Well the cakewalk meme that we’ve been assured the administration didn’t push at all before the invasion, probably got some people confused about war and casualties. Some folk are still waiting for actual pie!
Why is the 1000 deaths figure important? God knows. I’ve been seeing a lot of mention of this 1000 deaths figure lately (especially on this board) as people opposed to Bush wait breathlessly for the 1000th US soldier to die…as if this is some kind of magical barrier we have crossed into. Why 1000th death is important probably has more to do with partisan politics than anything else…because any fool could follow the numbers and realize we’d get close to 1000 deaths near the election. If we had of lost 1990 troops by July/August they would be breathlessly waiting for the 2000th soldier killed. Its sad really.
From a purely military perspective it HAS been a ‘cakewalk’. We strolled into Iraq with little or no problem, and have managed to fight it out with a heated insurgency and various terrorist type acts with…1000 dead (of course, it hasn’t been a ‘cakewalk’ for the Iraqi’s by any means…but thats a different story that isn’t usually brought up). Thats an unbelievably small number of casualties in comparison to what we’ve done. We aren’t losing by any stretch of the imagination…unless you mean losing the political will to continue the fight.
I never have understood this focus on how ‘badly’ the war is going…its not going badly at all. Our casualties have been miniscule compared to other wars/occupations of this magnitude, and the constant harping on it makes those doing so look like fools. The war was wrong…why can’t that be enough? It was stupid for us to go there when we didn’t need too, when our priorities should have been to go after the terrorist organizations directly and not get bogged down in an occupation that is tieing up a large percentage of our military. It has been costly in resources (over 100 billion and still climbing). THOSE are REAL issues. The fact that we lost our 1000th soldier is not.
-XT
You’ve got an idea there. Maybe we shouldn’t.
Well that was really the point, wasn’t it? 
Unless some WMD’s are found…
The 1000 is important because they are not being killed by a massive armed force, but by small groups of insurgents.
Like Vietnam. I know there is some degree of difference, but their ‘resistance’ was compromised of lightly armed part time combatants.
Thanks to Ms. Smith and Xtisme for making the points that I would have made, had I made my first post been longer.
Relative to what we accomplished in the March/April war, it was a cakewalk. Several Iraqi divisions were simply rolled over, with miniscule US casualties.
The unintended consequence of Saddam’s vaunted Republican Guards and other special units, including their version of the SS, never really being able to wage successful battle is that they survived the war. And now they have come out to fight, or if not to fight, at least assassinate government workers, kidnap journalists, execute laborers, plant roadside bombs, etc. I can just imagine what will happen if they actually take control of the country. We will have scenes reminiscent of Stalin (Saddam’s hero) or even Cambodia, in my opinion.
Realize: they are not fighting the American occupation; they are fighting the emergence of a stable, democratic Iraq. If they really wanted us out, they would stop fighting for six months, and Bush or Kerry would be able to withdraw the troops. Down side of that, of course, is that a stable, democratic Iraq might emerge.
They soon realized that the real war was being fought in the American media. The battle is over American resolve to see this through. I remember before the war, I asked those who were opposed because of expected high casualties, how many deaths in their opinion would be an acceptable number to win this war. I often heard 5,000 – 1/10 of what we lost in Viet Nam, about 1/7 of what we lost in Korea – about the number of KIA’s on D-Day alone in WWII.
Is 5,000 dead out of a military of about 2,000,000 unacceptable? If one believes in the war, meaning, the ramifications of victory or the consequences of defeat? Yes. If one does not believe in the war, the first death was too many.
Side note: “rising death count” is a politically charged phrase. Until the dead start getting resurrected, the death count is not going to go backwards.
I meant that 5,000 dead in order to win the war in Iraq is acceptable to me.
I gave up hope that people would become skeptical and cease swallowing and then mouthing bullshit propaganda years ago.
I “Realize” you assert this, but you’d have to do more than assert for me to be convinced.
According to this recent poll (thanks SimonX) 92% of Iraqi’s think the US are occupiers (as opposed to liberators or peacekeepers) and 55% would feel safer if they left immediately.
There is an insurgency against the US and its installed interim government, 92% of Iraqi’s think the US forces are “occupiers” in the perjorative sense, and yet you don’t think they are fighting the occupation? You are dreaming, pal.
As I’ve said before, there isn’t an occupying power in history that when faced with a nationalist insurgency hasn’t sought to use the propaganda machinery at their disposal to paint the insurgents as unpopular thugs, isolated madmen, terrorists, drug dealers, child molesters, religious fanatics, communists, backsliders, crooks, prisoners, murderers and etc so as to suggest they have no legitimacy, knowing that a signicant percentage of their home electorate will buy whatever crap they tell them (not mentioning any names).
