Inbox Fun

The week is never complete without another bullshit e-mail forward from my brother. This week's installment was bafflingly cobbled together from a few different things that have been bouncing around the internets for a few years, combining 2004's "A Letter from a Vietnam Vet" with Howard Metzenbaum's stupid 1974 (!) senate race "You Never Had a Job" attack on John Glenn and some hand-wringing about how tired our president is looking lately. The upshot of the new Frankenstein product is that we liberals simply don't understand how hard it is to win a war and should quit bitching about George Bush's grand adventure in Iraq because of several facts people just don't think about clearly enough.

Let's jump right in, shall we?

Last January, there were 39 combat-related killings in Iraq. In the city of Detroit there were 35 murders in the same month. That's just one American city -- about as deadly as the entire war-torn country of Iraq.

This is one of my favorites, frequently used to prove the point that since Iraq is just as safe as Detroit, we shouldn't be clamoring to get our guys out, or that we should invade Detroit. Given that this e-mail is obviously still circulating and serving as Truth in the brains of the folks who so eagerly keep hitting their "forward" buttons, the cited "last January" figure could use some serious correction. In reality, the cited death toll is not accurate for January of any year since the invasion; the monthly count has been below forty in only seven of the 49 months of the war to date, with an average of more than 67 US deaths per. Actual casualties from January 2007: 90 killed in combat; 44 in Baghdad, 56 elsewhere in Iraq (primarily Al Anbar province, Ninewa province, Karbala). Homicide data from Detroit during the same month are surprisingly difficult to come by; a blog tracking murders reported in Detroit media lists 15 homicides in January. The Iraqi civilian body count, which may be a more accurate proxy for the Detroit murder rate, is substantial: 1,568 people were killed in January 2007 in Baghdad alone, which works out to one murder per 63,400 Detroit residents (population ~951,000), compared to one per 4,719 Baghdad residents (pop. ~7.4 million)--a 1300% greater murder rate in Baghdad, which again does not count the rest of that war-torn country.

Okay, what's next? How about this one:

When some claim President Bush shouldn't have started this war because Iraq never threatened America, it could be recalled that in 1941 President Franklin Roosevelt went to war with Germany, which never attacked America. Japan did.

Why, yes, you are correct there; Germany did not pre-emptively attack the United States. Germany did, however, declare war on the US (another quaint concept, much like the Geneva Conventions, no?) on December 11, 1941; the US immediately responded with its own war declaration. The key distinction between Germany and Iraq should be fairly obvious here, but if it needs clearing up, the fact that Germany declared war on American means it was threatening America, and its very recent history of rolling into other countries (say Poland, for the history-impaired) backed that war declaration with a very real and immediate threat.

More.

John Kennedy started the Vietnam conflict in 1962. Vietnam never attacked. President Lyndon Johnson turned Vietnam into a quagmire. From 1965-1975, 58,000 lives were lost -- an average of 5,800 per year.

Yes. We recognize that Vietnam was a monumental mistake that turned into a quagmire. No one rationally disputes that, not even us liberals, despite our hero Kennedy's culpability. We remember that history and use it to argue against getting embroiled in a modern quagmire in Iraq. The fact that Democrats fucked up forty years ago does not justify the current adminstration's refusal to learn the lessons of history.

This is getting tiring, but:

In the two years since terrorists attacked us President Bush has ... liberated two countries, crushed the Taliban, crippled al-Qaida, put nuclear inspectors in Libya, Iran and North Korea without firing a shot, and captured a terrorist who slaughtered 300,000 of his own people.

Afghanistan indeed has a rudimentary democracy going, and the invasion of that country was fully justified because the people who plotted and planned 9/11 did the plotting and planning there. Great. The problem came when the dogs were largely called off and sent to Iraq, which had exactly jack shit to do with 9/11. You may have noticed the resurgence of the Taliban in the last year. You may have noticed today that the Afghan government is demanding a cease-fire in the wake of mounting civilian casualties. And yes, we caught Saddam, who killed thousands of his own people... using chemical weapons the US was happy to sell him during the Iraq-Iran war.

Hmm, something key is missing here. Wait for it... waaaaiiiit for it...

We've been looking for evidence of chemical weapons in Iraq for less time that it took Hillary Clinton to find the Rose law firm billing records.

Ah, there we go. Compulsory Clinton reference absolving the current administration of any blame or fault. Well, hell, we'd been looking (in 2004, the time this e-mail originally surfaced) for less time that Dubya spent AWOL from his National Guard unit. We've been looking for less time than he's spent clearing brush in Crawford. What's your point? If Dear Leader is looking worn out, it's sure as hell not because he's losing sleep over Iraq.

That's all I can take for now. Note to my brother and people like him: develop some critical thinking skills before sending this crap winging through the ether. Your arguments would have much more substance if they weren't backed in such large measure by out-of-date information, distortions, and outright lies.