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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aladin who wrote (115717)	9/26/2003 11:42:29 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi John Cavanaugh; Re: "There have been over 400 US soldiers killed by hostile fire in the line of duty near the DMZ with North Korea since the 'ending' of major hostilities." (a) The actual totals, since February 1, 1955, are around 98, as of 1996, and that number is obtained only by including our guys who were killed when they strayed into North Korean territory. The vast majority of those were back in the 60s, when we were doing a big time war in Vietnam against the Communists, and could expect Korea to be a little wilder. Six of the post-war deaths occurred between June 1974 and December 1994. koreanwar-educator.org (b) The real figure (for 48 years) is cheaper than what Iraq has already soaked up in less than 0.5 years. So Iraq is killing US soldiers at a rate of about 100x Korea. (c) The 98 figure includes a lot of our guys who were killed on the North Korean side of the border. The simple fact is that Korea is not eating our military alive. Iraq is. Our soldiers are not writing to their congresspersons about their dangerous duty in Korea. They are about Iraq. Nobody is running around asking the US public if they support keeping our soldiers in Korea because it is quite safe there. By contrast, everyone is asking the public what they think about Iraq. The fact that you are forced to compare Iraq to Korea is an indication of what a serious problem Iraq truly is. Re: "This is spread over a number of years, and amounts to 6-8 a year recently but was much higher closer to the conflict. This is simply untrue. No basis in reality. For that matter, the 400 you're talking about, divided by 50 years, is around 8 per year. So your claim that there are "6-8 a year recently", is incompatible with your other two claims that "was much higher closer to the conflict", and that approximately "400 US soldiers killed". There have been plenty of accidental deaths in Korea, that's the same as with every place that our military stays, including the US itself. Nor am I in favor of continuing to keep soldiers in Korea, unless the Koreans pay for it, and beg us to keep them there. But the simple fact is that duty in Korea is not especially dangerous. Duty in Iraq, by contrast, is dangerous as hell. In another echo to Vietnam, the military just started bringing troops back to the US midway through their Iraq tours for 2 weeks of R&R. None of this has applied to Korea for a very long time, because our soldiers are not taking significant casualties in Korea. The above link, which is one that is asking the military to recognize the continuing Korean casualties, says that only 6 of our guys were killed by hostile fire in the 20 years preceding the report. -- Carl