American wars since World War II

We have been watching the PBS special “The Sixties”, and tonight we watched the episode about the Vietnam War.  It made me think about all the American Wars since World War II.

The Korean War was at least a draw, in that when the fighting stopped the North Koreans and their Chinese allies had at least been pushed back more or less to the original dividing line.

Vietnam was a disaster. We essentially never found a workable strategy for winning, we lost 58,300 American lives with another 153,300 wounded, killed over a million civilians, spent about $173 billion (about $800 billion is 2014 dollars), and eventually withdrew and let the North Vietnamese take the whole county. Oh, and records now show our government lied to us repeatedly about the war, starting with the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident.

The first Gulf war a disaster. We spent about $30 billion of American taxpayer money (other nations contributed the rest) and beat Saddam’s forces in Kuwait in 100 hours, and then stopped without finishing the job, and then allowed Saddam to kill tens of thousands of his own people who thought we were going to help them.

Afghanistan was and still is a disaster. After 13 years of inconclusive fighting, the loss of 2200 American lives thus far with another 20,000 wounded, and perhaps around 20,000 civilians killed, and about $750 billion in America taxpayer money spent, the Taliban are reclaiming territory as fast as we withdraw from it. Once again, we never found a workable strategy for winning, and a student of history might have known from the beginning (or at least from the Soviet’s recent example) that it was an impossible war to win.

Iraq was and still is a disaster. After 11 years of inconclusive fighting, the loss more than 4500 Americans killed and something over 32,000 wounded, and between 130,000 and 150,000 more civilians killed and another $1.7 trillion in American Taxpayer money thus far (not counting another $500 billion in veterans’ benefits), the newly-trained Iraqi army fled in terror from the ISIS fanatics, leaving much of their expensive American-supplied weapons behind, and now the northern part of the country is in the hands of the most brutal thugs imaginable. Once again, our ruling elites never figured out a workable strategy to win – or even decided what would constitute winning. Oh, and once again our government gave us misinformation about the war - the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction that were never found.,

Is there a disturbing pattern here? Our military are doing their job superbly, often under impossible conditions.  Our politicians, on the other hand, have fumbled repeatedly.

Encryption and the feds

I see that the federal law enforcement agencies are quite perturbed about the new default encryption appearing in Apple's new iPhones and Google's Android phones, which will make it much harder, perhaps even impossible, to listen in on everyone's phone calls and e-mails. It will, they say, seriously impede the tracking of drug dealers, pedophiles, terrorists and other criminals. And no doubt they are right. Such measures have already been shown to be very effective in other systems - we call those systems "police states" - like Russia and North Korea.

Most of us already appear many times a day on surveillance cameras in big stores and on street corners in many towns. Our auto license plates are read and tracked automatically in many jurisdictions. The NSA already sweeps up all our phone calls, and perhaps most of our web visits and emails as well. Our credit card transactions can be tracked, as well as our air travel. No doubt a police-linked surveillance camera in every bedroom would further help the police deal with rapes and domestic violence, but do we really want to go that far?

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies always want more, and more intrusive, powers - of course it makes their job easier. It also makes abuses of power easier, and the history of federal agency abuses, from the Nixon years to the Obama administration's IRS scandal, ought to alert us to the dangers to our freedom and privacy that this constant federal overreach offers.

The feds are annoyed about the encryption. My response is "tough - get used to it". This is supposed to be the land of the free - if the feds can listen in to every telephone call I make and and every email I send, we are hardly free.