to wonder if the war would ever end. A year after Iraqi civilians (with the help of U.S. Marines) toppled Saddam's statue, America suffered through its worst week of combat since the supposed end of the war, with more than 40 soldiers dead and hundreds more wounded. During Tet, a Viet Cong suicide squad penetrated the American Embassy in Saigon before being gunned down. Nothing quite that dramatic happened in Baghdad. Yet Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, had to cancel an appointment on the edge of the so-called Green Zone, where the Americans are headquartered, when security forces found an unexploded bomb possibly waiting for his arrival.

 

Though Senator Byrd got a little carried away with his prediction that Iraq would turn into a debacle of epic proportions (he recited "The Charge of the Light Brigade" on the Senate floor), and Senator Kennedy is, well, Senator Kennedy, there are, indeed, uncomfortable echoes of Vietnam in Iraq. So far they are heard mostly by the chattering classes. One significant difference between now and then—no draft—has kept down dissent in the heartland. Even so, it is possible to lay Iraq and Vietnam side by side and see disturbing parallels, as well as critical differences—both of which shed light on what must be done going forward.

 

For all the tremendous reforms by the military since Vietnam, the battlefield challenges are eerily similar. The generals are still torn between winning hearts and minds with soccer games and reconstruction projects—and going in hammer- and-tongs to obliterate the enemy. The experience of the Marines is illustrative. For most of the occupation in Iraq, the Marines regarded the U.S. Army as too heavy-handed. With its emphasis on heavy armor, the Army liked to stand back and bombard the enemy from afar with artillery and tanks. The Marines, by contrast, preferred to go in "light"—to make friends while patrolling the streets, even taking off the dark glasses that many Arabs find offensive.

 

The leathernecks are now finding, however, that the desert can be as deadly and confusing as the jungle. Because the Marines sent most of their tanks home, they found themselves badly missing their armor when Fallujah blew up last week (and even had to suffer the indignity of asking the Army to loan a few tanks). When Marines came under fire from a mosque, they had to call in an airstrike. A 500-pound bomb dropped from a jet, even a satellite-guided smart bomb, is a blunter instrument than a tank shell. Arab-language TV claimed that the bomb killed more than a score of civilians at prayer (a claim rejected by a Marine spokesman).

 

Then there is the question of adding "boots on the ground" in a distant nation where the situation is murky at best and the lure of throwing more force at the problem is hard to resist—another debate that also consumed Washington in the 1960s. "The bigger the better" is an old American reflex, but today's military is divided over whether more troops would really help—or just provide more targets for Iraqi insurgents and terrorists. Americans seem to accept that more troops may be required to pacify Iraq, but the appetite for a long stay is very limited. According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, 63 percent support increasing U.S. personnel in Iraq in response to the recent attacks on Coalition forces; 31 percent are opposed. But by 50 to 34 percent, they oppose extending the June 30 deadline for turning over power to the Iraqis, and the poll suggests that most Americans would support large troop deployments in Iraq only for another year or two.

 

And who, exactly, are our troops—the ones there and the ones who may find themselves in theater before it's all over—fighting? Just as in Vietnam, it is not clear that America understands the enemy. The Viet Cong may have been communists, but they were nationalists first—and prepared to fight however long it took to free their country. The Iraqis are Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds, age-old enemies, but there are disturbing signs that the Sunnis and Shiites were willing to bury their differences, at least for the moment, in the common cause of burying Americans.

 

Vietnam had its Best and the Brightest, brilliant but sadly wrongheaded (and hubristic) government officials who tried to convince themselves that they were on the right track long after wiser heads had detected a march of folly. Iraq may have its own cast for a best-selling tragedy.

