Hi twfowler; Re: "Many of the deaths after the initial stages of the Vietnam War where caused by NVA regulars. ..."
Nice point! Uh, you neglected to list all the reasons that Iraq is WORSE than Vietnam. Here they are:
(a) We have no equivalent of the South Vietnamese Army taking casualties for us.
(b) The Moslem religion historically supports martyrdom.
(c) There is no Catholic run government in Iraq to sympathize with us.
(d) We're a sea power. Our logistics in South Vietnam were fairly simple because very little of the country is farther than 50 miles from the ocean. With Iraq, very little is within that distance of the ocean or a navigable river.
(e) We're already having to deal with "volunteers" from other Arab countries. But the other Arab countries amount to something like 150 million people, while North Vietnam was only about 20 or 30 million.
There are also other reasons why Iraq is less difficult than Vietnam. For example, in Vietnam, we had another major power directly supporting the other side. So far, we don't have that in Iraq.
Re: "Do you seriously think there will be about 30,000 American deaths in Iraq from 2005 to 2007?"
No, I expect us to bug out long before 2007.
Re: "If not what's the point of your chart?"
Just showing a comparison. The way we got involved in Vietnam was the same way that you boil a live frog. The American public won't sit still for a boiling in Iraq because too many of them remember the experience in Vietnam. And the way we got into Vietnam didn't have anywhere near the long list of screwups that have accompanied this war. For example, it didn't become public knowledge that there was a possibility that there was no "Tonkin Gulf Incident" didn't become public knowledge until years after the incident, but that there were no WMDs became evident within days of the start of the war.
By the way, do you have any idea what the NVA / VC ratio in Vietnam was? What I'd really like would be a breakdown for the total casualties, in South Vietnam, for the two forces, preferably by year. The sources I've found just add their totals together.
-- Carl |
