Every Monday we post updated figures for U.S. casualties in Iraq. You can find them on your own here.
As of today:
U.S. troops killed: 754 (up 33 from last week; up 52 from two weeks ago)
U.S. troops wounded in action: No updated figures available (3,864 as of last week)
A concerned reader (see the comments following last week's post) writes to say that he considers our Monday postings to be part of a growing alarmist tendency in the press to handwring over setbacks in Iraq while ignoring positive developments there. He writes that it is unfair to compare every military action to Vietnam and that in any conflict a certain level of loss of American life is necessary and to be expected.
We do not see American casualties as ever being a reason to cut and run from a legitimate conflict. We find it sad -- outrageous even -- that the loss of 19 U.S. soldiers in Somalia caused us to abandon that country and to make excuses for not intervening in the Rwanda genocide.
We do, however, find in the mounting losses in Iraq a reason to question the leadership that put our military there. Remember: that leadership provided a fraction of the troops the Army itself estimated it would need to secure the country. We don't advocate abandoning Iraq, but we grow increasingly doubtful that the current administration will bring things to a successful end.
We didn't bring up Vietnam, but since the subject is on the table it's also worth remembering that so far the number of U.S. troops dead in Iraq is almost double the number of troops killed during the first
three years of major U.S. involvement in Vietnam. (The linked-to article puts the two conflicts in perspective, noting that the number of troops in Iraq far exceeds the number of troops present in the early years of Vietnam.) It may be that we can stay in Iraq for the "next 100 years" and never see Vietnam-like casualties. But that's impossible to predict. We doubt any American in 1964 would have guessed what the next decade had in store. U.S leadership failed then, and there are signs that it's failing again, in many of the same ways.