 

The Iraq war was supposed to banish forever the ghosts of Vietnam and America's long, slow slide into paper tigerdom. By demonstrating resolve and "shock and awe," America would show the Arab world that it had not gone soft, frightened off by terrorist bombs or the fear of sending home a few body bags. At least that was the hope of President Bush and most notably the gung-ho hawks in his war cabinet, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (who also hoped that America could go in with a bang—and get out quickly). But now America finds itself entangled in a conflict that does look suspiciously like an open-ended war for vague or shifting strategic aims on behalf of an ungrateful, if not incomprehensible people.

 

Not a quagmire, not yet. But the atmospherics have a distinctly familiar feel. At a recent Washington dinner party attended by some famous names from the foreign-policy establishment and the media elite, the conversation went something like this:

 

Former Senior Administration Official: I had real doubts about going in there...

 

Echoes Around the Table: Me too, me too, but...

 

Chorus: But we have to stay the course. We can't cut and run.

 

Lone Voice (who has imbibed one more, or perhaps one less, glass of wine than the others): Why not?

 

Chorus: American credibility!

 

The exact same conversation could have been heard in a dozen Georgetown salons on almost any given weekend night from about 1966 to the winter of 1968, when the establishment decided that it was time to get out, one way or the other.

 

In their own ways, both Vietnam and Iraq were wars of choice. With Southeast Asia, Western leaders worried that the spread of communism would affect our security; with Iraq, the White House worried that the spread of the means of terrorism (from ideology to weapons) would get Americans killed, either at home or abroad. Still, neither posed an imminent threat to us, though the administration can rightly argue that the stakes for ordinary Americans are actually higher in Iraq than they were in Southeast Asia. The Viet Cong never attacked an American city. Saddam may not have had direct ties to Al Qaeda, but the jihadists are eager to fill his shoes. If Iraq is allowed to become a failed state, it is likely to create a breeding ground for terrorists who will attack the United States, if they possibly can.

 

Bush does appear from time to time with the families of dead or wounded soldiers, and he always calls for steadiness and sacrifice. Yet Bush's top advisers sometimes look like Robert McNamara, LBJ's Defense secretary, as well as the various Vietnam-era generals who were always seeing light at the end of the tunnel. There is one more disquieting similarity between then and now: the beginnings, at least, of a credibility gap.

 

All last week administration officials danced about to downplay the insurrection in terms reminiscent of what reporters called the "Five O'Clock Follies," the out-of-touch official briefings in Saigon. Early on White House spokesman Scott McClellan explained the Shiite uprising in the south as "one individual who is seeking to derail democracy and freedom for the Iraqi people." He was referring to Moqtada al-Sadr, the Islamic extremist graduate student with ties to the mullahs of Iran. Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army may number only 5,000 to 6,000 men, but then, as columnist George Will has noted, the Russian Revolution was started by a few thousand determined radicals in a country of 150 million. By Wednesday McClellan was arguing with reporters who demanded to know about a two-front war (Sunnis to the north, Shiites to the south, and unsettling signs of alliance between them). "A relatively small number of extremists elements... are trying to take advantage of the situation," the White House spokesman insisted. By Friday the terminology was "a minority of extremist elements."

 

Behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, there were testy exchanges between Secretary Rumsfeld and his interrogators on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Rumsfeld dismissed the insurrection as a "flare-up." Sen. John McCain was still simmering when he later spoke to a NEWSWEEK reporter: "For Rumsfeld to say 'there are good days and bad days' when they are taking control of cities... well, it's a little more than a flare-up, a lot more than a bad day." McCain said that Bush needs to make a nationwide speech laying out the difficulties involved and the sacrifices required—more troops, more time, more will.

 

Will the president rise to the challenge? Out in Crawford, as he prayed with his mother and father, wife and daughters over Easter weekend, Bush was undoubtedly seeking to renew his resolve. He is in the same difficult spot faced by earlier presidents who have sent troops into harm's way and could not find a way to bring them back. In America's long and violent history, its people have been ready to fight—small wars, big wars, "police actions," world wars, even, a century and a half ago, a gargantuan Civil War. But when the fighting is done, Americans like to come home and try to forget about it. It is not really in the American character to be effective imperialists. With few exceptions, Americans have been too decent and freedom-loving, as well as too nativist, impatient and inward-looking, to want to colonize or "pacify" any country for long.

