TWO UC PROFESSORS AND THEIR BLOGS

I just found out that a close associate of TFM is taking a class at UCLA, taught by a blogger whom I regularly read, Mark Kleiman.

Unfortunately, the person in question finds Kleiman's lectures to be "dull", and occasionally skips out on the class. Which is interesting, because I find his commentary on his blog to be quite witty and lively. Maybe he could take the 90minute trip up to SB and put Gordon in his place.

Checking in with the Bugger, he's in the middle of a three-part piece on how Iraq is nothing, nothing like Vietnam. Says Gordon in part two, referencing the mounting US casualties in Iraq:

And now, of course, it's a legacy of worries and ultra-sensitivity that feeds into the concern --- voiced repeatedly in the media and by numerous Democratic politicians (and a few Republicans) --- that the public will soon weary of growing American casualties in post-war Iraq, if it already hasn't: witness, it's claimed, the decline in recent public support for the President's policies there. So far, remember, there have been about 380 US casualties since the start of the war to topple Saddam in March and over the six months since its end in early April. Though that amounts to slightly more than a US soldier killed a day --- a trend-rate that dipped noticeably after the war and then continued to dip beginning again in July --- and hence is about one-tenth of the daily casualty rate in Vietnam --- the worry that the public might abandon support for our efforts to transform Iraq can’t be lightly dismissed.

Hmm, "one-tenth of the daily casualty rate in Vietnam". Well, yeah. But we're in the initial 7 months of our military involvement in Iraq. Looking at the Vietnam stats (scroll to bottom), we see that in the first few years of the conflict in earnest (61-65 or 63-65, whatever napalms your jungle), there were around 1,800 US casualties. We're about to hit 400 in seven months (and contrary to Gordon's claim, it's not slowing down). Granted, it's too early to say what historical parallels will most easily be drawn to Iraq in the long run. But through the 'Nam lens, Iraq does look pretty bad. And Gordon would have been better off if he started and finished his piece with "well, one's jungle and the other's desert".