Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Captain Capitalism's Annual Chart Contest - Entrant #9

Kevin makes a good point with this chart.

I often wonder if we'd have the wherewithal today to fight in WWII. Sadly, I think we'd collapse and capitulate just as fast as the French, because, hey, being alive and enslaved is better than being free and dead? Right? I recall somebody saying something about liberty or death in American history, but ah, what did those dumb American founding fathers know anyway? Cripes.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm wondering exactly what Iraq has to do with our freedom. It seems to me that we're sacrificing money and lives for the sake of people who would rather be killing each other anyway.

The Sunnis and Shiites look more than capable of carrying out the war in Iraq without any further US help, so it looks like our job is done. :P

Anonymous said...

Where's the rest of the Vietnam months? You only show up through the end of 1965. Shift the Vietnam months over to begin in 1964. That's when US involvement really began.

Anonymous said...

The more I think about it, the more I believe the reason we really all got behind WW2 is that the Soviet Union was also attacked. Which means the left got behind the war as much as the right. If Germany hadn't attacked the USSR, that war would have looked quite a bit different.

Alfred T. Mahan said...

Um, no, actually, he doesn't.

Read the chart again. It begins with American involvement in Vietnam in December of 1961, when our commitment wasn't anywhere near what our commitment, force-wise, was in Iraq in 2003. Ergo, the possibility of the number of deaths simply isn't there until the commitment of major American forces AFTER the Gulf of Tonkin resolution...conveniently enough, 48 months later.

C'mon, Captain, you've seen We Were Soldiers' you should be able to figure that out.

Alfred T. Mahan said...

I'm going with the reason we all got behind WWII is that the United States Pacific Fleet was attacked at Pearl Harbor by the forces of the Empire of Japan, and then Nazi Germany was stupid enough to declare war on the United States while still bogged down in the Soviet Union.

Were we sending Lend-Lease to the Soviets? Yes, but that was a hard sell in Congress (Southern Dems and Republicans weren't keen on aiding Communists, for some reason). The German declaration of war simplified matters considerably.

As for the war in Iraq, well, there is the little matter of that's where Al Qaeda is right now, so if we kill them there, so much the better.

Anonymous said...

Heh. Al-Qaeda wasn't there until after we stormed in and started kicking up the shit. Hussein didn't tolerate those guys stirring up trouble, and his brutal methods and extensive secret police were a whole lot more effective than our forces for keeping Al-Qaeda from running around under his nose. We're probably getting them way more recruits than we're killing.

We had more than enough Al-Qaeda to shoot at in Afghanistan, but we took our troops from there to go kick over the biggest secular counterweight to Iran and Islamic Fundamentalism in the region. Granted the Turks are pretty secular too, but they're not going to do anything to keep Iran in line, and they're pissed at us for going into Iraq and getting the Kurds all stirred up anyway.

Go go idiotic foreign policy. We couldn't be doing more to promote Islamic fundamentalism if we were actually trying.