Supporting The Troops, Then And Now

One of the weirdest things about Iraq has been the open comparisons of it by people like Max Boot to the Spanish-American War. Usually you'd expect crazy leftists to do that, since the Spanish-American War was imperialist yadda aggression based on shameless yadda lies. But I guess the right feels comfortable enough in their power to be honest. Certainly I admire how straightforward Jay Garner was when he said:

"Look back on the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century: they were a coaling station for the navy, and that allowed us to keep a great presence in the Pacific. That's what Iraq is for the next few decades: our coaling station that gives us great presence in the Middle East."

But thankfully it's not just the coaling station part that's the same! For instance:

Troops and civilians at a U.S. military base in Iraq were exposed to contaminated water last year, and employees for the responsible contractor, Halliburton Co., could not get their company to inform camp residents, according to interviews and internal company documents.

Compare to:

Richard Morris's Encyclopedia of American History gives startling figures: "Of the more than 274,000 officers and men who served in the army during the Spanish-American War and the period of demobilization, 5,462 died in the various theaters of operation and in camps in the U.S. Only 379 of the deaths were battle casualties, the remainder being attributed to disease and other causes"...

In May of 1898, Armour and Company, the big meatpacking company of Chicago, sold the army 500,000 pounds of beef which had been sent to Liverpool a year earlier and had been returned. Two months later, an army inspector tested the Armour meat, which had been stamped and approved by an inspector of the Bureau of Animal Industry, and found 751 cases containing rotten meat. In the first sixty cases he opened, he found fourteen tins already burst, "the effervescent putrid contents of which were distributed all over the cases." (The description comes from the Report of the Commission to Investigate the Conduct of the War Department in the War with Spain, made to the Senate in 1900.) Thousands of soldiers got food poisoning. There are no figures on how many of the five thousand noncombat deaths were caused by that.

Note that this information comes from a special Senate commission set up a hard look at War Department procurement. Whereas today:

The Associated Press obtained the documents from Senate Democrats who are holding a public inquiry into the allegations today. Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), who is scheduled to chair the session, held a number of similar inquiries last year on contracting abuses in Iraq. He said Democrats were acting on their own because they had not been able to persuade Republican committee chairmen to investigate.

So don't think nothing has changed since 1898. Thanks to advances in democracy over the past 108 years, war profiteering has become much less risky!