 

Persuading Americans to commit abroad has been a challenge for any president. After World War II, as the cold war loomed, most Americans just "wanted to go to the movies and drink Coke," the statesman Averell Harriman said. President Harry Truman had to persuade them to spend billions to rebuild Europe and send their sons to far-off places to guard against communism. Truman achieved this in part by hyping the communist threat (or as his Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it, "by making things clearer than the truth").

 

Bush has declared an ambitious foreign policy, vowing that he will not hesitate to "pre-empt" terrorist threats. He has demonstrated a willingness to promote liberty, even by going to war. But he has been less than forthright about explaining the cost and sacrifice required by such undertakings (not unlike LBJ, who tried to have both "guns and butter" during Vietnam). Bush's opponent this November, John Kerry, has been no more willing to step up. He talks about the need for honesty and more troops, but then seems to suggest that the United Nations can bear the burden, a somewhat wishful suggestion and, in any case, too late.

 

Pacifying Iraq—as well as stopping further terrorist attacks on the United States—will require an enormous act of national will and the abandonment, or at least diminution, of some taken-for-granted freedoms. The Vietnam-era draft is gone, but as anyone in the Reserve or National Guard can attest, protecting America from the wrath of Islamic extremism requires sacrifice and stoicism. Are other Americans willing to shoulder their share?

 

In Vietnam, Johnson had most of the country with him for most of his presidency. Inspired by JFK's "bear any burden" rhetoric, Americans were willing to lose tens of thousands of their sons before they finally listened to Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman and national father figure who turned against the war in the winter of 1968, at the height of Tet.

 

Bush is a long way from such a moment. He has the virtue of taking better care of himself than LBJ, who soaked his miseries in Cutty Sark, and he has the beginnings of an argument that could sustain Americans through some bad "flare-ups" ahead. That is the need for national resolve to face a threat far greater than insurrection in Iraq—the threat of more "spectacular" terror attacks against the United States.

 

The failure, or lack, of national resolve is the real story behind the 9/11 commission hearings that have captivated many TV viewers over the past two weeks. In her long-awaited public testimony, national-security adviser Rice stirred up the talk-show hosts by admitting that on Aug. 6, 2001, a month before the terrorist attacks, the top-secret PDB—Presidential Daily Briefing, his morning menu of hot intelligence tips—was titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." Her inquisitors pounced: here was the smoking gun! Bush had been warned yet failed to act. (On Saturday, the White House declassified the PDB, which showed intelligence that Al Qaeda planned attacks on Washington and New York.)

 

The problem with this analysis is that it was probably too late to stop 9/11. Even if Bush had jumped on his desk and shouted "Do something!" it's unlikely much would have been done. As Rice pointed out, the PDB made no mention of when and where the strike might come. The bureaucracy was too sclerotic and risk-averse to really go after shadowy terrorists. Rice observed, correctly, that until there were thousands of dead Americans after 9/11, the country lacked the will to stop terrorist attacks. Neither the narrowly elected Bush nor his scandal-plagued predecessor, Bill Clinton, had the clout to rally the county and force the bureaucracy to do what needed to be done: assassinate Osama bin Laden and his associates and unleash the intelligence services to spy inside the United States.

 

So far, there is only one group of Americans who have had to bear the true burden: the servicemen and -women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their families. There is, to be sure, some restlessness in the ranks. Military Families Speak Out reported receiving so many calls and e-mails from people wishing to join their antiwar cause that they lost count. And yet there are families like the Rippetoes of Gaithersburg, Md. Capt. Russell Rippetoe, 27, was an Army Ranger killed a year ago when a bomb-laden car exploded at a checkpoint he was guarding in northwest Iraq. A pregnant woman had run from the car just moments before, asking for help. Rippetoe had moved toward her. Both he and the woman were killed; Rippetoe was the first Iraq com-bat casualty buried at Arlington cemetery.

