I posted on the Iraq = Vietnam topic some months ago. A new article in Slate, Iraq 2004 Looks Like Vietnam 1966 neatly falsifies the "light casualties" meme. The authors, former officers, show that after adjusting for wound lethality (better military medicine) and troop counts (Vietnam had three times more U.S. troops in 1966), we've got the same fatality rate as the prior quagmire.
As an interesting aside: they cite a study that showed improved civilian trauma medicine accounts for most of the decline in the domestic murder rate over the past 40 years.
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