I have seen innumerable articles about the shortness or length of American wars, and heard the Bush administration comments about the War on Terror being an unusually long one, but I have yet to come across a bar graph putting it all in perspective. Since I find a visual helpful, I threw something together to show how (as of today) the War in Iraq and Afghanistan have climbed the rungs of time. Thought I would share (click on it to enlarge):

Of course the start of the US engagement in Vietnam is a little fuzzy if you count the tens of thousands of “advisors” and special operations teams sent by Eisenhower. Some say the whole war was as short as 90 months but I used 101 months as recently posted by the AP, which I have to admit ignores the crucial twenty four months after Kennedy officially sent in American troops. All of these timelines for Vietnam are still well-shy of the 18 years suggested by others. I would add the LSU calculations of total casualties and financial costs to my graph as well, but as you can see above the dates are hard enough to pin down…

< ------------Casualties------------>
                                    [-----Deaths---]                             < -----Percentages-----> Duration 
Conflict                Enrolled    Combat   Other   Wounded     Total    Ratio  KIA    Dead   Casualty   Months  KIA/Month          
Revolutionary War          200.0    4,435   *          6,188      10,623   2.4   2.2%    2.2%     5.3%      80       55
War of 1812                286.0    2,260   *          4,505       6,765   3.0   0.8%    0.8%     2.4%      30       75
Mexican War                 78.7    1,733   11,550     4,152      17,435   1.3   2.2%   16.9%    22.2%      20       87
Civil War: Union         2,803.3  110,070  249,458   275,175     634,703   1.8   3.9%   12.8%    22.6%      48    2,293
           Confederate   1,064.2   74,524  124,000   137,000 +   335,524   1.7   7.0%   18.7%    31.5%      48    1,553
           Combined      3,867.5  184,594  373,458   412,175 +   970,227   1.7   4.8%   14.4%    25.1%      48    3,846
Spanish-American War       306.8      385    2,061     1,662       4,108   1.7   0.1%    0.8%     1.3%       4       96 &
World War I              4,743.8   53,513   63,195   204,002     320,710   2.7   1.1%    2.5%     6.8%      19    2,816
World War II            16,353.7  292,131  115,185   670,846   1,078,162   2.6   1.8%    2.5%     6.6%      44    6,639
Korean War               5,764.1   33,651   *        103,284     136,935   4.1   0.6%    0.6%     2.4%      37      909
Vietnam War              8,744.0   47,369   10,799   153,303     211,471   3.6   0.5%    0.7%     2.4%      90      526
Gulf War                 2,750.0      148      145       467 ^       760   2.6   0.0%    0.0%     0.0%       1      148

Combat deaths refers to troops killed in action or dead of wounds. Other includes deaths from disease, privation, and accidents, and includes losses among prisoners of war. Wounded excludes those who died of their wounds, who are included under Combat Deaths. Ratio is the proportion of wounded in action to combat deaths. Note that the wounded figures do not include cases of disease. Under Percentages, KIA refers to the percent of those enrolled killed in action, Dead to the percent dead from all causes, and Casualty to the percent killed or injured. KIA/Month, killed in action per month, gives a fair indication of the intensity of combat

Notes:
* Non-battle deaths not known for these wars.
+ Confederate non-battle deaths and wounded estimated.
& Actually only six weeks of sustained combat.
^ There was only one month of combat.

I also did not put the “War on Drugs” on the chart but I do wonder if that would help put something like the War on Terror in perspective? According to the Boston Globe, it is now decades old and the results have not been quite what was intended…

Fact: In the three decades since Nixon declared substance abuse a “national emergency,” the United States has focused on curbing supply and demand for illegal drugs. Currently, nearly half a million people in this country are behind bars for drug crimes (mostly trafficking). Yet the domestic drug market remains free-flowing. Classic economic theory states that when supply goes down, the price of a commodity goes up and its purity declines. With hard street drugs, the inverse has occurred. They’re dramatically cheaper and purer than they were 25 years ago — suggesting greater supply and easy access. Adjusted for inflation, cocaine prices have dropped by more than half since 1980. A bag of heroin goes for little more than a gallon of gas or a six-pack of water.

Thirty-five years and drugs flow more freely and for less cost? Wonder if anyone has readily available data on the suspected causes of terrorist activity such as displacement, persecution or perhaps fundamentalism. Ah, the definition of terrorism is tricky. Maybe it would be easier to try and quantify the sale of illegal arms relative to the number of terrorist factions, or the supply of small arms and the number of incidents caused by paramilitary groups and militias? I would go with something like this in the CS Monitor, but then again it seems to come right back around to the Iraq War…

In a report to be released next week, US government figures will show that the number of terrorist attacks in the world jumped sharply in 2005, totalling more than 10,000 for the first time. That is almost triple the number of terrorist attacks in 2004 — 3,194. Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau reports that counterterrorism experts say that there are two reasons for the dramatic increase: a broader definition of what consitutes a terrorist attack, and the war in Iraq.

[…]

“Roughly 85 percent of the US citizens who died from terrorism during the year died in Iraq. The figures cover only noncombatants and thus don’t include combat deaths of US, Iraqi and other coalition soldiers.”

Their “broader definition” of terrorism apparently now includes attacks that do not include more than one nationality. In other words McVeigh’s bombing would not have been classified as terrorism under the old rules since he was American and attacking Americans. The CS Monitor article also has some other useful references to defining the War on Terror, however long it has lasted.

