Go to the original article to read an excellent post. I did, and then I felt I had to do battle with the neo-cons and freepers who haunt the comment board:
TalkLeft: A Vietnam Vet Speaks Out on Today’s Iraq Deaths
The lesson of Vietnam is this: you cannot outlast insurgents fighting in their own country. To paraphrase the Doritos ad, frag all you want, they’ll make more.
Body counts in Iraq are not even on par with Vietnam, where 200 dead Americans a mouth was a slow month.
BurgerBoy, you conveniently list the thousands of US dead/year in Nam for 1966-68 to prove some point about how the current 62 deaths per month (or 84/month over the last six months, or 95/month over the last three months, see these stats) is somehow a good thing.
However, you ignore the fact that the total casualties from the first eight years of our Vietnam involvement totaled 401 honorable servicemen, a number we eclipsed in our first nine months of our Iraquagmire. There were 1,863 casualties in 1965, which was around the time the public started thinking, “hmm, maybe sending our boys 10,000 miles overseas to die in a jungle for some ‘domino theory’ isn’t a good idea…”
We have learned from Vietnam.
We shall see. If the American public wises up and forces our government to abandon this Iraquagmire before the death toll hits five digits, I’ll agree with you.
Steve Everyday-Patriot, you are so right, I am a foolish child traitor. I forgot that it was my patriotic duty to blindly obey our fearless leader. I forgot it was our destiny to rid Saddam of his WMD’s, er… liberate the Iraqi people, um… rescue them from the hands of brutal torturers, uh… bring the fight to al those al Qaeda terrorists in league with Saddam, ah… install an American oil-company and military-base friendly puppet regime in the Middle East (whoops, how did that get in there?) er… I’m sorry, I was distracted; I was on the phone with Barbara Steisand while I was watching Jane Fonda in “Barbarella”, can you remind me why we’re in Iraq again? My TV’s on the fritz and I can’t get FOX News.
Those Marines on that Helo could have crashed in Texas and died and not one of you asses would have even thought twice about them. You don’t honor our military’s sacrifices in preserving your rights, you use their deaths to make a political statement. The Left laments the deaths of Americans they despise? Yeah Right! You disgust me and all true American Patriots.
Again, you’re so right, Steve. I just don’t honor the military’s sacrifices like our fearless leader does every time he attends a military funeral or our defense secretary when he was signing all those death notices by hand or our Pentagon that allows the photos of those flag-draped coffins to stand as silent tribute to all their sacrifices. As a foolish child traitor, of course I hold nothing but hatred and disgust for our American fighting men. Why, I don’t even have a tattered American flag or magnetic yellow ribbon on my 8 MPG SUV!
I wonder what your position, and others who regular comment on this blog, would be regarding Iraq if Clinton was President.
Poker Player (aka Jim), my position on Iraq would be the same as it was when Clinton was president, since neither then nor now would there have been a decent reason to invade Iraq. I think President George H.W. Bush wrote it best in his memoirs:
Trying to eliminate Saddam … would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible … We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq …there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
Sorry for the long post. I need to go back to hating America some more.
