A good rebuttal to the "not as many casualties as Vietnam, Korea, WWII..." meme

Written by: Martha Sullivan on Jan 23, 2007 11:55 AM EST

I found the following Letter to the Editor in yesterday's NC Times to be very useful, in having an empirically-based response to the right-wing meme that our military casualties in Iraq aren't as bad as Vietnam, Korea, etc.  THANKS to Sorab Ghandi of Escondido.

THANKS also to John-Erik Nilsson for his excellent LTE on the same page, referring to Maj. Smedley Butler's "War is a Racket." and talking about today's war profiteers.  You can read his letter at the same weblink listed following (scroll down for both letters).

I had to send this around before I go into overdrive to get myself out of the house by 2p today, enroute to DC for the peace march this weekend. 

Martha Sullivan

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace -- business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."

--Franklin Delano Roosevelt Oct 31, 1936

JOIN in "MANDATE FOR PEACE" Actions on Jan. 27th: unitedforpeace.org

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/01/22/opinion/letters/12107141307.txt

It's all a matter of perspective

J. Howard Crews (Letters, Jan. 6) is upset because over 3,000 Americans have already been killed in an ill-conceived, immoral war in Iraq. But William Barbour (Letters, Jan. 17) says that many more Americans were killed in an ill-conceived, immoral war in Vietnam, so the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq is no big deal. For him, it is all a matter of perspective.

Here is my perspective. The total U.S. military death toll in Iraq is greater than the combined total of all military actions since Vietnam. This includes Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo and Afghanistan. The number of Americans killed in action in Iraq also exceeds the number killed in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War or the Spanish-American War.

With about 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and 3,000 fatalities, our troop/fatality ratio is about 47. For the Vietnam War, with about 8.75 million troops and 58,168 fatalities, the troop/fatality ratio was about 150. A comparable figure for WWII was 142.

So, the Iraq war is about three times as deadly (for Americans) as either the Vietnam War or the Second World War. It is all a matter of perspective, I suppose.

Sorab Ghandi

Escondido

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