46,137 - total non mortal casualties in Iraq

[BOSSHOG]

and not one of them cared about by an conservative in this country.

http://icasualties.org/oif/default.aspx

They continue to die or are blown to bits and conservatives are too proud and too ignorant to do anything but continue to support bush (although that number is dwindling, the damage done by conservatives on our military is close to total.)

[sinkingfeeling]

1. If the Iraqi occupation were taking place in the mid-1960's, then I would guess that

at least half of those 46,137 would have died from their wounds. Iraq would to be more deadly than Viet Nam. 2882 + 23,068 = 25,950....half of the 58,000 VN deaths in only 4 years.

[Boo Boo]

2. Bad guess. In Vietnam there were well over 350,000 casualties.

Number of wounded or killed in action was, AFAIK, 352,082 with 47,378 killed. Do the math, and that works out to roughly a 13.5 percent mortality rate. So...

(46,137 + 2,883) x .135 = ~6,618

* Edit: Was rounding down the mortality rate to .13, which rounded off ~245 KIA.

[PurityOfEssence]

3. Great. So it doesn't stack up against the fourth largest disaster in our history

Arguments like this always wilt when confronted with reality. It's like Bob Novak huffing and snorting that economic conditions are nowhere near as bad as when he was a kid. (That was during the biggest financial disaster of our country, the great depression.) If you compare a disaster to the worst disasters known, it's generally fairly easy to make things seem like a stroll in the park.

The Civil War was the worst, World War 2 comes in second, World War 1 third (although the killing rate per day was much worse than any of our wars if you look at the few months of our actual commitment) and Vietnam is fourth. Gosh, so this really doesn't stack up against horrific disasters; that must make it just fine, right?

It hardly rates with ghastly ugly carnage, so it's not such a big deal.

Talk about lowered expectations and quibbling...

[sinkingfeeling]

4. And you're not taking into consideration the length of Viet Nam vs. Iraq. The point I was making is

that with the improvements in 'battlefield medicine' over the last 30+ years, more wounded are surviving in Iraq than in Viet Nam or WWII or WWI or the US Civil War. Since so many of the injuries in Iraq are head traumas, I heard someone on TV discussing that 30 years ago, more than half of those would have been fatal.