Posted by
Agamemnon on Thursday, December 07, 2006 11:02:31 PM
Thucydides Project 3-19-03
editors note: Thucydides Project is my project to start to collect sources and eyewitness accounts of the War on Terror. I hope to put the sources together in some kind of systematic narrative. I am starting with the 3-19-03 and the coalition invasion of Iraq. I hope to then move one day forward and one day back from this date.
3-19-03 Invasion of Iraq
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1196707
Copyright National Public Radio Mar 19, 2003
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
A statement from the White House today warned Americans that a war with Iraq will entail casualties. Now the calculus of war and loss of life. We wondered what Americans expect in the way of casualties and what we now think of as significant casualties. Of course, many would say even one casualty is significant, and that's what several people told our reporters in San Diego, Austin and Cleveland.
Unidentified Man #1: One would be too many, but that's being unrealistic.
Unidentified Woman #1: Well, if one is that significant, but for the price of freedom, we have to sometimes give up something.
Unidentified Man #2: Unless there's an accident, I don't think we'll lose 25 people.
Unidentified Woman #2: Significant would be anything over a hundred, really. If we start breaking into the hundreds, then something went wrong.
Unidentified Man #3: I really don't know, but if you go by precedence from the last time around, we'll be somewhere in the case of less than 500.
SIEGEL: One reason people may expect two-digit or three-digit casualty counts is recent history. In the Korean conflict, 33,000 Americans died in combat; in Vietnam, more than 47,000. But more recently, the wars and the casualty counts have been smaller--147 in the first war against Iraq, 23 in Panama, 43 in Somalia. US operations in the Balkans have cost the US 30 lives, and in Afghanistan, the toppling of the Taliban and pursuit of al-Qaeda have claimed a death toll of 47.
The writer Max Boot, now with the Council on Foreign Relations, has written about America's small wars. And, Max Boot, do you think that over a quarter of a century we've come to expect wars that cost us relatively little in the way of American lives?
Mr. MAX BOOT (Council on Foreign Relations): I think that's fair to say. We've certainly seen tremendous success of American arms on the battlefield over the past decade and, not unnaturally, we expect that success to continue. After Vietnam, of course, America was horribly scarred and we were very wary of military involvements as a result of that, because we feared another Vietnam, a repeat of those quagmire and catastrophe. Since the Gulf War of 1991, however, we no longer think of Vietnam as the norm. We have come to think of the Gulf War as the norm, and so far, we have not been disappointed, and I pray that we never will be.
SIEGEL: Yeah, the thesis of your book, "The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power," is that the US military has been at least as much shaped by the experience of small wars as by the big ones. Is part of that the relatively low expectations of casualties?
Mr. BOOT: Certainly there is a relatively low expectation of casualties. I think the big factor with small wars is that there are just so many more of them than the big wars. You can count on one hand the number of big wars the United States has fought in our history, and yet, practically every year going back to 1789, American soldiers, sailors and Marines, and more recently airmen, have been engaged in combat somewhere, very often in missions that are not even called wars, that are called peacekeeping or operations other than war, constabulary actions or some other phrase. So there are just so many of these, and most of them are not that costly in either casualties or in national wealth. But there have been an awful lot of them, and this has had a lot to do with the rise of American power over the last two centuries.
SIEGEL: We also asked the same people we heard from earlier about how many Iraqi casualties they expect the US would inflict.
Unidentified Man #4: I think significant for them would be a thousand. Anything over would be catastrophic for them.
Unidentified Woman #3: I can't even give an estimate because I have no idea if it would just be hand-to-hand combat or if there would be any type of biological warfare.
Unidentified Man #5: I don't know. You know, I look at the American technology. There's going to be significant loss of Iraqi lives. I don't know. It's hard to say. Hundreds.
SIEGEL: Max Boot, do Americans actually have a clear sense, or do we have an overly sanitized sense, of how many casualties this country inflicts in a small war?
Mr. BOOT: I think to some extent we might have an overly sanitized sense. In part, this is a result of technology, because in 1945, when we were attacking Japan with B-29 bombers, we did not flinch when inflicting hundreds of thousands of casualties on Japanese civilians, and that's even before the atomic bombs were dropped, whereas now, it creates a national scandal if a smart bomb goes astray and hits a wedding in Afghanistan. Now as I say, in part, this is simply due to the fact that targeting technology is so much more precise and that, in 1945, you couldn't be certain that a bomb would hit within a mile of its target, whereas today you have a very high degree of certainty that precision-guided munitions will hit within a few meters of their target.
So we are much less accepting of civilian casualties, but I think in some sense we may have set the standard too high. We have come to think, I think, of war as being a surgical business, where we only hit the bad guys and leave all the innocent people alone. But it's never going to be that way. It's always going to be a messy, ugly business with innocent people on both sides getting killed. And I think we have to accept that as being inherently true of war. That's not going to change, no matter how much technology may change.
SIEGEL: Max Boot, author of "The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power," thank you very much for talking with us today.
Mr. BOOT: Thanks for having me on.
SIEGEL: And earlier, we heard the opinions of Doug Thompson, Marian Ezel(ph), Todd Ezel(ph), Alex Alviso(ph), Scott Day, Enrique Wajardo(ph) and Jeannette Burda(ph).
I was able to access this article through Proquest and my local library. I’m not sure that it would be legal to reproduce the article in. So I won’t unless someone credible tells me different.
Agamemnon