Saturday, December 20, 2003
Military deaths in post-war Europe
As much I enjoyed the email below from the Marine CO (or, more precisely, allegedly from a Marine CO), in at least one respect is does not square with an extensive study prepared by RAND on the history of American post-war reconstruction efforts. Specifically, the email posted below claims that: "Iraq under US-led control has come further in six months than Germany did in seven years or Japan did in nine years following WWII. Military deaths from fanatic Nazi's and Japanese numbered in the thousands, and continued for over three years after WWII victory was declared." The RAND study, which you can download in chunks for free, asserts that there were zero post-war military deaths in either Germany or Japan. Assuming for a moment that the email in question really did originate with a Marine CO and remain unaltered in its journey to me (a big assumption), one wonders where his claim about military deaths in occupied Germany and Japan might have come from. It seems unlikely that a Marine CO would make something like that up out of whole cloth (especially after providing so much other useful and verifiable information), so the assertion begs the question: Is the Pentagon stepping from honest argument to lying about the facts of post-war Germany and Japan in order to counter criticism of its efforts in Iraq?
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