A Large Regular: Iraq War

President Obama's Iraq Speech

Close to 13 million people have watched the double rainbow guy's video on YouTube. I wonder if that many people watched President Obama's speech on Iraq last night? If I had to guess - I'd go with the under. Obama overused the TV in his first 100 days and now people are tuning him out.

Let me predict that the pledge to remove all troops in Iraq by the end of next year will prove as empty as the promise to close Guantanamo in the first year of his Presidency. It just won't prove practical. We still have troops in Germany, Japan and Korea. I'm not sure if Obama has a true understanding of history and how these things work.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting and thought I'd share.

- Very true Venn Diagram

- Venezuela more Deadly than Iraq (or even Detroit for that matter)

- How 17 Great American Cities Got Their Names

- Dan Wetzel on how Boise State could burst the BCS bubble. A Boise State and TCU National Championship game would go a long way to fixing the BCS mess.

- Very Interesting Read on Trader Joe's

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Wow!

Check out this chart!

Wow! Excellent work by Gateway Pundit. The raw numbers come from the Congressional Research Service from a report prepared specifically for Congress. Looking further into the report you find that the rate for in-theater deaths for Operation Iraqi Freedom is almost equal to the rate for in-theater deaths from the Persian Gulf War which was hailed at the time for its low cost in terms of loss of life.

I will also say that I have seen reports that suicide is a big problem with the military today but the numbers point out that the worst year for self inflicted deaths during the Bush administration (188 deaths) is still better than each year of the Clinton administration's first term and equal to Clinton's fifth year in office.

I am respectful of the fact that each number listed represents an American serviceman who gave the last full measure of devotion to his country. I just want people to understand the historical perspective. There are more missing in action from the Korean War than there are dead from Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Smoot-Hawley and the Iraq War

At the beginning of the Depression in 1930 the Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff act and President Hoover signed it into law even though 1,028 economists wrote that the act would be a disaster for the country. The experts were right of course and Smoot-Hawley just made things exponentially worse.

I can't help but see a parallel to today and the War on Terror. Some people may not want to acknowledge it but the fight against Radical Islamics is only just beginning. We still have a long way to go yet some in Congress argue for the almost immediate removal of our troops from Iraq. Almost every military expert says that such a move will just make things worse. Yet there are still those in Congress (and some running for President) that argue for just such a move. I can only imagine that these people either think they know better than the experts (like how Hoover and Congress in 1930 thought they knew better than all those economists) or they are plain pandering to the fringes of the Democratic Party (don't taser me bro).

Just a random observation to toss out there on a Saturday while I wait for the college football games to start.

Friday, May 25, 2007

Iraq Fatalitity Numbers

Instapundit pointed to this post yesterday and I've been thinking about it quite a bit since. And before I start - I know what Twain said about statistics.

The key to the Gateway Pundit post was this graph. The graph shows that the number of military dead in Iraq and Afghanistan just reached the halfway point of the total military dead from the Clinton adminstration.

I agree with the commenters who said that the numbers are decieving because the Bush numbers don't include all the military dead (including those who died in accidents, or natural causes or suicide) whereas the Clinton numbers do. I don't have numbers for Bush's second term but in Clinton's first term there were 4302 total military deaths whereas Bush's first term had 5187 total military deaths. In Bush's first term there were "only" 885 more military deaths even though we were fighting to free an estimated 31 million people in Afghanistan and another 26 million people in Iraq.

Let me toss out two more sets of statistics. The first is from the leftish Iraq Body Count who estimates that a minimum of 64,133 or a maximum of 70,243 civilians have been killed since the start of the Iraq War (which again is misleading because this is actually just a continuation of the first Gulf War). I want to compare that to something Andrew Sullivan posted just before the war started:

Based on Iraqi government figures, UNICEF estimates that containment kills roughly 5,000 Iraqi babies (children under 5 years of age) every month, or 60,000 per year. Other estimates are lower, but by any reasonable estimate containment kills about as many people every year as the [first] Gulf War - and almost all the victims of containment are civilian, and two-thirds are children under 5.

People like to think things exist in a vacuum but if these sets of numbers are correct - then doing nothing (i.e. keeping the status quo that existed prior to 2003) would have cost the lives of 240,000 children under 5 in Iraq by now - never mind the number of adults or children over the age of 5. Think about that for a little while.

I think short term that things are improving in Iraq to a point where when the 2008 elections heat up - Iraq will be much less of an interest to voters. Some people will be purposely ignoring good news coming out of Iraq because it will disprove their anti-war, Code Pink positions. There is more flipping and flopping predicted on the horizon.

I also think that in the long term that the idea of "flypaper" will find much favor with historians. Two years ago I was on the "flypaper" bandwagon and I remain still. I believe David Warren is credited with coining the term. Here's a brief explanation from him:

....While engaged in the very difficult business of building a democracy in Iraq -- the first democracy should it succeed in the entire history of the Arabs -- President Bush has also quite consciously to my information created a new playground for the enemy away from Israel and even farther away from the United States itself. By the very act of proving this lower ground he drains terrorist resources from other swamps.

This is the meaning of Mr. Bush's "bring 'em on" taunt from the Roosevelt Room on Wednesday when he was quizzed about the "growing threat to U.S. forces" on the ground in Iraq. It should have been obvious that no U.S. President actually relishes having his soldiers take casualties. What the media and U.S. Democrats affect not to grasp is that the soldiers are now replacing targets that otherwise would be provided by defenseless civilians both in Iraq and at large. The sore thumb of the U.S. occupation -- and it is a sore thumb equally to Baathists and Islamists compelling their response -- is not a mistake. It is carefully hung flypaper.