Today's Straw: The War in Iraq
What frosts my wheaties about the war is not so much that we went or why we're 'really' there or who knew what and when and who exaggerated and all that. It's the foggy-headed comparisons to Vietnam... yeah, Viet-friggin-Nam! Anyone old enough to know about Vietnam should know better than to think our excursions into Iraq are remotely comparable.

I'm so apolitical it's scary, and I avoid news whenever possible, but even so, I've finally heard enough of this bullshit to peg my irritation meter.

Vietnam. Go read about it if you don't remember seeing slaughter on the evening news every night for ten years. The entire Iraqi business, including the first time we went over there to bail out Kuwait, doesn't add up to one year of death resulting from Vietnam. Claiming that our troops are currently in the same position now as they were then is an insult to every name on the wall in Washington and all the names we don't even know because we lost track of them in the swamps. It's an affront to every Vet who came back broken and even the guys who broke up their lives to avoid the meat grinder in Asia.

I'm sorry but our current volunteer military is made up mostly of people who wanted college money or couldn't find a civilian job. They are NOT facing the same thing as all those tens of thousands of drafted young men who found themselves fighting deep in the swamps, or in ragged streets where even children could be explosive.

Don't get me wrong, I support everyone we've sent to Iraq. I want every single one of them to come home, safe and sound. I support their families, especially those who have lost or will lose a loved one. But, this is not Vietnam, and this current lot of soldiers isn't likely to return home to people spitting on them or threatening to harm them on our streets too.

Yes, there's danger in Iraq and people are being killed, on both sides. War is like that. People die. If we don't want any more of that, then we must find ways around it. But... don't for a minute try to say that a few hundred deaths in a year equals a hundred in a day.

We're not going in and bombing the shit out of acres of people like we did in Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. We're trying to drop food and supplies for them. We're not wedging ourselves between two obvious factions. We knocked out a man who was committing crimes against humanity and maybe, just maybe, afforded a beaten and fractured population the chance to breathe long enough to figure out what they want. They couldn't dare think about it until now.

I don't know if it was really the right thing for us to go into Iraq. I don't know if we ever really had justification. But I have to say this, I'm damned glad we're not killing and being killed in massive numbers as it was with Vietnam. We're still playing at war and I hate it, but at least we seem to be a little smarter about how we're playing it.

That incomplete list on the Vietnam wall in Washington has over 58,000 names on it. In the year and a half of the Iraqi war, the Coalition forces, not just the US alone, have lost about 1000 in Iraq.

Don't fucking tell me you see a resemblance between Iraq and Vietnam. Don't insult those who died there, or those who've spent every day since trying to figure out how to live with what happened there.