Re: OT: America Anesthetized

John Peerybingle wrote: Some stuff.

Here is what he left out.
LZ

HNN
History News Network Because the Past is the Present, and the Future too.

Thomas C. Reeves
More Perspective on Iraq

With civil war threatening in Iraq, a struggle that could doom our efforts there and elsewhere in the Middle East, a pair of valuable articles in the March, 2006 issue of American Enterprise offer additional perspective that should encourage all well-wishers.

Casualties

1. The Union Army in the American Civil War suffered a 29% casualty rate.
2. During World War Two, 7 % of our G.I.s were killed or wounded.
3. In the Korean War, the casualty rate for American soldiers was 8%
4. In Iraq, the casualty rate to date has been 4%

Author Karl Zinsmeister observes of the current conflict, “Those losses are lower than we suffered in nine previous wars. The Civil War, Mexican War, War of Independence, Korean War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and Philippine War were all half-again or more as costly as Iraq has been.”

Mounting Losses

While no one wishes to minimize the tragedy of American casualties, the fact remains that the number of troops wounded in action is down from 7,920 in 2004 to 5,961 in 2005. The estimated number of terrorists killed or detained in Iraq has increased from 24,470 in 2004 to 25,500 in 2005.

Morale

1. Re-enlistment rates among Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan are 6% above targets. Over a third of Army re-enlistments occur in combat zones.
2. Color makes no difference in our Armed Forces, and blacks and Hispanics are enlisting and re-enlisting along with whites. Some 75% of the soldiers killed in Iraq have been whites. The socioeconomic level of members of the Armed Forces broadly matches the wider American population. Red State participation, however, exceeds that of the Blue States, reflecting yet another dimension of the Culture War.
3. The Army has met or exceeded its recruiting goals every month since June, 2005.
4. In a public opinion poll released in December, 2005 by Oxford Research International, 71% of Iraqis said their life was “good,” compared to 29% who said “bad.” A majority said that life was better for them than under Saddam Hussein. Fully 70 % reported that “my family’s economic situation is good,” and 78% rated their new freedom of speech as “good.” By a margin of 5 to 1, Iraqis expected to their lives to be even better a year from now. A November, 2005 poll by Oxford Research revealed that 64% favor a democratic form of government for their nation.
5. Some 8 million Iraqis voted for an interim government in January, 2005, almost 10 million later voted for a constitution, and 11 million voted in December, 2005 for the first permanent parliament. This in a country with just 14 million adults.
6. In surveys conducted in 2005 in 17 nations by an organization chaired by Madeleine Albright, support for terrorism has “declined dramatically,” support for Osama bin Laden has plummeted, and positive views of the United States are rising, up 23% in Indonesia, 15 points in Lebanon, and 16 points in Jordan.

Slow Progress

How long did it take to heal the wounds of the American Civil War and bring southern states fully back into the Union? How long was our occupation of the Philippines, and how costly? After World War II, we had to occupy Japan for seven years, and we were in West Germany for four years. It can take time to conquer, heal, and reconstruct. A guerilla war, such as we are facing today, is painful and difficult, requiring considerable stamina and endurance.

1. Attacks waged against oil and gas facilities in Iraq dropped from 146 in 2004 to 101 in 2005.
2. Iraqi per capital national income rose more than 30% between 2002 and 2005, and average household income rose 60% from February, 2004 to November, 2005.
3. There are now 44 Iraqi commercial television stations and 72 commercial radio stations (there were none of either before 2003). Cell phone ownership has leaped from 6% in early 2004 to over 65% today. Fully 86% of Iraqi households have satellite TV!
4. The ranks of Iraqi security forces surpassed the number of American troops in March, 2005. The total now exceeds 200,000 men, soldiers, police, and guards who will increasingly take over the security of their nation. As of December, 2005, a quarter of all military operations were carried out exclusively by Iraqi units. Since the January, 2005 elections, not a single Iraq army unit has been defeated in battle.
5. Progress has, of course, been severely hindered by terrorists, committed to killing anyone at any time to rid the region of Western values. Our efforts have also been hindered by nervous and appeasement-inclined Western allies. Of the $13.6 billion pledged to help rebuild Iraq, only a couple of billion have appeared to date.

Spreading Democracy

Victor Davis Hanson’s “What History Says About The Iraq War,” notes, among other things, that our investment in creating democracy has been tried before, with positive results. Democracies curb the frequency of war. “…so spreading democracy will prove a far better mechanism for promoting peace than empowering international organizations peopled by dictatorships, theocracies, and totalitarian states. Consensual governments rarely arise spontaneously, though; normally it takes a war or revolution to bring them into being. Consider democratic Athens, and the birth of the democracies in the U.S., Western Europe, Japan, Korea, Afghanistan, and Iraq.”

War is sometimes necessary to obtain and perpetuate peace. Davis writes, “The great pathologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—slavery, Nazism, fascism, Japanese militarism, and communism—were ended only through force and military deterrence. More recently, brutal bullies like Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, and Mullah Omar were stopped from preying on others only by the barrel of a gun.” So too in Iraq. “The U.S. military did more in three weeks early in 2003 to save threatened Iraqis and begin humanitarian improvements than 12 years of no-fly zones and a fraudulent United Nations Oil-for-Food program had accomplished.”

Posted on Saturday, March 4, 2006 at 7:47 AM
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