That might be a logical thing for them to do, assuming they believe what the present US administration says its intentions and motivations are. A large proportion of even the US population doesn’t do that. The US administration lied about why it went into the war (WMD’s, remember them?): it’d be a rare Iraqi insurgent who believed the US adminstration’s comments about when they are going to leave.
No, rightly or wrongly I’d be pretty sure that the insurgents would have the view that the only way the US forces will leave is in body bags and that it would be nothing short of a lack of patriotism on their part not to assist the US forces in that regard.
You may be right about what Iraqis think and feel.
My question about the insurgents: if they are trying to rid themselves of the American occupiers, why are they murdering so many Iraqi civil servants?
Please look here
I think those interested should read the whole poll carefully. For example, 43% of Iraqis said that they thought that the Coalition forces were occupiers when the ar began, so 57% is not a huge increase.
Most would feel unsafe in the Coalition left now.
And – most get their info regarding the Coalition forces from what they here, not from personal experience.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-04-28-gallup-iraq-findings.htm
Three answers:
Firstly for the same reason insurgents have always killed civil servants in the regime set up by occupiers: because they are collaborators
Secondly because of factions, infighting, power struggles etc. This does not mean that a main driving force behind the insurgency isn’t nationalism: it’s just that infighting is always an adjunct to violent nationalist insurgency.
Thirdly, to a certain extent for the same reason US bombs and shells kill children: as collateral damage.
I’m not sure these figures add up, but regardless of that, so what? What’s your point? That lots of Iraqis thought the US were occupiers, and now more of them (over 90%) do? How does that impact on the point I’ve made?
Iraq is not a place conducive to feeling safe now or for the forseeable future. Period. That’s what comes through loud and clear in the statistics. 55% think US forces make Iraq less safe, over 50% think they’d still feel unsafe if the US left. None of this impacts on my point.
So?
It’s not enough that they’re dead, you had to hit them?
That’s nice, and if there were even some vague hint that the 1000 we’ve already lost had achieved any progress whatsoever towards winning this war, I might be tempted to agree with you. Sadly, the CPA muffed its yearlong mission so badly that we face a multipronged insurgency from Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, and the prospect of having to retake many cities from a people that has turned against its ‘liberators’.
1000 dead, and political incompetence has reduced us to the point of needing a do-over. That’s not good enough.
And how many direct relatives would you be willing to include in that number?
Ahem. Evil Captor already did that joke.
FoxNews site didn’t put the 1k milestone as a front topic ? I checked in and didn’t see the 1000 deaths getting its own headline.
If some are willing to play the statistics game, why not go for a full-court press?
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How many combat non-military US deaths have occurred in Iraq?
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How many non-combat US military deaths have occurred in Iraq?
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How many non-combat non-military US deaths have occurred in Iraq?
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How many combat US military casualties have occurred in Iraq?
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How many non-combat US military casualties have occurred in Iraq?
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How many combat US non-military casualties have occurred in Iraq?
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How many non-combat US non-military casualties have occurred in Iraq?
Why the additional questions? Well, what about all the US contractors in Iraq? News reports place them at anywhere between 20,000 and 50,000 in Iraq. Surely, quite a few of them have died or suffered casualties that are not reflected in the published stats. FWIW, where does the death of Nick Berg fit in?
I’m not going to even address the Iraqi dead and wounded here.
I will try to do this without getting too maudlin or sentimental or angry.
Now, some 16 months after the invasion, we have more than 1000 soldiers, sailors, aircrew and Marines dead in Iraq from hostile fire and other causes and more than 7000 wounded (thank God for modern body armor and armored vehicles). This must to be an occasion to mourn for each one of those lost lives. Since many of them wore the uniforms we once wore and carried on their shoulders the unit patches we once carried the mourning is a little deeper for some of us even we did not personally know them. One thousand lives lost. That is nearly one-third the population of my little town. While it is a soldier’s duty to place himself at risk, to allow his life and body to be used as an expendable instrument of national policy, the loss of these lives is excessively sad simply because reasonable minds can rationally argue that their sacrifice and the nation’s sacrifice of them was premised on false and questionable grounds that were willfully accepted by the very people who had a duty to the nation and those young service members to use them only for the best and most pressing of reasons.
It is hard to post this without being partisan. It seems to me that the President and his advisors have to deal with this unnecessary lose of life and they will have to deal with the burden of all these dead and injured. When ever the President, the Vice-president, the Secretary of Defense appear before a sanitized audience maybe the specter of these mutilated and bleeding young warriors will spring into the minds of some of the listeners and they will ask if all this was really necessary to the defense of the nation.