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.
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