http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ucrr/20050624/cm_ucrr/timetablesixmoreyearsiniraqThe words are almost always the same: "threat" ... "atrocities" ... "secret intelligence" ... "mission" ... "preventive" ... "fog" ... "brave" ... "terrorists" ... "Support our troops" ... "Stay the course" ... "waste"... "treason" ... "timetable" ... "withdraw" ... "tragedy."
It usually takes about nine years to say them all. Americans said them about Vietnam between 1964 and 1973. The Soviets said them about Afghanistan from 1979 to 1988. Judging by that recent history, we will be in Iraq for six or even more years. It will be a "tragedy" when we leave in 2012.
As we count our dead -- we lost more than 55,000 men and women in Vietnam, and the Soviets lost about 15,000 in Afghanistan -- the land we fought over will return to what it had been and may always be. The Vietnamese have been in the steamy heat of Vietnam for as long as history has been written. The same is true of the people in the hard mountains and valleys of Afghanistan and in the sands of Iraq. They are there forever. The occupiers go home one day; we come and we go.
It does take a while, a generation or so, for the natives to work their numbers up to where they were. The 135,000 invading Soviets killed more than a million Afghans, more than 9 percent of the 1979 population. Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died in their nine years of cohabitation with the 550,000 Americans sent to save them. Thankfully, the numbers in Iraq will certainly be lower. Even now it is hard to keep track -- and our government does not count collateral deaths -- because the time differences make it hard to remember whether the 53 announced on television just now includes the 32 I just saw in the papers.
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