Slate has a piece up today comparing body counts in Iraq and Vietnam. Basically, the argument is that, if you control for advances in military and medical technology, Vietnam in 1966 is as deadly as Iraq in 2004.
That’s frightening in and of itself. But it prompted me to do some investigation of my own. I’m still skeptical of Iraq/Vietnam comparisons for two reasons: (1) the draft vs. the all-volunteer (well, sort of) army, and (2), the fact that the opposition in Vietnam was state-based with a governing ideology (Communism), whereas the opposition in Iraq seems to be a bunch of nihlists/anarchists/foreigners with no plan for what happens if they win.
Besides, Vietnam’s population, I reasoned, is about 85 million, but Iraq is only 25 million. Even with all the terrorists swooping in from Jordan and Syria, we’re still ahead in the numbers game.
Whoops… forgot to control for inflation.
According to this site, Vietnam’s population in 1965 was about 35 million. Iraq’s 2004 population is about 25 million. Given that troop levels in Iraq are a mere fraction of what they were in Vietnam, the picture looks less rosy. And advances in military technology aren’t helping as much as they could. With all this street-by-street fighting, we’ve lost most of our force multipliers in Iraq.
So it begs the question: when can we compare Iraq to Vietnam? Us reasonable centrists are supposed to bristle at the comparison. “You’re being hysterical,” we tell the peaceniks when they try to force the issue. But unless we pull out something close to a miracle with these January elections, the hysterics will look more and more reasonable.
So when can we begin to compare? Hard to say. I’d like to ask my fellow “reasonable” folks, the Tom Friedmans and Chris Hitchens’ of the world, for a number, so I can stop thinking about it. If we have 3,000 dead Americans by 2006, does that make it okay to compare to Vietnam? how about 10,000 by 2009? Or should we focus on Iraqi casulaties? 100,000 by 2007? Just give me a number and I’ll stop worrying and go back to being a reasonable centrist again.
