Quite a quandary this war is. Although I’ve long said that we might have been better off to have found another way to manipulate Saddam Hussein while keeping him in power (since he seems to have managed to do a better - read: murderously efficient - job of keeping Iraq’s many factions under control)… for better or for worse, we deposed him, and through our intervention, have inextricably linked ourselves to the well-being of Iraq, and in the long term, the entire region.

That said, while the press continually plays up the casualties of this war (both those of our own soldiers, and the larger tally of the Iraqis on the street who are busily bombing each other or slashing one anothers’ throats, or other violence) as something approaching the scale of Nazi or Maoist democide, I still believe our presence is preventing a bloodbath that would be worse by far.

Many (some rather faulty) comparisons of our Iraq intervention to the Viet Nam war of more than 30 years ago abound; many leftists seem to think that they have the same sort of groundswell of public disaffection for Bush (hoping to transfer their BDS or “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to the wider public), when in fact, we aren’t anywhere close.

Certainly, there are many who favour a complete and immediate withdrawal, and many more who would see a tempered withdrawal according to some established timeline. But I do not see massive riots or millions of people marching on the Capital Mall demanding withdrawal as we did more than a generation ago.

Let us do a comparison then, to discover the fallacy of the Left’s thinking:

As we can see… the numbers tell a better story, and may hold a frightful promise for the people of Iraq, should we cut and run as the Democrats are straining to pull off.

One has only to reconsider what really happened after we fled from Viet Nam, accordging to this author:

A most noteworthy and still sensitive example of this double standard is the Vietnam War. The international community was outraged at the American attempt to militarily prevent North Vietnam from taking over South Vietnam and ultimately Laos and Cambodia. “Stop the killing” was the cry, and eventually, the pressure of foreign and domestic opposition forced an American withdrawal. The overall number killed in the Vietnam War on all sides was about 1,216,000 people.

With the United States subsequently refusing them even modest military aid, South Vietnam was militarily defeated by the North and completely swallowed; and Cambodia was taken over by the communist Khmer Rouge, who in trying to recreate a primitive communist agricultural society slaughtered from one to three million Cambodians. If we take a middle two-million as the best estimate, then in four years the government of this small nation of seven million alone killed 64 percent more people than died in the ten-year Vietnam War.

Overall, the best estimate of those killed after the Vietnam War by the victorious communists in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is 2,270,000. Now totaling almost twice as many as died in the Vietnam War, this communist killing still continues.

We can expect something quite similar to this, if we withdraw from Iraq and so confirm the consensus held by the Arab world in particular, and most of the world in general, that given enough restistance and bloodshed, that America will retire from the field.

We can expect the Iraqis to bleed themselves white, until finally one man stronger than his competitors emerges above the rest, and puts them all under the banner of the Caliphate and Jihad.

Only problem is … it would then be only a matter of time before AQ and other terrorists regroup and use Iraq as yet another launching pad for their evils, as they strive to bring Jihad to our shores.

Sources:

War Isn’t This Century’s Biggets Killer, R.J. Rummel, published originally in the Wall Street Journal, 7 July 1986

Casualties of the conflict in Iraq since 2003, Wikipedia

Casualties of War - Putting American Casualties in Perspective, R.G. Price, 2003