Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "And Carl, you can hide behind relatively recent definitions such as "operations other than war", but that does not necessarily apply to situations where war was waged against a regime and resistance continues. OOTW includes peace-keeping and humanitarian assistance missions as well."
On the one hand, the neocons want to compare the occupation in Iraq with the occupation of Germany. But there is no disagreement that war in Germany ended in May, 1945. This would suggest that the American occupation of Germany was not "war", but was, in fact, peacekeeping. This is consistent with my interpretation of the situation in Iraq, which the neocons (wrongly) claim is no worse than the postwar German situation.
Now what does "postwar" mean? It means "after the war", which means that what goes on after the war is not war. If the German occupation was "war", then the postwar period didn't end in 1945. God knows when it ended, LOL. But the fact is that to the troops involved, it sure felt like peace, LOL.
On the other hand, you want to define a situation which clearly, by your own admission above "OOTW includes peace-keeping ...", defines what happens after a war is over as "peace".
The situation in Korea was "war" in that there were clear lines between the two sides. Vietnam didn't quite meet the definition of "war" because there were no front lines.
If you'll review the facts you will discover that Korea had little of the behind the lines sabotage and bombing that went on in Vietnam and is going on now in Iraq. When we dropped bombs on North Vietnam, that was a form of limited air war, but the simple fact is that our operations in South Vietnam did not meet the US military definition of "war".
It's true that to the people getting shot at, it all feels like "war", but that doesn't mean that it is war. As you yourself pointed out, police also suffer deaths due to violence, and they probably feel like they're at war too. But to have a "war", as defined by the US military, you need to have an enemy defined by a government and all that.
The whole conservative critique of Vietnam, as compared to Korea, is that we did not fight hard enough. In the sense that we fought Vietnam as if it were an internal policing action, while we fought Korea as a war, is an indication of where our military strengths lie.
As a nation, in our overseas conflicts we are very strong in war, but very weak in peace. (Or "military operations other than war", if you want to call it that instead of "peace".)
Re: your link: handlebars.org
The above is a link from outside the .mil universe. The article was written by a civilian, with no more connection to the military than you have. Stick to .mil sources and you will suffer less confusion.
Your other link is better, but it suffers from the recent administration decision to define the "war on terrorism" as a "war". So in the "posture statement", they define the war on terrorism to be "war", but they do this only by rejecting the military policy of only a few months ago, which instead defined this as "MOOTW". Redefining a word so that it means what you want to is no more logical and moral for the Bush administration now, than it was for Clinton when he defined "sex" to not include certain sexual acts.
In fact, their posture statement includes a definition of MOOTW (see page 113), but it does not use the term anywhere else in the 118 page document. This is a sign that the military, in particular the civilian controlled BS from Rumsfeld, just went through and redefined "war" to include what they wanted it to mean, and didn't quite manage to scrub the distinguishing differences that prevented our military from getting stuck in peace-keeping police actions like Vietnam:
defenselink.mil
As far as operational differences, it's pretty clear. If Hawkmoon can compare the casualty rate to that of US peace officers, the character of the conflict is that of a peace keeping operation. If instead, the casualty rates are more like those of what we all agree is a war, then we can call it a war. The historical fact is that the US military has been pretty good at war, but not so good at peacekeeping.
Along this line, it's useful to remember what the casualty rates were in Vietnam (which was mostly a peacekeeping attempt) and Korea (which was mostly a war):
Vietnam US combat deaths, by year:
1964: 137
1965: 1,369
1966: 5,008
1967: 9,378
1968: 14,592
1969: 9,414
1970: 4,221
1971: 1,380
1972: 300
For Korea, I don't have precise figures, but these are close enough to see the differences with Vietnam:
Korea US combat deaths, by year:
1950: 14,000
1951: 10,000
1952: 6,000
Yes, both conflicts involved a lot of our guys getting killed, but notice that in Korea, most of the dying was done in the early stages. That's the clue that Korea was a war. In a war, you take your punishment early and hard in the hope that you will win, and will have a peace that doesn't involve a lot of sacrifice. In Vietnam, by contrast, we went into the conflict already owning the ground so there were no lines of conflict. This made the situation from a linear fight over ground, like Korea, which the US fights very well at, into a bilinear fight over the hearts and minds of the people in an area, a type of conflict which the US does not fight well.
The invasion of Iraq was a war, but it was rather brief, and Bush truthfully declared it over on May 1st. But as I said before the war, the invasion would be the easy part. As with Vietnam (and in contrast to Korea), the difficult part is the peace-keeping.
In other words, the first part of our conflict did match the Korea data, that of a sharp conflict with the casualties compressed into a short period of time. But the neoconservative problem is that the conflict did not end there. Instead of being welcomed by grateful Koreans, we were instead shot at by angry Iraqis. That has resulted in a death toll that continues to stagger on, in the Vietnam mode.
Right now the casualties are far below the peak levels of the Vietnam war, but that's simply because we have far fewer troops in Iraq than we had at the peak of Vietnam. In fact, it is clear that the deaths that we will suffer in Iraq for the occupation part of the conflict will be larger than the 137 KIA in Vietnam in 1964.
This is the problem with Iraq, not that it is as bad as the Vietnam war, but instead that it is acting like it will eventually get that way.
The basic problem is not that the number killed in Iraq is so large. It isn't. The problem is that there is no exit strategy. When we finally get Saddam, unlike WW2 in europe, the Iraq conflict will continue. There is no enemy capital to occupy because just like South Vietnam, we have already occupied all the capitals that we're going to. No, the problem with Iraq is that it is a peace keeping mission like Vietnam, not a war like Korea.
-- Carl
P.S. References:
geocities.com
rand.org
Also see:
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