 

Rippetoe's father, Joe, had been an Army Ranger who served two tours in Vietnam. "If my son were here today, and I wasn't disabled, we'd both put our uniforms on and say, 'Where to?' " said Rippetoe, 67. His wife, Rita, said of her son's death, "If I look at it through the eye of a mother, I am devastated." But, she added, the United States must stay the course in Iraq. "I don't think you can go into a place and start something so significant and just walk out... As family members of soldiers serving in wartime, we have to have faith. It's not blind faith, but it's a deep faith."

 

It is such faith that sustains Americans and drives them forward. We do best when we defend freedom without trampling it, defeat tyranny without becoming tyrannical, and understand what is worth the blood of our children and what is not. That is the true lesson of Vietnam.

[Guest MikeSC]

A rebuttal to that column

 

April 08, 2004, 8:26 a.m.

Senator Kennedy, Iraq Is No Vietnam

And Vietnam wasn’t what you think it was.

 

In a speech on Monday, Senator Ted Kennedy asserted that Iraq has become "George Bush's Vietnam." This charge, popular among Democrats, makes it clear that the senior gasbag from Massachusetts understands neither Iraq nor Vietnam. The upturn in violence in Iraq notwithstanding, I believe that the points I made in my November article for NRO, "No Comparison," are still valid. Indeed, Coalition forces are taking the steps I suggested. This doesn't mean I am particularly smart; it simply means that the steps I suggested constitute military common sense.

 

In "No Comparison," I observed that I could think of no instance in which guerillas alone had ever prevailed in a war. Of course they can harass Coalition troops with mortar attacks, inflict casualties in ambushes or by mining roads, shoot down a helicopter on occasion, and even mass for an attack, as they did in Ramadi on Tuesday. But these things don't win a war, unless they break the will of the stronger power.

 

For the most part, guerillas contribute to real success by serving as an auxiliary to a "force in being," a conventional military formation that concentrates the mind of the enemy. In Vietnam, the Viet Cong (VC) guerrillas operated in conjunction with the Peoples' Army of Vietnam (PAVN), a conventional force we referred to as the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).

 

The insurgents in Iraq lack anything like the coherent strategy pursued by Hanoi against the Americans and South Vietnamese. Both the VC and PAVN operated in South Vietnam under the direction of the Lao Dong party in Hanoi, which followed a strategy called dau tranh (struggle). Dau tranh consisted of two operational elements: dau tranh vu trang (armed struggle) and dau tranh chinh tri (political struggle), which were envisioned as a hammer and anvil or pincers that crush the enemy. Armed dau tranh had a strategy "for regular forces" and another for "protracted conflict." Regular-force strategy included both high-tech and limited offensive warfare; protracted conflict included both Maoist and neo-revolutionary guerrilla warfare. Political dau tranh included dich van (action among the enemy), binh van (action among the military), and dan van (action among the people).

 

From 1959, when the Lao Dong party in Hanoi decided to launch dau tranh in the south, until 1965, political dau tranh prevailed. Then it shifted to armed dau tranh until mid-1968. Two more full cycles followed: political dau tranh from 1969 to 1971, armed dau tranh from 1972 to 1973, political dau tranh from 1974 to 1975, and a hurried shift to armed dau tranh as Saigon collapsed in 1975.

 

In other words, contrary to the belief of those who invoke comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq, the former was not primarily a guerrilla war. Unlike what is going on in Iraq today, there were major conventional aspects of the war. The strategic thrust that culminated in the battle of Ia Drang in 1965 (portrayed in the Mel Gibson movie, We Were Soldiers), was part of armed dau tranh regular-force strategy, as was the 1972 Easter Offensive, and the final push in the spring of 1975. But after Ia Drang until 1967, armed dau tranh seems to have followed a protracted war rather than regular-force strategy. In fact, to defeat dau tranh both arms of the pincer had to be blunted. Unfortunately while the United States able to defeat armed dau tranh, it never dealt successfully with political dau tranh, which led ultimately to defeat.

