Reality Check

In the American war on Vietnam (between 1965 and 1975) over a million Vietnamese lost their lives (see Hirschman, Preston, and Loi, 1995). The ostensible purpose of American military intervention in Vietnam was to prevent the spread of Communism (considered to be a virulent ideology).

The American war on Vietnam ended in failure: after the withdrawal of American troops, the northern and southern sections of the country were united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, a political arrangement that has persisted now for 40 years.

The American war on Iraq started in 1991 and has continued until the present time. No accurate statistics are presently available for Iraqi deaths during this period.

The ostensible purpose of American military intervention in Iraq has shifted over the last quarter of a century, from an alleged "mad man" at the helm (Saddam Hussein, now deceased), to an alleged "mad man" at the helm actively developing "weapons of mass destruction" for use against the U.S. mainland or Israel, to a feared takeover of the country by an alleged global network of terrorist cells ("al-Qaeda") bent on destroying Western civilization, to (at present) a feared takeover of the country by another alleged terrorist organization ("IS" or "ISIL" or "ISIS," the acronyms are unstable) bent on...establishing a medieval Caliphate?

Before proceeding further, the reader is requested to review some facts and questions posed in this blog on September 17, 2014.

For reasons that are obscure to the present blogger, the virulent ideology that is embraced by the Vietnamese (not to mention their neighbors China and North Korea) and that justified American military intervention over a ten year period and the deaths of over a million Vietnamese (men, women, and children) is, in the aftermath of our defeat, no longer virulent. How does that follow?

In Iraq, the alleged "mad man" is dead (executed by the U.S. military), his alleged program for the development of weapons of mass destruction was a fiction, and the same may be said for the notion that there is a global network of terrorist cells bent on destroying Western civilization.

Never mind any of that, now we are supposed to fear the establishment of a medieval political institution in Iraq because...this is the latest allegation fed to the American public through its news media.

At what point does the bizarre equal the utterly preposterous? And when do past disclosures of false allegations finally influence our estimation of the reliability of our sources of information?

And, perhaps most important of all, why don't we know, or care to know, precisely how many men, women, and children have lost their lives in Iraq due to the American war against that country since 1991?