James McCusker’s “Losing Iraq war can’t be an option” (Money, Feb. 15) makes the comparison with Vietnam and thus implies that losing Vietnam was an option. They didn’t have any oil we wanted. All they won was their bomb-pocked, defoliated country. This selective telling of history just tallies up the number of bodies or dollars and declares the winners and losers. We lost 58,000 humans. The estimates range between 1 million and 2 million on the other side. That’s a casualty ratio of 20- or 30-to-1, if that helps you feel like a winner.
Mr. McCusker’s point is that economically it wasn’t a big deal. Unless you consider our credibility deficit. Don’t mention that awkward genocide in neighboring Cambodia. Unfortunately for the victims, the perpetrators were enemies with our enemies. The communist North Vietnamese finally intervened against Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and the genocide finally ended. They must have had different songbooks.
We had paperbacks. “The Ugly American” and “A Nation of Sheep” admonished us to be ever alert to the spreading red threat. The anti-communist hysteria led to more bombs dropped than in all of World War II on a small country basically trying to escape colonial rule.
Iraq is obviously different than Vietnam, but the hysteria in the United States is the same. Communist, Viet Cong, oooohhh. Radical Islamists, terrorist, ooooooohhh.
Saddam didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, but that doesn’t matter. He is a nuisance, he is widely hated and that oil-rich region is too important to be left in the hands of an unstable dictator.
None of these are legitimate reasons to invade another country. But taken all together, it’s more marketing than logic. It’s what makes the fat guy still supersize it. It may be garbage, but it’s three-for-the-price-of-one garbage.
Bothell
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