Where Does Iraq Stand Among U.S. Wars?

Total Casualties Compare to Spanish-American, Mexican and 1812 Conflicts

With more than 800 U.S. military personnel killed and more than 4,600 wounded, U.S. casualties in Iraq over the past 14 months now compare to those of several of the smaller wars in the nation's history.

In total casualties -- that is, combined dead and wounded -- the U.S. military now has suffered more in Iraq than in the Spanish-American War. The wounded tally in Iraq -- but not the death total -- has surpassed the figures for the War of 1812 and the Mexican War.

Some military historians and other specialists are beginning to see the Iraq campaign as at least as significant as those other conflicts in its impact on the nation's politics and public opinion.

"Iraq began as an intervention, has now become a minor war and stands to become a medium war as time passes," said Kalev Sepp, a former Special Forces officer who teaches defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School.

By that, Burk said, he meant that it has become "at least the equal of the Mexican War and Spanish-American War in its capacity to make or break political leaders and eventually to affect who Americans think they are in the world."

With the Iraq war still going on, it is impossible to predict how historians and the rest of the American public will ultimately regard it. Burk and others warn that if the pace of casualties in Iraq keeps up, the war's impact on American life could become more like that of the Vietnam War than of those earlier conflicts.

While historians agree that the Iraq intervention is becoming a significant event in the nation's history, they disagree sharply about several other points, such as how comparable it really is to conventional wars. And a few historians, along with some military officers, argue that the fighting in Iraq really is part of a larger war against Islamic extremism and therefore should not be considered in isolation.

The key to much of the disagreement is that most of the nation's smaller wars occurred in the 19th century. American life and culture were so different then, some say, that it is hard to compare the impact of casualties then and now.

But there is general agreement that small numbers of casualties have more political impact now than they did in 1813 or 1847.

"Up through World War I, high casualties were looked at with pride, and bluntly, a lot of people were a lot tougher then -- mentally more than physically," said Robert L. Goldich, a defense expert at the Congressional Research Service. "Death was everywhere, and lots of people died early from disease or complications from injuries or childbirth." In addition, he said, in the dominant political ideology of the time, combat deaths were mourned but were also held to be "glorious and necessary and to be celebrated."

Kurt Hackemer, a specialist in 19th-century U.S. military history at the University of South Dakota, also noted that combat casualties had less immediacy in an age of slow, image-less communications.

"For the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, people read about -- not saw -- casualties well after the fact," Hackemer said. "Because there were no real images associated with casualties, I think they remained something of an abstraction, which allow ordinary citizens to think about them in highly idealized terms."

Some historians say that in some ways, the Iraq effort looks like the long-running, low-intensity conflict of the Army's fighting against Native Americans in the Old West. "Our Army today has a lot in common with the professional army that fought against Native Americans in the American West during the 19th century," said G. Kurt Piehler, a University of Tennessee military historian. Both forces were not only professional, he said, but also relatively small and all-volunteer.