 

In "No Comparison" I also observed that guerrillas require a secure sanctuary to operate. Sometimes remote, inhospitable terrain, e.g. jungles and mountains, provides such sanctuary. Sometimes sympathetic or weak states, e.g. Laos and Cambodia in the case of Vietnam and Syria and Iran in the case of Iraq, provide the necessary sanctuary. Of course, the conventional wisdom holds that the most important sanctuary for guerrillas comes from a sympathetic population that, in the famous formulation of Mao, provides the "water" in which the guerrilla "fish" may safely swim.

 

But with time and perseverance, an army can always defeat guerrillas acting alone, especially if it can optimize its force structure for counter-guerrilla operations. Thus, I believe my original point still holds: since there is no enemy conventional force in being, anti-Coalition forces can harass the U.S. forces and inflict casualties, but they cannot prevail unless we permit them to.

 

Coalition forces are now doing what is necessary to defeat the guerrillas. They are organizing themselves optimally to fight the guerrillas. They are isolating the Baathist regions. They are developing good intelligence and acting on it quickly. In Fallujah, the Marines have begun an operation reminiscent of the "country fair" operations in Vietnam: isolating a guerrilla stronghold, preventing anyone from entering or leaving, and them systematically identifying, capturing, or killing the trapped guerrillas. This is a useful method of eliminating the guerrillas' internal sanctuary.

 

But we also have to secure the borders between Iraq and its neighbors, especially Iran and Syria. Recent operations are focusing on this requirement. For instance, Robert Alt, a frequent contributor to NRO who is currently in Iraq, sent this CENTCOM press release on Wednesday describing the operations around Ar Ramadi and Fallujah:

 

Operations from the Syrian border to the Baghdad suburbs have resulted in the capture or death of a significant number of anti-Iraqi Forces and foreign terrorists. To the west, a combination of the ongoing efforts in the Husaybah and Al Qa'im regions are undercutting the ability of the anti-Iraqi Forces to import foreign fighters, cash and equipment. Heightened operations to the east, to include the cordon around Fallujah and combat operations in other major cities in the Al Anbar Province, are drawing out anti-Iraqi Forces.

As I concluded in November, Iraq is not like Vietnam. There is no PAVN to prevent Coalition forces from optimizing for guerrilla war. There is no anti-Coalition strategy akin to Hanoi's dau tranh. There is no external sanctuary of the scope enjoyed by Hanoi during the Vietnam War. If we isolate the guerrillas, they will die on the vine. And we can. There is nothing new about fighting guerrillas. We have waged successful counter-guerrilla campaigns before. The Marines have a book on guerrilla war: The Small Wars Manual, first compiled in 1940 and recently reissued.

 

Perhaps pacifying the Sunni triangle, disbanding the Shia militias, and arresting the rabble-rousing Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, are steps that should have been taken earlier. The failure to do was no doubt the result of undue optimism about the postwar situation or America's desire to be loved rather than feared.

 

But it is too late for "shoulda, coulda, woulda." Machiavelli reminds us that the reverse is true: it is better to be feared than loved. Indeed, numerous experts on the Middle East point out that the Iraqis may have interpreted U.S. restraint as weakness. I believe that the new approach indicates that the Coalition is getting serious about extirpating the guerrillas. The Marines in Iraq have adhered to a simple principle: "no better friend, no worse enemy." That's a pretty good guide to action for the Coalition as a whole.

http://nationalreview.com/owens/owens200404080826.asp

[NoCalMike 0]

IMO, it is safe to say that the Iraq situation is a mess, while at the same time it is not approaching the levels of Vietnam by a longshot.

