Iraq, the War on Terror, and the Lessons of Vietnam

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Victor Davis Hanson put a great essay on his website a few days ago. I only just got to it now, on the lessons of Vietnam. towards the end, he makes a point that I want to quote again:



Sacrifices are judged senseless by factors beyond sheer carnage. While we are, of course, tortured over the American dead of the Civil War, World War I and World War II, we nevertheless find solace that those lost ended slavery, restored the Union, stopped the kaiser, eliminated Adolf Hitler and Hideki Tojo, and made possible present-day South Korea.



On the other hand, we agonize as often over the much smaller losses of Vietnam, Beirut or Somalia precisely because we are not sure whether they led to any permanent improvement.



Those who evoke Vietnam should think carefully of the entire lesson of that tragedy. We hear daily how we once foolishly got into that chaos but rarely the lessons on how we got out.



To put this in context: The US lost about 126,000 killed, 234,000 wounded and 4500 MIA in nineteen months in WWI. It was horrible, it was awful, and Wilson et al pissed the victory away, but the threat was defeated.

(Source here)



The US lost 300,000 killed or MIA and 300,000 wounded in three and a half years of WWII. It was horrible, it was awful, and we should have confronted Stalin at the end, but we won, and made the world safe from Hitler and Naziism, Tojo and his Greater East Asia Co-prosperity sphere, and Mussolini and his fevered dreams of ressurecting to Roman Empire.

(Source here, Additional Source)



The US lost 36,516 killed and 92,134 wounded and 8176 unaccounted for thirty-seven months in Korea. It was horrible, it was awful, and and we didn't kill the Kim regime. But we won the independence of South Korea, and it's still there today.

(Source here)



The US lost 58,226 killed in Vietnam in about eight years of major operations (Source), and it was for NOTHING. We wasted their sacrifice, we wasted the sacrifices of those who were maimed or wounded. We wasted the sacrifices of those held prisoner. We wasted all those resources that could have been used for other things. Why did we waste them? Well, first off we didn't stop Johnson from escalating the war. But more importantly, we wasted them because we didn't have the political vision to finish a job that was mostly done. We wouldn't - didn't - support our allies who had staked their lives on our word with the material support we promised them in order to salve our consciences when we cut and ran. We allowed ourselves to be manipulated by those with agendas other than our national interest. We cut and ran on our allies and left them to death and disaster.



Prospective allies and enemies took note. Things didn't improve when we similarly cut and ran from Lebanon in 1983 or Somalia in 1991, didn't do anything about the Iranian embassy in 1979, and were so wussy-footed about getting our hands dirty in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Rwanda. I have liberal acquaintances that brag "we suffered no combat deaths!" there - but how many died in ethnic cleansing as a result? I value the lives of American soldiers. I may even value an American soldier's life more than that of some Bosnian thug who certainly wasn't blameless for what happened there. But we had thousands - hundreds of thousands - of mostly innocent human killed at least twice because nobody was willing to put their foot down forcefully enough to stop it. It was plain to even casual students of the situation in the former Yugoslavia about what was going to happen. If we didn't have the will to get involved to the degree necessary, we should have ignored the situation altogether. That way, at least the perpetrators of systematic slaughter would have had uncertainty of our intentions to deal with, which would have been much more help than we gave the victims with what we did. And it's not even like our forces were being used elsewhere at the time. Had we intervened forcefully from the first, the overall casualty list would have been a fraction of what it was. I love our American soldiers and sailors and marines as much as anybody. But their job, willingly accepted, is to go in harm's way when ordered. Compare this to Bosnian or Rwandan children.



