MARK SMITH MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

Time after time we are told, fanatically, that we are up against the worst threat ever. That the War on Terror is the greatest threat we have ever faced. And the saddest thing is a lot of people believe it.

It's nonsense, folks.

Just glancing at casualty figures, I'd say World War II was pretty bad, but of course that's a long time ago and all those dead didn't mean anything, did they?

Then you can look at Korea -- 33,000 dead -- and Vietnam -- 58,000 dead -- and I'd say there were a lot more casualties in those wars than the War on Terror has come close to taking.

Terror? Roughly 3,000 dead in the U.S. and 4,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is the worst threat?

Yeah, I know, at any moment someone could touch off a dirty bomb or unleash the plague, but the same could have been said about the Soviet Union or Red China in the 1950s or '60s.

And the fact remains, none of those things has happened.

To add to the insult, the 4,000 dead in Iraq are all for an error. Oops, imagine our embarrassment! There weren't any weapons of mass destruction. Was our face red.

Sorry, but now we're there and we have to clean up the mess we caused.

Sorry for those 4,000 dead guys and the 30,000 wounded.

Sorry for all the dead and crippled and maimed Iraqis, but no sweat, no one is listening, much less counting them.

Seems to me the way to clean it up would have been to get out of there back when our casualty count was in the low hundreds.

We invade Iraq and kill Saddam Hussein. But we don't even make a pretense at consistency. Next door in one direction is Syria, as brutal and tyrannical, albeit slightly more subtle, than Iraq was, and in the other direction is Iran, which is not exactly heaven sent. North Korea is virtually a buddy now, and we don't dare lift a finger when China trashes the Tibetans (they've got nukes, so we're not going to do a thing to them).

Listening to the radio and hearing this: We're over there fighting so our buddies will get back alive. Yes, that's almost ver batim what the Marine vet said on NPR.

Completely ignoring the fact that if we weren't over there, we wouldn't have to worry about getting our buddies back alive.

I'm apparently lost in Cloud Cuckooland where all the logic is circular and comes back to bite itself.

Another vet, in these pages, announced that leaving troops there for nine or 10 years would be fine. Heck, we've been in Korea and Germany for that long, right?

Right, only we weren't still fighting all that time, the wars were over and we were occupation troops, backing up a demi-country that had been invaded by North Korean communists and, in Europe, providing the core to NATO against the Soviet Union.

Another made mention of Vietnam. Well, shoot, that went on for 10 years, didn't it?

Yes, and it did so because our leaders couldn't get it through their thick skulls that we weren't winning. Remember? We lost, they won. And it took us more than a decade to realize it.

Well, heck yeah, let's do that again and prove we're too stupid to learn anything.

So I'm a little touchy about all the feel-good stupidity that is oozing out of D.C. regarding a war that never had to be fought and that has gone on for far too long and is not getting any shorter.

And then Bush and the new attorney general drone, Mukasey, both mention the terrifying stuff they've learned about terrorists.

But have you noticed, not in one instance has the conveniently color-coded terror level gone up so much as a notch? Not an iota.

Meanwhile we manage to forget about even the recent past.

You know, after Vietnam there was an effort in the services to come up with some rational strategy where future wars were concerned.

How do we avoid quicksand wars that kill our troops but won't allow us to get out?

The reason for the idea was that whatever we go into, we need to know ahead of time that there is a way for us to remove ourselves.

But alas, we haven't learned a damned thing.

And no, it's not the troops out in the boondocks -- it is, once again, the dunderheaded politicians who are convinced they know better, not one of whom has ever been shot at for keeps.

At least in Vietnam, we had some experience at the highest levels. Secretary of Labor Goldberg had actually planned amphibious invasions; Secretary of the Interior Udall had fought with the OSS in Burma. They were ignored, unfortunately, but the knowledge was there. Kennedy was an authentic hero in the South Pacific, and even LBJ flew a couple of missions there.

Not anymore.

These days we are led by the ignorant and the obtuse, men who learned their trade in academic journals and on college campuses and never saw the blood-webbed body of a buddy or got rained on or ate C-rations.

It is often said of World War II and other historical epochs that there were giants in those days.

Now we have merely a gang of pathetic midgets, acting out their bloody-minded fantasies, where only sterile numbers die and the wounded are photo ops.