[Justice 0]

IMO, it is safe to say that the Iraq situation is a mess, while at the same time it is not approaching the levels of Vietnam by a longshot.

I'd say that's a pretty fair assessment. People who continually compare it to Vietnam have no idea what the fuck Vietnam truly was.

[syxx2001 0]

Even I know Iraq is nowhere near Vietnam. Iraq is like a school yard fight compared to a concert riot.

[Guest MikeSC]

IMO, it is safe to say that the Iraq situation is a mess, while at the same time it is not approaching the levels of Vietnam by a longshot.

I'd say that's a pretty fair assessment. People who continually compare it to Vietnam have no idea what the fuck Vietnam truly was.

Indeed. We don't have a completely inept and corrupt group that we're forced to support. We don't have the gov't saying that certain targets are off-limits.

-=Mike

[Some Guy 0]

IMO, it is safe to say that the Iraq situation is a mess, while at the same time it is not approaching the levels of Vietnam by a longshot.

I agree with the latter, but disagree with the former. Iraq is far from a mess. It is certainly messy at times but no one said this would be an in and out, quick fix job. The President said from the very begining of the War on Terrorism that this would be a long term battle fought on many fronts. NoCal, I'm not refering to to you sepcifically but the left wing remind me of some Red Sox fans. The team loses the first game of the season and Pedro doesn't hit 93 mph with his fastball and the world is about to end, the next day Schilling dominates and the Sox win but that is ignored by some in favor of talking about what they perceive to be Pedro's poor performance (6 ip and 2 earned runs). What we have in Iraq is a concentraion on the bad "innings" and ignoring the good things that are coming from it (Libia cowtowing on WMDs, Saddam being out of power, etc... It took us a month or so to elect our current president and while the dispute went on the stock market dropped and the ecomony took another hit, because of "uncertainty". Well, Iraq is that times roughly 60 million. People are frantic because they don't know what's going to happen next, that's an understandable human emotion. People are trying to grab power by force and terror, that is also to be expected. American soldiers are dying, to think that wouldn't happen is painfully naive and to think that we should leave because the inevitable happen is even moreso. We've hit some bumps in the road, largely because we didn't "nuke the place and pave it smoothly into a parking lot" as some of the less rational of us had thought we would.

[Highland 0]

I don't see any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, and I know this sound callous, but a few hundred casualties is, while unfortunate, not a disaster. If all it takes is about 500 deaths over the course for the war in Iraq to be called a disaster, then I'd hate to see a real disaster, like Vietnam or WWII where literally thousands of soldiers were killed.

[Vyce 0]

Exactly Naibus.

 

If 500 deaths are all that it takes to bowl Americans over, then we really HAVE become a paper-tiger.

[Guest MikeSC]

Exactly Naibus.

 

If 500 deaths are all that it takes to bowl Americans over, then we really HAVE become a paper-tiger.

Some radio show I heard mentioned a poll (I don't know from whom, so I can't verify it) that reportedly asked people how many deaths would be acceptable in the Iraq mission before it started.

 

Military people surveyed had a mean score of 6,000

U.S citizens had a mean score of 29,000.

 

It's not the deaths causing upset. It's certain groups discussing how badly this is going, how bad we are for doing this, and how this is actually a disaster that is fueling the fire of protest.

 

All this for political points at the expense of the troops.

-=Mike

[Highland 0]

29,000? Even I'm surprised by that number, especially with the relative ease wars have been won and the light casualties compared to only a generation ago. It's funny: Hollywood portrayed Vietnam as hell (which it was), but CNN and company completely sanitize the Gulf and Iraq Wars and gives us some green tracers flickering across the screen like some video game.

Edited April 13, 2004 by Naibus

[Hogan Made Wrestling 0]

The comparison to Lebanon in the first article was reasonably realistic. Now, Iraq isn't even close to that bad yet, but Lebanon is about the worst-case scenario for what could happen in Iraq if things spiral out of control. At any rate, it will never be a Vietnam.

