Facts About the War

Facts About the War

Commentary

THE GENERAL facts about the recent war are not in much dispute. In a span of about three weeks, the United States military overran a country the size of California. It utterly obliterated Saddam Hussein’s military hardware—tanks, heavy artillery, transport—and tore apart his armies. Of the approximately 110 American deaths in the course of the hostilities, fully a fourth occurred as a result of accidents, friendly fire, or peacekeeping mishaps rather than at the hands of enemy soldiers. The extraordinarily low ratio of total American casualties per number of U.S. soldiers deployed, or of American fatalities per Iraqi soldiers killed, is almost unmatched in modern military history—and an unimaginably long way from the specter of Armageddon offered up by a variety of self-proclaimed experts before the war and during its early days.