A Matter Of Perspective

[Ken King (Premo)]

I have been stumbling over this for several months and wasn’t quite sure whether or not I should even broach this topic, but with the rhetoric coming from the media and those participating in the ongoing campaign for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency, I have decided to pitch in my two cents. My desire in doing this is not to criticize or downplay the loss of lives that we have suffered in the Iraq campaign. My thoughts are nothing more then an attempt to place these losses into perspective.

Every day we hear from many how President Bush has placed us in a quagmire and that the Iraq war is his Vietnam. First, I, for one, don’t see this as a quagmire. We were in Vietnam for right around 20 years and have only been in Iraq for just about 10 months.

In Vietnam we walked away in what I would say was a defeat and what we accomplished was nothing more then the waste of right around 60,000 military personnel. This is not a slam against the brave men and women who served in that conflict as they served in what I would say were the highest standards of any military. This comment is directed against those administrations that placed our people there and the members of Congress that did nothing to stop the waste when it became clear that we had no defendable reason for being there or any hope of success (the quagmire).

We went in there with less of a reason, in my mind, then why we are currently in Iraq. The accepted belief as to why we were in Vietnam was to stop the spread of that Red Menace – Communism. We feared the continued spread along the southern peninsula of Asia and the presumed threat that accompanied those beliefs. The reason that we are in Iraq, and it is important to note that this was supported by Congressional acts during two separate administrations, was to remove this tyrannical regime and its leader. Whether anyone cares to believe it or not Hussein was a threat to our security and if left alone he and his cohorts would have continued to work on this goal of causing grave damage to our nation and way of life. We knew that he was killing and had killed any of his citizens (and their families) that dared express any view other than his. We knew that he regularly and ruthlessly brutalized or outright killed those that had differing religious beliefs or were comprised of a different ethnic heritage. We knew that he possessed and had used weapons of mass destruction, both against Iran and against his own people. This vermin was the Hitler of our day and age.

During the Vietnam conflict we averaged 3,000 deaths a year. To date (the latest count given by the media) we have lost 510 Americans in Iraq, at this rate we will achieve an annual death tally of 612. While any death in combat is one too many, and I assure you that I firmly believe each and every one is a great and tragic loss, we are in no way close to the devastation of what took place in Vietnam and anyone stating that the two are similar is seeking nothing more then to sensationalize the losses for their own personal agenda.

To further place these tragic losses into perspective lets look at the mortality data for our military over the past two decades. From 1980 to 2002 the United States military lost 35,227 members to death: 20,609 were classified as accidents, 345 were due to hostile action, 1,898 were due to homicide, 6,436 were due to illness, 4,969 were self inflicted, 426 were due to terrorist acts, and the remaining 643 are undetermined or pending determination.

Taking the above into consideration, it is obvious to me that we have sacrificed many more for a hell of a lot less. Already in Iraq we have brought about the fall of the regime and the capture of its head. We are slowly but surely helping these people to obtain a right that we so routinely take for granted - freedom. And, again in my mind, we are making the world and America safer in the process.

I anticipate that we will have a presence in this country for several years to come and we still have a ways to go before we squelch all of those that were loyal to the regime and Hussein that continue to inflict losses upon our military. But this needs to be kept in perspective also. After WWII was won we maintained a presence in Germany and Japan and to date still do (almost 60 years). After the Korean conflict was declared over we still, to date, maintain a presence there (50 years). It’s reasonable to expect that we will be in Iraq for a while also; as this is a very hot region as we all know (and I am not talking temperature either).

Maybe instead of continuously stating that we shouldn’t be there our media, and many of these Presidential hopefuls, should just thank the stars that we have men and women willing to do what is necessary when our Nation calls upon them. While our losses are significant they are nothing like what they attempt to make them out to be. One positive note is that at least I haven’t seen any of the things I remember from the late 60s and early 70s when our service personnel were being spat upon when they returned home by the citizens that that they were fighting and dying to protect.

The casualty data utilized above, unless otherwise indicated, was obtained from http://web1.whs.osd.mil/mmid/casualty/castop.htm

[Tonio]

Originally posted by Ken King
In Vietnam we walked away in what I would say was a defeat and what we accomplished was nothing more then the waste of right around 60,000 military personnel. This is not a slam against the brave men and women who served in that conflict as they served in what I would say were the highest standards of any military. This comment is directed against those administrations that placed our people there and the members of Congress that did nothing to stop the waste when it became clear that we had no defendable reason for being there or any hope of success (the quagmire).

Good column, Ken. Vietnam is a great example of political considerations interfering with military judgments. I happen to believe that George H.W. Bush was wrong when he claimed that we fought Vietnam "with our hands tied behind our backs." It was actually the reverse--the generals were urging caution in Southeast Asia, but the administrations who placed our people in Vietnam didn't listen to them. I suspect that the generals wanted to avoid the kind of guerilla war that we fought in the Philippines right after the Spanish-American War.

Sometimes I wonder if Eisenhower and Kennedy could have done more to keep Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro from siding with the Soviets. Those alliances seemed like they were based less on ideology and more on expediency and on bitterness against the US.

I would like to know your basis for considering the Viet Nam war to have been a waste of 60,000 American lives? Do you have some mystical insight into what would have happened in Southeast Asia and other parts of the World if the Communists had siezed Viet Nam unapposed? It's easy to view the World now and say that the fall of Communism and rise of free-market economies were due to things like the Soviet Union going broke, or the rise of unions in Poland, but what would have happened if the Soviets had siezed control of all Southeast Asia? Would there have been a World War III nuclear exchange if the Soviets had then targeted Japan? I don't see those 60,000 lives lost as a waste. They were lost to further our national objectives, and while there may have been no trophy ceremony for the US after the war, there's no telling what life would be like, or even if life would still exist, on the World today if those folks hadn't fought and died. It's hard to call that a waste.

The reason I'm glad we went into Iraq are two-fold: first, the thought of Hussein taking over the Middle East and holding our economic interests hostage is enough for me to want to take him out. Second, how many lives have been lost, and billions of dollars wasted, trying to bring peace to the region by letting a bunch of despots try to get their acts together? I think that the US should sit on the Middle East just as we sat on Europe after WWII. Europe's never known such unity and prosperity, and abscence of war, in it's history. We can do the same for the Middle East, but we'll have to stay there.

[Ken King (Premo)]

Bruzilla,

My basis is that we lost these lives for no appreciable gain in a war that wasn’t really necessary and that all of Vietnam fell under communist control regardless of our intervention. What do you call it when you expend a great deal of effort and lives for no gain whatsoever, a justifiable loss?

You might not see these deaths as a waste, but go ask any of the families of those that perished and see what their take is on it. The only National goal was to stop the spread of communism, as it was perceived by some in power as a significant threat, not that it actually was. It wasn’t like why we went into Iraq; those reasons were clearly defined by Congress and just.

Again, as I stated in the article this isn’t about those that perished, they served well, they did what was asked of them, but what was asked was in my mind nothing worthy of sacrificing their lives for as compared to the lives being lost in Iraq and our reasons for being there.