Maybe Celebrim is having a hard time adjusting to the pendulum swinging back against right wing extremism. Celebrim need not worry, those on the left are easily fatigued when pushing against right wing extremism and wwnj’s. So the pendulum is not likely to go to far.

Also, I’m noting that Obama is starting to sound more like Dick Cheney lately than anyone on the left, so things might not be so “bad” for Celebrim after all.

Once you have driven the remaining 1200 “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” fighters (ever question who made up those numbers,how or why?) away to their deaths or other regions, are you going to return your attention to the insurgency continuing throughout the country or the 80% (my estimate) of Iraqi’s who want American troops to leave?

Next topic: Angry wwnj’s -

I thought Celebrim had some good points, but wow were they ever out of place. Rather than criticize, he should stfu and go create his own graphs.

Funny how, despite his claims that jbc’s method failed and that therefore JBC was ideological and wrongheaded, his assertion that his method would have shown the similarities between the two wars was surprising. That reminds me of a defence attorney (JBC) facing off against an incompetent prosecutor (but who thinks he is cerebral) and the defence attorney just smiles and motions for the prosecutor to please… keep talking(!) knowing that the prosecutor will simply FUBAR his own case and no defence will be necessary.

Kudos to JBC’s reply to Celebrim, I got a chuckle out of it. The sad part is that the wwnj probably took John’s reply seriously. I’m starting to agree with Enk that ridicule is the best way of dealing with these wwnj’s. It seems that trying to be rational, explain subtleties or what constitutes general human decency is completely lost on them. Arguing with these arrogant degenerates is like wrestling with a pig: nothing is accomplished, you both end up covered in shit, and the pig likes it.

images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=morans&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title

The only bush derangement syndrome is for morans who still think shrubbie is in any way competent for the job.

enkidu: That lie has been widely debunked by numerous websites, including by ones that lean hard to the left – probably because itthey don’t want idiots repeating it and poisoning the anti-war well with easily debunked conspiracy theories.

But don’t take my word for it. Try this site with a left leaning admin, http://icasualties.org/oif/Outoftheater.aspx

Anyway, keep up with your stupidity, it just makes it easier for me to discredit the whole bunch of you morons.

‘If you’d actually done those things, the resulting graph would actually show “the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US.”, and would actually show a good deal of political similarities between the two conflicts. But, since your interest in history was never as acute as your BDS, the actual graph you produced has absolutely no merit and will henseforth only increasingly show just how wrong headed you always were.’

Heh. Well, at least it’s good for _something_.

John

As always, your protests and rationalizations regarding your motives are really weak. If anyone goes back and reads your original post, it’s quite clear that the purpose of constructing these (otherwise truly excellent) graphs was to advance the claim that Iraq = Vietnam.

As always, I claim your start dates were chosen not because they made any sense, but to ensure that the graph you ended up with supported the thesis you wanted to advance at the moment you made it.

Now that that thesis has been left in tatters by the onward march of history, as I always said that it would be, I want to add a few things:

a) I told you so.
b) If you had adopted the reforms I suggested early on, ironically you would have actually done a better job of fulfilling both your stated and unstated goals. In case you’ve forgotten, the reforms I advocated had three parts.

i) Set the graphs up so the the Vietnam trendline begins when the US first sent advisors to Vietnam and US soldiers began dying, which is significantly prior to where you begin it your graph.
ii) Likewise, set up the Iraq trendline to begin with the December 28, 1992 incident which broke the ceasefire that ended the first Gulf War. This would cover the period of Operation Southern Watch and Operation Desert Fox, a period which, contrary to conventional wisdom the US and the Iraqis were shooting at each other and dying on both sides. As I’ve said before, the most US deaths in a single month during Operation Southern Watch (due to a friendly fire incident) were higher than those of some of the quieter months of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Setting up the graph to show a full picture of the US-Iraqi conflict would show a great deal more historical understanding than you’ve ever shown, but it would be correct.
iii) Align the two trendlines so that the Americanization and escalation of the Vietnam conflict that began with the January 31, 1965 offensive and the March 20, 2003 offensive that marks the beginning of operation Iraqi freedom are the midpoint of the graph. In this way, you’d be comparing apples to apples. The long lead up to both conflicts would be compared to each other, and the period of heaviest fighting would be directly compared to each other.
iv) Normalizing the graph in various ways (time scale, troops engaged) would be interesting, but is not strictly necessary as the above reforms produce a very interesting graph without manipulation.

If you’d actually done those things, the resulting graph would actually show “the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US.”, and would actually show a good deal of political similarities between the two conflicts. But, since your interest in history was never as acute as your BDS, the actual graph you produced has absolutely no merit and will henseforth only increasingly show just how wrong headed you always were.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article4276486.ece

I’d be very interested to see two more colored lines on jbc’s graph: # of wounded for each war. We are saving lives with our much better front line med tech and medevac systems. Too bad the VA funding increases from 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006 were all opposed by McBush.

In a 2004 Washington post article it said fatalities are about 10 percent in this war, I’ve recently heard 1 in 12 so we have gotten better as the war has progressed, they were about 25 % in Vietnam and the first Gulf war. We are getting much better at getting guys back to the US for treatment, they said it took an average of 28 days in the Vietnam era to get someone home, in one case in this war a soldier was in Walter Reed in 36 hours with about a week being average. The two wars aren’t very analogous in terms of geography, or tactics. This Iraq war is a combination of urban and desert warfare and the Vietnam war was jungle so getting someone out of the fight would be easier in Iraq I would think. We have also had absolute air superiority in Iraq and are fighting a much smaller and less organized force. This war has it’s own unique set of challenges, but the two wars aren’t very similar.

I don’t think anyone has good numbers on civilian losses in either war. I would think civilian losses caused by us would be less with the development of smart bombs. They were in their infancy at the end of Vietnam. I would think civilian losses from the terrorists would be higher in this war if you don’t include deaths in Cambodia and Vietnam after we left. But those are just assumptions based on some rather sketchy estimates.

Just for historical perspective I believe more people died of injuries weeks and months after the fact in the civil war than were killed outright.

1) I wonder how the casualty charts would look, since clearly we’re much better at saving the lives of injured soldiers than we were back in Vietnam.

2) I wonder if the military strategy has changed as well. I’m going on the assumption that our power over Vietnam was significant enough that the increase in our military power since then is immaterial to having such low death rates. Perhaps there’s a different strategy here in Iraq?

3) I’d also be curious about the civilian casualty figures and if there has been any progress between these two conflicts.