Iraq - the US version of Soviet Afgan War?
I studied up a little on the Soviet Afgan war that took place from 1979 to 1988. Almost 10 years and they lost 14,000 soldiers with 10,000 seriously injured and 415,000 which got sick from bad conditions. These numbers seem close to ours. We have almost 4,000 dead but probably more so if you consider those that died from natural conditions, accident, and suicide. Also, they had far less seriously wounded, we have more. Remember, I am comparing 1/2 of the Soviet war to the US-Iraq war over the past 5 years. The conditions are better for our soldiers but they are estimating that tens of thousands will suffer from PTSD in the future.
It seems our troop rotation might be on a longer period as the Soviets had over 600,000 troops over the 9 year period. I don't remember the exact number but I think the US has sent about 400,000 troops over to the area over the past 5 years.
Lastly, the Soviets never had more than 105,000 troops occupying one country. We currently have 180,000 spread all over the place.
The thinking by those in agreement with war is that if we don't attack them, someone else will. That someone else will then get the oil. Vacuums in power and resources available will always exist, why shouldn't the US take advantage of those vacuums to set ourselves up to keep power?
The other side says that we should simply get away from oil as a natural resource. As the old saying goes, if the oil were broccoli, there would be no war there.
One big issue is the gobs of money that is going into this war - on a huge national credit card. This fact is not brought to our attention because we are not paying the costs through increased revenues such as taxes. Heck, we haven't even been billed or invoiced yet. So we really don't know how much this war costs as it is not a line item in our national budget. It really should be, don't you think?
The other issue is the veterans that will have mental health problems, lack of jobs, and lack of medical care and support with our dwindling budget. This new Vietnam will give us homeless veterans, some of which might be a danger to themselves and others. We haven't even seen these people because they are still serving oversees or getting some treatment at this time. Once the country starts going bankrupt and pulling out of the middle east, we will then see these folks cast aside in huge numbers.
The final issue is that war can cause countries to literally go bankrupt. The Soviet Union has never recovered from fighting one country. How will this end for a country, like the US, waging wars against multiple countries?