As I have pointed out before, here and here and here and here, US security may be most at risk from Chinese economic superiority (if not global environmental issues undermining economic sustainability). If you think of it in terms of the conflict between the US and USSR during the Cold War, who was the “victor” and why? Now China stands poised to do to the US what the US managed to do the Soviet Union (or what the Soviet Union did to itself, if you follow the case made by Gorbachev for ending the war).

The Bush administration panders to fire and brimstone because they mistakenly believe economic and military hawks were the true victors of the Cold War. This is not only patently untrue, but it seriously alienates the world from US influence.

We do not want a freedom and democracy based on Washington’s flawed model, controlled by a clique of corporate elitists who gravitate around the White House, making a mockery of their people and a mockery of democracy and which practise a policy of freedom of the press which makes the Gestapo look like fairy godmothers.

The international community is made up of hundreds of sovereign nations with models of government which reflect in some cases thousands of years of history and culture, which is to be respected, not obliterated in a wave of blind arrogance fuelled by the greed of Washington’s invisible masters.

The international community does not want, nor does it need, the model imposed by a country barely 200 years old, with serious human rights problems, whose history is associated with ethnic cleansing of its native population, whose history is based upon the illegal deportation of races, a country whose military forces even today practise torture and which has concentration camps in more than one continent where the terms of the Geneva Convention are broken.

People do not like the US for being militant and greedy, but for its reputation of promoting freedom by offering fair opportunity regardless of persuasion. Thus, compared to the preception of a new compassionate Chinese diplomacy spreading around the world, the undeniably hawkish and war-hungry Bush administration has taken on the reputation of a big bully intent on grabbing economic control for its self-serving corporate dinosaurs. Nevermind reality (like Russian and Chinese-supplied arms to Iran, Syria and assorted anti-US militant cells — another page from the American foreign-policy playbook), perception of the Chinese as liberators bringing gifts of prosperity has never been stronger while perception of the US as selfish expansionist oppressors who do not care about others…

The former chief of the World Bank gets it, and has issued a strong warning:

“The fact that not enough of our young people are preparing themselves with knowledge, experience, residence and language to deal certainly with China, although India has the benefit of an English language, it does seem to me that it presents a formidable challenge.”

Wolfensohn pointed to both China’s and India’s recent substantial investments in Africa as an example of how the two emerging giants were exercising their increasing clout on the global stage.

To put this in perspective, consider the Bush administration nomination of a right-wing militant hawk to replace Rumsfeld:

The president has described his pick as “an agent of change” at the Pentagon. But the declassified memorandum shows Gates to be a proponent of a no-holds-barred approach to foreign policy, advocate of covert and overt military action with little appetite for diplomatic niceties.

The document begins with a bitter overview of US foreign policy setbacks in Cuba, Vietnam and Angola and complains that “half measures, half-heartedly applied, will have the same result in Nicaragua.”

Acknowledging the covert US aid to Nicaraguan “contras” was not having the desired effect, Gates writes that the US goal should now be “overtly to try to bring down the regime” led by Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega.

Ortega, who was voted out of power in Nicaragua in 1990, won the presidential post back earlier this month.

It was men like this who would have lost the Cold War for the US. Full of vinegar and piss, they will make America look the worst it ever has in a race for hearts minds while the sweet-soft touch of Asian diplomacy walks around smiling and shaking hands.

Foolish pride will blind men like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Gates from realizing that their instinct to call for military action in destabilized regions actually could be a trap set by the Chinese to show the cruel and unusual side of American foreign policy. The military knows this, CIA knows this, a former World Bank chief is saying it, but will a US leader emerge who can understand the pressure to avert self-immolation and set foreign policies straight again?

Even the Freedom Fries fool has realized the error of his ways and admitted his mistake.

A pro-Iraq war US congressman who campaigned for French fries to be renamed “freedom fries” is now calling for US troops to return home from Iraq. […] “I just feel that the reason of going in for weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the Iraqis to make a nuclear weapon, that’s all been proven that it was never there.”

Hmmm, not to be too much of a conspiracy theorist, but what if the Chinese were not only funneling small arms to anti-US groups but pushing disinformation to the US itself and then arguing plausable denial to anyone who tries to make a connection? I’m almost convinced it was the Chinese who were complicit in the destabilization of the Darfur region in order to set the stage for international “assistance” while securing their access to natural resources. After all, that’s what the US used to do to its adversaries during the Cold War, right? Of course, with men like Gates in office, you probably need very little to send them off charging into the wild looking for something to blow up or destroy. Anyone want to bet what another hot-headed anti-diplomatic hawk will do in terms of over-taxing the country and undermining military capacity?

The commander of the US army reserve says it is rapidly degenerating into a “broken” force.

Lt Gen James Helmly, in a leaked memo to the Pentagon, says the reserve has reached a point where it cannot fulfil its missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Interesting to compare Helmly’s sentiments about the mishandling of American forces to a recent interview in Pravda with “Vyacheslav Generalov, former deputy chief of the KGB’s Ninth Chief Directorate, ex-head of the security service of Mikhail Gorbachev”:

We need to bear in mind that the Afghans were well-armed. They didn’t have any heavy weaponry, but they got plenty of machine guns and bazookas through the courtesy of the Americans.

By and large, I believe the decision to pull out the Soviet troops from Afghanistan was a right one. It was untimely, though. The military that doesn’t receive arms and equipment, the military with no ideological backup, it simply ceases to be the armed forces.

Many of those who served in Afghanistan ended up down and out after coming home. A bit later they formed the cornerstone of organized crime in this country. Who’s to blame for their wasted lives?