{"id":55,"date":"2005-08-30T19:21:41","date_gmt":"2005-08-31T02:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=55"},"modified":"2007-07-08T19:21:03","modified_gmt":"2007-07-09T02:21:03","slug":"democracies-and-long-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=55","title":{"rendered":"Democracies and Long Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Cindy Sheehan has <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/news\/nation\/2005-08-18-peace-mom_x.htm?POE=NEWISVA\">left the building<\/a>. If it hasn&#8217;t already happened, mainstream media coverage of the protest at George W. Bush&#8217;s ranch will soon dwindle to the level given <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sun-sentinel.com\/news\/nationworld\/cl-et-aruba5aug05,0,4103750.story?coll=sfla-newsnation-front\">missing black women<\/a>, and we can all quit thinking about dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis.<\/p>\n<p>My friend Dick says democracies can&#8217;t fight long wars. I agree with him, but I have to ask: What&#8217;s long, and how do you measure it, in duration or deaths?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>We fought in WWII &#8211; a &#8220;popular&#8221; war &#8211; from 1941 to 1945, at the cost of 413,000 American lives. Worldwide, between 1937 and 1945, approximately 68 <em>million<\/em> died in WWII. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/World_War_II_casualties\"><em>(link)<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li>We fought in Korea &#8211; a terribly unpopular war &#8211; from 1950 to 1953, at the cost of 62,371 American dead and missing. Total dead and missing of all involved nations: 2,500,000. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Korean_War_casualties\"><em>(link)<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li>We fought in Vietnam &#8211; an even more unpopular war &#8211; from the mid-1960s to 1975, at the cost of 72,238 American dead and missing. Total dead and missing of all involved nations: over 2,500,000. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Vietnam_War_casualties\"><em>(link)<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li>The 1991 Iraq war, Desert Storm, was short, popular, and cheap (for us): less than 500 American deaths. The Iraqis, on the other hand, lost more than 120,000 people, military and civilian. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Desert_Storm\"><em>(link)<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li>The current Iraq war is less and less popular: two years into the invasion 1,863 American troops have died and another 13,877 have been wounded. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/icasualties.org\/oif\/default.aspx\"><em>(link)<\/em><\/a> No one knows how many Iraqis have been killed and wounded; guesses run from 23,580 to 26,705. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/casualties\/index.php#count\"><em>(link)<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But as I said, I agree with my friend, and frankly I&#8217;m amazed we stayed with Korea and Vietnam as long as we did, never mind Iraq. Why? Because we have access to information. Although our vaunted free press has in the main uncritically supported the Iraq war, detailed information &#8211; the piggy-dirties about the premises under which we went to war, how we planned it, how we&#8217;re executing it, and how we&#8217;ve botched it &#8211; has always been available to any American who wants to learn.<\/p>\n<p>I submit that the more we learn about war &#8211; any war &#8211; the less likely we are to support it and the more likely we are to oppose it. That&#8217;s a consequence of living in a democracy. You can pretty much sum up the pro-war coalition&#8217;s criticism of Cindy Sheehan in two words: Shut up!<\/p>\n<p>How long will it be before Rush Limbaugh picks up on the astute recommendations of the <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/fafblog.blogspot.com\/2005\/08\/dont-look-now-last-week-chairman-of.html\">Medium Lobster<\/a>? I can&#8217;t resist a short quote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Given the number of riots, the amount of violence, and the attacks by insurgents that appear to have erupted since the dawn of the war, it&#8217;s clear that something has to be done to stop news of the conflict from getting out to crazed terrorists, who, becoming so excitable about the prospect of American torture, might well become livid if they learned of the US&#8217;s involvement in preventively invading a muslim country and killing thousands there in a massively botched occupation. . . . The Medium Lobster recommends in the strongest possible terms that no mention be made ever again of the war, its disastrous progress, its inept and incompetent leadership, or the mystifying reasons for which it was launched, ever again &#8211; for the sake of national security.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There are those among us &#8211; quite a few of them, I suspect &#8211; who would equally well say that something has to be done to stop news of the conflict from getting out to the American public.<\/p>\n<p>But we live in a democracy, so that can&#8217;t happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cindy Sheehan has left the building. If it hasn&#8217;t already happened, mainstream media coverage of the protest at George W. Bush&#8217;s ranch will soon dwindle to the level given missing black women, and we can all quit thinking about dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis. My friend Dick says democracies can&#8217;t fight long wars. I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}