[Guest hunger4unger]

I don't see any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, and I know this sound callous, but a few hundred casualties is, while unfortunate, not a disaster. If all it takes is about 500 deaths over the course for the war in Iraq to be called a disaster, then I'd hate to see a real disaster, like Vietnam or WWII where literally thousands of soldiers were killed.

Don't forget the 10,000 + Iraqi's that have been killed..there again they don't count I guess.

 

Before the situation in Iraq is resolved the coalition forces death toll is going ot be MUCH higher than 500.

[Guest Salacious Crumb]

Well if you want to go with non-fighting deaths Nam was in the millions considering the genocide that happened after the U.S. left.

[Justice 0]

I don't see any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, and I know this sound callous, but a few hundred casualties is, while unfortunate, not a disaster. If all it takes is about 500 deaths over the course for the war in Iraq to be called a disaster, then I'd hate to see a real disaster, like Vietnam or WWII where literally thousands of soldiers were killed.

Don't forget the 10,000 + Iraqi's that have been killed..there again they don't count I guess.

 

Before the situation in Iraq is resolved the coalition forces death toll is going ot be MUCH higher than 500.

Uh, over a million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War. I mean, seriously, there is no comparision for it. I mean, when we get into civi casualties, your case gets even worse because of the disparity in numbers.

[snuffbox 0]

I don't see any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, and I know this sound callous, but a few hundred casualties is, while unfortunate, not a disaster. If all it takes is about 500 deaths over the course for the war in Iraq to be called a disaster, then I'd hate to see a real disaster, like Vietnam or WWII where literally thousands of soldiers were killed.

Don't forget the 10,000 + Iraqi's that have been killed..there again they don't count I guess.

 

Before the situation in Iraq is resolved the coalition forces death toll is going ot be MUCH higher than 500.

Uh, over a million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War. I mean, seriously, there is no comparision for it. I mean, when we get into civi casualties, your case gets even worse because of the disparity in numbers.

You do realize that the number of Vietnam casualties accounts for some 15 years of combat right?

 

There is a difference between a year of occupation in Iraq and 15 in Vietnam. Its a really big difference too. This arguement of the similarities here is moot....15 and 1 are too far apart to consider total numbers.

 

After dismissing this silly aruguement, you are left with the serious similarities/differences to discuss.

[Some Guy 0]

I don't see any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, and I know this sound callous, but a few hundred casualties is, while unfortunate, not a disaster. If all it takes is about 500 deaths over the course for the war in Iraq to be called a disaster, then I'd hate to see a real disaster, like Vietnam or WWII where literally thousands of soldiers were killed.

Don't forget the 10,000 + Iraqi's that have been killed..there again they don't count I guess.

 

Before the situation in Iraq is resolved the coalition forces death toll is going ot be MUCH higher than 500.

Uh, over a million Vietnamese died in the Vietnam War. I mean, seriously, there is no comparision for it. I mean, when we get into civi casualties, your case gets even worse because of the disparity in numbers.

You do realize that the number of Vietnam casualties accounts for some 15 years of combat right?

 

There is a difference between a year of occupation in Iraq and 15 in Vietnam. Its a really big difference too. This arguement of the similarities here is moot....15 and 1 are too far apart to consider total numbers.

 

After dismissing this silly aruguement, you are left with the serious similarities/differences to discuss.

Going the 10,000 Iraqis that have supposedly been killed (no one knows the true number) and the 500 or so Coalition soldiers who have died that brings us to approx. 10,500 total deaths in one year. Multiplied by 15, the number ofyears you claim we occupied Vietnam that brings us to 157,500 deaths if this was was to contnue for that long. A far cry from the million number that was thrown out for the Vietnam War. While we're at lets look at American deaths in Vietnam, it was about 56,000 or so over the 12 or so years we were there and fighting. Once again using 500 as the number of Coalition deaths in the first year of the Iraqi War we'll multiple 500 by 12 and get 6,000.