To date, we have lost some 1700 killed and about 13,200 wounded in Iraq (Source). It is horrible, it is awful, and I wish the situation was otherwise. It isn't, and wishing will not make it so. Our immediate goal is a democratic Iraq, which may not sound like a lot until you consider that it is surrounded by Islamic and Ba'athist dictatorships of a repressive nature, and Wahhabist Saudi Arabia (and for all the stuff similar to this and this and this I heard before during and after the Gulf War, you might think this was more important to the left than it seems to be today). Iraq is the strategic linchpin of the whole area, as anyone with a modicum of history knows, and anybody who's bothered to haul out a map can plainly see. If Iraq becomes a stable democracy, it is a dagger pointed at the heart of many of our worst other enemies in the war on terror - the Assads in Syria, the mullahs in Iran, and the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, as has been more than adequately documented in many places, Iraq and al-Qaeda had extensive links and mutual support, and even if we cannot conclusively prove significant co-operation between them on the 9/11 attacks, 9/11 was only one shot in this war, which had been going on for a long time whether or not the majority of the American public realized it. If you take nothing else away from this essay, take this and engrave it upon your soul: The War on Terror is not about 9/11 any more than WWII was about Pearl Harbor. It is much broader than that. We cannot prevent another 9/11, many more 9/11s, things much worse than 9/11, without eradicating terrorism worldwide, all of the regimes that shelter or countenance it, the sick idealisms behind it, and the very thought that terrorism is a legitimate means of making war. It isn't, in case you were unclear on the concept. (Aiming at military targets through asymmetric warfare is not terrorism.) There is no shelter for civilization short of this goal. It is going to take a long time, and we're going to have to fight and bleed and die and kill and spend and build in more places and the world is going to have to pitch in and help if they like the idea of living in a civilized, technological society rather than scrabbling upon the ruins in a real life game of Aftermath. A state from which the human race will never recover because all of the easily gotten resources of the planet have already been used. The means of mass destruction are becoming sufficiently available - smaller, more deadly, cheaper, easier to make, conceal and use with readily available tools - that if we do not fight this war and win it now, in a generation it will be orders of magnitude more expensive, in all senses of the term (civil rights, lives, treasure, standard of living, state of mind). If we wait to fight this war, the terrorists will acquire weapons beyond their wildest current dreams, and many of us will awake one otherwise unremarkable morning not too far in the future to discover that they have used them to devastating effect. The only ones who don't awake to this discovery will be dead.



Getting back to the point: So far we've lost 1700 plus killed and about 13,200 wounded, and $300 billion dollars. We cut and run, and it will all be for nothing.. Worse than nothing, because the mullahs in Iran and Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia will make certain Iraq becomes a terrorist state of the same sort as Iran, if not worse because Iran at least pretends Hezbollah et al are not following its orders and not under its pay, and doesn't want Hezbollah able to actually get too strong. The terrorists will have more time - their most precious resource - to find funds, reorganize, recruit and come back stronger, with more devastating weapons and more dire consequences to the rest of the world. The meme of the lazy stupid americans who won't follow through on foreign wars and won't stand by our allies will get more reinforcement, and every little bit of reinforcement it gets makes it three times as hard to destroy. We are in need of every ally we can get, and this makes it harder for us to get them every time it happens. We have to fight this fight now, whether with every civilization and country in this world as our ally or all on our own (We're not on our own. We actually have more committed allies than I thought we would on 9/11, and I'll bet we get more now).



The alternative is to poke our heads back into the sand and pretend we're comfortable like these useful idiots would have us do for a few more years, until one fine day a generation from now the toll for a day is four major metropolitan areas and forty million dead instead of four airliners and a couple of buildings. All of our sacrifices and hard choices that we have to make now in order to confront this evil will pale beside what we have to do then.



For the sake of our old age, for the sake of our children, for the sake of the future of civilization and Earth and humanity, we cannot quit now, close up shop in Iraq and the War on Terror and go home. The price is simply too high.







UPDATE: After I finished this, but prior to publication, Mr Hanson puts up another article: Jihad Is Knocking: Another Episode in the War between Christendom and Islam, supporting some of what I write.



Additional update: I'm informed that one of the three sites (daily Kos) has now taken action to disavow a certain brand of conspiracy theorist.

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This page contains a single entry by Dan Melson published on July 11, 2005 10:01 AM.

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