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In the Second World War, which again -- in theory, but only naively -- we needn't have fought, 407,000 Americans died from the fighting. This is out of a population that had grown to about 138 million on average between 1941 and 1945. Death rate: roughly 1 in 350 -- not 350 soldiers, but 350 Americans of all ages and sexes. This figure also surprised me. Was it worth so high a price to save distant strangers from fascist forced labor and slaughter? Didn't we have ample resources, even after Pearl Harbor, to defend our shores and airspace from anything the Axis could throw our way? Of course, the correct answer is the same then as it is now -- dictators are never satisfied until they rule the world, either directly or by proxy or by terror. Leave them alone too long, and even back in the 1940s our enemies could've come up with weapons of mass destruction and means to deliver them into the U.S. homeland. To repeat for emphasis, World War II is considered by most as a good war -- oddly enough, even though we obliterated much of Italy, Belgium, Holland, and France in order to save them from the Nazis, with a horrific civilian death toll as the collateral price of this "liberation." Makes you stop and think, doesn't it?
In the Korean War -- now not so very forgotten as it once was -- 37,000 Americans died. In the Vietnam War, America's longest war, 58,000 Americans died. Since these two wars both took place in Southeast Asia, and can both be viewed as huge battles within the larger context of the Cold War against the USSR and Red China, I'll combine them -- with no slight meant to the Veterans of either conflict. This makes for about 100,000 U.S. Cold War KIAs, compared to a U.S. population that between 1950 and 1975 averaged about 185 million. The resulting aggregate death rate was in round numbers 1 in 2000. Taken this way, the Cold War wasn't so cold.
U.S. KIAs in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, to evict Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait, were only 269. The effect on the American population, in terms of death rate, was negligible.
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Now let's take a hard look at Operation Iraqi Freedom. Let's use as a round number 2,000 U.S. deaths from the operation so far. The American population during OIF is close to 300 million, for a death rate of 1 in 150,000 -- so far. This figure is totally eclipsed by the death rates of previous major wars. For a sense of scale, note that in the U.S. during 2003 the odds of you or me dying in a car crash were 1 in 6500.
And we really are trying to install some sort of functional democracy in Iraq. Saddam Hussein actually is a very bad person. He waged an aggressive war with Iran in which deaths on both sides may have run into millions. He used nerve gas against his own citizens as far back as 1988, killing thousands, and there's no statute of limitations for homicide or crimes against humanity. He invaded Kuwait, he says, to keep his army busy after the war against Iran stopped. Since Kuwait is the size of New Jersey, you has to wonder what he would have done next to "keep his army busy" -- once they were done looting rich Kuwait to refill Saddam's bankrupt treasury. The number of mass graves discovered on Iraqi soil, filled with decomposed corpses of Iraqis who died under Saddam's rule, is 30,000 to 300,000, depending on which source you use. Compared to a population averaging maybe 25 million over the past 15 years, the death rate of Iraqis due to Saddam falls between 1 in a 100 and 1 in a 1000.
Is it worth the cost in American lives and limbs to have brought this modern monster to justice, at long last? Have We the People -- at least some of us -- suddenly gotten stingy, gone way out of our historical character, as to how much we'll sacrifice to make the world safer for democracy? The annual Holiday Season is supposed to be about generousness, about knowing that it's better to give than receive. Maybe we should stop being so selfish, so separated from our own honorable past and traditions -- and mourn the dead but live for the living. Maybe we'd best keep learning from our tactical and strategic mistakes in that most-imperfect process of war, and get on with the job of helping Iraqis have a free country, whatever exact form the structure of the government might take. The latter is for them to decide. It's their country. They're certainly suffering dearly for it. But is the price Iraqis are paying now, in terms of their own KIAs in the anti-OIF insurgency, any worse than the "going rate for freedom" based on prior U.S. (and European liberation) statistics? Iraqi deaths under Saddam led nowhere. At least the deaths at the hands of heartless terrorists and brazen assassins, and the tragic losses through collateral damage from American ordnance aimed at this horrible new enemy, could lead to something very worthwhile. The calculus of war might be dehumanizing, and what I've said may anger you -- but freedom is something enjoyed by flesh-and-blood people, and history proves repeatedly that freedom doesn't come for free.
Reading the daily headlines with all this in mind could maybe help just a little to dispel those holiday war blahs.
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© 2004 Joe Buff. All opinions expressed
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