 

There is a huge difference between Iraq and Vietnam. First of all we were fighting more people and there were about 2.6 million troops sent to Nam. Secondly we crippled the Iraqis ability to make war within a few months and never were able/allowed to do the same to the Vietnamese Communists. All the Iraqis are left with is a handful of reasonably decenlty armed terrorists and militia men. God, some times it seems like the baby boomers want to relive the righteous indignation they had in their youth and the youth of America is jealous becase they don't have their own Vietnam and want it really, really badly. You know that "big Lie" theory? If you say something enough times it eventualy becomes accepted as the truth. I think that must be the goal of some of these "the world is falling around us and only France can save us" nutcases.

[Guest hunger4unger]

I wasn't suggesting that the Iraq invasion has produced or likely to produce more deaths than Vietnam - I was pointing out the amount of civilian deaths thus far and making the point that whilst the casualty toll isn't on Vietnam levels a significant number of people have died and needlessly so.

[Guest MikeSC]

I wasn't suggesting that the Iraq invasion has produced or likely to produce more deaths than Vietnam - I was pointing out the amount of civilian deaths thus far and making the point that whilst the casualty toll isn't on Vietnam levels a significant number of people have died and needlessly so.

I agree. The terrorists should stop before they kill more.

-=Mike

[Guest hunger4unger]

I wasn't suggesting that the Iraq invasion has produced or likely to produce more deaths than Vietnam - I was pointing out the amount of civilian deaths thus far and making the point that whilst the casualty toll isn't on Vietnam levels a significant number of people have died and needlessly so.

I agree. The terrorists should stop before they kill more.

-=Mike

Coalition forces have killed way more Iraqi civilians (non terrorsists, regular people) than terrorists or the Iraqi resistance have killed troops. It was only last week that 400 civilians were killed. With accidents like that no wonder more and more Iraqi's are turning against the coalition forces.

 

To clarify, not everyone who wants coalition troops to leave Iraq are terrorists.

[Guest Salacious Crumb]

I wasn't suggesting that the Iraq invasion has produced or likely to produce more deaths than Vietnam - I was pointing out the amount of civilian deaths thus far and making the point that whilst the casualty toll isn't on Vietnam levels a significant number of people have died and needlessly so.

I agree. The terrorists should stop before they kill more.

-=Mike

Coalition forces have killed way more Iraqi civilians (non terrorsists, regular people) than terrorists or the Iraqi resistance have killed troops. It was only last week that 400 civilians were killed. With accidents like that no wonder more and more Iraqi's are turning against the coalition forces.

 

To clarify, not everyone who wants coalition troops to leave Iraq are terrorists.

Actually this is a lot like the riots in Cincy a few years ago. The media was hyping and hyping how the black community in Cincy had had enough of the police and this and that. Blah Blah. And you know what? 95% of the rioters were from out of state.

[Guest MikeSC]

I wasn't suggesting that the Iraq invasion has produced or likely to produce more deaths than Vietnam - I was pointing out the amount of civilian deaths thus far and making the point that whilst the casualty toll isn't on Vietnam levels a significant number of people have died and needlessly so.

I agree. The terrorists should stop before they kill more.

-=Mike

Coalition forces have killed way more Iraqi civilians (non terrorsists, regular people) than terrorists or the Iraqi resistance have killed troops. It was only last week that 400 civilians were killed. With accidents like that no wonder more and more Iraqi's are turning against the coalition forces.

 

To clarify, not everyone who wants coalition troops to leave Iraq are terrorists.

Well, just to give you a quick primer on basic law, when terrorists attack and innocents are killed in the retaliation, liability is given to the terrorists.

 

Innocents wouldn't have died if the terrorists a) hadn't attacked and b) didn't hide in the populace.

-=Mike