I thought you all might find this interesting. I was recently reading an article that stated American casualties are lot worse than projected because it is only our medical technology that has reduced the number of deaths and not the actual size of the conflict. The artcle reported that to date their are roughly 16,000 (the number is now up to 17,000) wounded soldiers and if these soldiers were fighting during Vietnam, there would probably be about 5,000 more deaths. Unfortunately, statistics say what you want them to say. Here is a link of the American and coalition casualties. If you look under wounded you will see the number of soldiers who have been medevaced, meaning really needing assistance, is a little over 7000. Now I'm sure our current medical advances have saved many lives, however, maybe 5,000 is a number to sell a point. All of this of course is irrelevant. You are either for or against the war. The number of casualties is and always will be a straw man argument. I doubt anti-war protestors will say George Bush turned out to be right if we lost only 500 total U.S. Soldiers. On a different not of the same subject, to die at 18-22 is really sad. To have permanent brain damage might be even worse. I guess it is easy for me to say the numbers are not that high....
http://icasualties.org/oif/
2 comments:
It does suck to think in terms of deaths and injuries incurred in a war, on both sides. But those are the easy stats, since they are readily available.
Its harder to put a number on deaths and injuries potentially caused if we didn't go into Iraq. What I mean is that if other terror attacks the likes of 9-11 had happened since 9-11.
Now I'm making a causal relationship between our involvement in Iraq and the fact that not one major terrorist attack has happened on our soil. I do believe its only a matter of time until something 9-11 like happens again, but in the mean time nothing has.
The free flow of goods, the freedom to travel, the lack of worldwide upheaval, the basically open borders the US still has, etc. all contribute to lessening potential hardships that would be caused if the US was attacked again.
Does the gain in the US's freedom contribute to less US and worldwide death and injury overall? I dunno. But it can possibly be argued as yes if you agree with the argument that our involvement in Iraq limits this kind of US upheaval.
I mention US upheaval because what happens here affects the world (and especially us) much more than an upheaval in Iraq.
Our involvemnt in Iraq may lessen that potential (inevitable?) dirty/nuclear/airborne-disease bomb that may go off in the US, thereby keeping the total number of US citizens injured in the 17,000 range (the Iraq number stated) as opposed to 100,000's if we didn't go into Iraq.
Each has to decide if that argument makes sense. It makes sense to me.
Clearly those are well thought out points. Unfortunately since we can never have a side by side comparison of the two courses of action (going to war or not) we can only rely on what we think would have happened. That, my friends, is what makes the criticism against the war so easy. Bottomline, the only thing we can depend on is the endstate because that is measureable and tangible. WW2 is considered a success for all of the obvious reasons that have been rehashed once the war was over. Vietnam not so much for the same reason. I hope and believe fighting in the Middle East is the right thing. I wonder this endstate will ultimately be.
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