Worth it?

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. – Thomas Jefferson

The remains of two U.S. contractors kidnapped in Iraq have been found. With these deaths, and the four US servicemen killed by a roadside bomb just a week after the fifth anniversary of the Iraqi War, we are now mourning 4,000 Americans killed in Iraq. Of those 4,000 military personnel killed in the war, 3,263 have died in combat, and 737 in various incidents such as traffic accidents and suicides. Eight were civilians working for the Pentagon. (The numbers are based on a CNN news report.) Discounting the monetary costs of the war, the US has certainly paid a high price in her soldier’s lives for Iraqi freedom. Were those deaths “in vain”? I guess that would depend on who you talk to. The Democrats say “YES, they were in vain” quite loudly, while the Republicans say “NO they were not in vain” equally loudly, and hope to continue the fight against radical Islam. Meanwhile the US military bleeds, and Iraqi women and children aren’t being killed in quite the large numbers they were a couple of years ago.

According to statistics posted by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the United States suffered 4,435 battle deaths over the course of eight years, with another 6,188 soldiers wounded. That was our revolution. The War of 1812, a three year struggle, cost us 2,260 killed, and 4,505 soldiers wounded. From 1846 to 1898, the entire era of the Indian Wars, saw approximately 1,000 soldiers killed in action. The Mexican War counted 1,733 deaths in battle, 4,152 wounded, and 11,550 “other” deaths in service (“other” generally means deaths from disease, starvation, accidents, and hardship). Our Civil War saw three and a half million Americans, both Union and Confederate, slugging it out over four years. Of these, 215,000 were killed in action, 283,394 died of other causes, 281,881 union soldiers were non-lethal battle casualties along with an unknown number of Confederate wounded. The Spanish-American War saw 385 soldiers killed and 1,662 wounded in combat. World War I cost us 53,402 killed in slightly over a year of fighting, along with 204,002 wounded. Another 63,114 died non-combat deaths. World War II was the “Big One”, costing us 291,557 battle deaths, 671,846 wounded, and an additional 113,842 other deaths in its four year duration. Three years on the Korean peninsula cost us 33,741 American lives in combat, along with 103,284 wounded. Eleven years in Vietnam cost us another 47,424 battle deaths, 10,785 other deaths, and 153,303 wounded. Desert Shield/Desert Storm wasn’t quite as expensive, with 147 battle deaths, 235 “other” deaths, and 467 wounded in slightly less than a year. (As it hasn’t ended yet, the DVA statistics do not include the present conflict in Iraq.) Historically, approximately 41 years of actual warfare have cost the lives of 1,119,098 American soldiers, and have left us the painful legacy of another 1,431,290 non-mortal casualties. In playing with those numbers I find that we’ve averaged 27,295 deaths, and 34,909 wounded, for each of those forty one years. (This is a lot less than those killed on the nations’ highways each year.)

Had we not fought the Revolutionary War, we’d still be paying taxes on British tea I suppose, taking orders from Buckingham Palace, and toasting the "glorious" King (or Queen) at every turn. But we’d have “saved” 4,500 lives. We expended American lives in the War of 1812 to allow US ships to sail the seas unhindered, and to put an end to American sailors being forced into the Royal Navy, where who knows how many more of them would have died in Britain’s incessant “small wars”. The War with Mexico gained us the entire American southwest at a relatively low cost, but I can hardly claim it was a “just” war. The Civil War was expensive, but it did prove to all and sundry that we believe in the constitutional point of view that all men are created equal. It also provided the basis for many of the governmental problems the United States faces today. The War with Spain served little purpose other than to provide a few war heroes, introduce the US Army to the horrors of tropical disease, and made William Randolph Hearst a little richer. WW I saw the end of three empires, the Kaiser’s Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. It saved the empires of Britain and France, along with laying the groundwork for WW II. The Second World War saw the Allies crush Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan along with their threat to the free world, at a very high cost to all participants. It also made the Soviet Union a world superpower, and made the forty-five year long “Cold War” inevitable. Korea was little more than an expensive demonstration of Americas resolve to “halt communist expansion”, as was the long and painful war in Vietnam. I guess the jury’s still out on the mid-east conflict.

With the exception of Vietnam, each of our previous wars were more or less “conventional” wars for their era, and the causality figures reflect that fact. Vietnam was the unusual case of a conventional military force (the United States Army) trying to engage a Guerrilla military force (the Viet Cong/NVA) in a conventional war. Unfortunately for the United States that idea didn’t work very well, as with only a few shining exceptions we’re not real good at unconventional warfare. Nor does it seem that the Powers That Be have learned the lessons of Vietnam either, as once again we’re trying to fight a “limited war” against guerrillas, with more or less conventional forces. But American soldiers… fighting and dieing for the freedom of Iraq? Well, remember that a lot of French soldiers came over here, to fight and die for American liberty during our revolution. Be glad they did, we’d have lost without them.

But still, were all those American wars “worth it”? Not according to the “Better Red than Dead” pacifists of course, who seem to prefer lifelong slavery to individual freedom. Not even the history books can agree on the value of any particular war, depending of course on who wrote the book. Perhaps we would be better advised to ask the previously enslaved American blacks if the Civil War was “worth it”, or the surviving European Jews if World War Two was worth the effort. You might also inquire of the slave laborers that despots always seem to exploit, or the concentration camp victims of totalitarian “justice”. Ask the Iraqi people who have suffered tens of thousands of their relatives, friends, and countrymen killed by radical extremists. And don’t forget to ask the families of those dead Americans if the sacrifice of their husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters was “worth it”. Ask them if their loved ones died in vain, ask them if the people of a free nation cannot hold upright the light of liberty for all the worlds inhabitants.

The current war in Iraq is averaging around 800 lives per year, or about one fifth the causalities we suffered in Vietnam. The cause of those causalities is much the same however, mines and booby traps for the most part, treacherous weapons emplaced by fanatics who know full well they cannot defeat us, but can only hope to outlast us, that shortsighted American patience will eventually grow frayed… that once again the American people will demand that their soldiers come home before the job is done… and once again they will allow the enemies of democracy a free hand.