Elder care obligations have kept me on the run this week, but I see that Jonah Goldberg left his mark on the Los Angeles Times Opinion page yesterday. So did my parakeet, but Jonah clearly outperformed her by managing to cover twice as many column inches while still working with the same basic materials.
ONE THOUSAND three hundred and forty seven days.
Jonah’s head has now officially been up his ass longer than America was involved in World War II.
That’s how long the United States was involved in combat in World War II, and Monday, the U.S. passed that “grim military milestone,” as one TV anchor called it. This factoid has become a fixture of respectable talking points about the futility of the Iraq war. Newscasters and pundits note its gravity with sober foreboding and slight head-shaking.
The only thing they don’t note is the grotesque stupidity of the comparison.
And when Jonah wants to talks about “grotesque stupidity,” it’s like a bearded sea captain in a yellow sou’wester who wants to tell you about his 3 Way Chowder and Bisque Sampler. Trust the Gorton’s Fisherman.
Let us start with the obvious. World War II may have lasted 1,347 days, but it cost the lives of 406,000 Americans and wounded 600,000 more. Losses among Allied civilians and military personnel stretched into the tens of millions. Whole cities were razed, populations displaced, economies shattered.
All that and it still took less time than George Bush’s Outward Bound excursion to Baghdad.
The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq remains much less than 1% of our WWII losses.
Amazing! Unless you continue with the obvious, and observe that we have roughly 135,000 troops in Iraq, while there were over 16 million men and women in the Armed Forces during World War II.
World War II ended when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Were it not for those grave measures, the war might have lasted for another year or two and cost many more lives. So maybe those wielding the WWII yardstick as a cudgel would prefer we gave Sadr City and Tikrit the Hiroshima-Nagasaki treatment?
Well, Jonah promised grotesque stupidity, but I have to say, he delivered well beyond my wildest dreams. This is the H-Bomb of Strawman Arguments, and earns the coveted Order of the Wicker Man with Screaming Christopher Lee Cluster:
That would surely root out even the most die-hard insurgents and shorten the war.
Yeah, I can’t see any of the other Sunni and Shiite communities in the region getting all worked up just because we expunged a couple of Sunni and Shiite cities in Iraq with nuclear weapons. Tony Snow might have to take a little chin music at the next presser, but I predict it would be a 24 hour story, tops.
The phase of the Iraq war that was comparable to World War II ended in less than three weeks.
That would the phase where we weren’t sucking like Jeff Gannon on an overbooked holiday weekend.
Remember “shock and awe”?
Yeah. Principally, I remember that it sounded pretty stupid. But now – and I gotta admit, props to Jonah – it sounds grotesquely stupid.
As far as such things go, the conventional war put WWII to shame.
Yeah, all the Allies had to do in WWII was to fight a multi-front war spanning the globe from Scandinavia to the South Pacific. In Iraq, we had to fight our way from Kuwait City to Baghdad, a distance of 344 miles! (And it sounds even more impressive when you count it in kilometers!)
the U.S. military victory was akin to defeating all of Italy in less than a month.
Wellll…If you don’t count the fact that Italy was muddy, mountainous, and defended by both Fascist troops and a well-equipped, battle-hardened German Army that didn’t collapse at the first sound of gunfire, then yeah. Sure.
The current phase of the Iraq war — whether we call it post-occupation, reconstruction, civil war or whatever — is really a separate war.
Donald Rumsfeld’s greatest innovation: The Modular War. Today…Iraq. Tomorrow…Ikea!
It’s at once a Hobbesian nightmare in which chaos rules as well as a complex, multi-front battle between various regional factions and their proxies.
I can see why Jonah is so prone to defend it. Who wouldn’t want to hop on some of that sweet action?
But as insurgencies go, it hasn’t lasted very long at all or cost very many American lives.
At least, it hasn’t killed any of the people Jonah meets for crumble cake and vanilla mocha lattes at Starbucks.
The man who probably deserves the most credit for the low number of American deaths in Iraq is Donald H. Rumsfeld. The outgoing Defense secretary decided from the outset that U.S. forces would have a “light footprint” and would opt for surgical efficiency over the kitchen-sink approach that characterized World War II.
Jonah has a point. If there’s one gripe I have with our strategy in WWII, it’s that we simply had too many men. It wasn’t sporting, and it made us look like big insecure bullies. Imagine how much more respectfully the Nazis would have received us if, instead of rolling into Germany with 3 separate armies and millions of troops, we’d tried to occupy them with, say, 150,000? Now that would have been a fight! Face it, people like to get their money’s worth; nobody likes a knockout in the first round. And if we’d only followed the Rumsfeldian “light footprint” doctrine, why, we might still be fighting the Nazis today. Just imagine the pay-per-view possibilities!
Rumsfeld’s way is better, at least on paper. All else being equal, it’s better to have a long war with fewer casualties than a short war with more of them. That’s why the World War II comparison is so frivolous: Days don’t cost anything, lives do.
Except when we’re losing 2 or 3 or 4 lives per day, every day we stay in Iraq. But who cares? Sands through the hourglass, and all that.
Given the enormous scope of World War II, it was a remarkably short war. (Just think of the Hundred Years War by comparison.)
Given the enormous amount of traffic it carries, Fifth Avenue is a remarkably short street. (Just think of the Pan-American Highway. Or the distance from the Sun to Uranus.)
(Okay, I admit, now I’m just cherry-picking the juiciest fruits of stupidity.)
Indeed, when partisans claim that the American people are fed up and want our troops home, they’re deliberately muddying the waters.
Which Jonah objects to on principle, except when he’s using your Jacuzzi.
The American people have never objected to far-flung deployments of our troops. We’ve had soldiers stationed all over the world for decades.
Not getting shot at and blown up on a daily basis, but still…They’re definitely out of earshot.
What the American people don’t like is losing — lives or wars. After all, you don’t hear many people complaining that we still have troops in Japan and Germany more than 20,000 days later.
Even though you can’t get from Tempelhof to the Unter den Linden without your taxi getting hulled by a .50 sniper rifle or dismantled by an IED, people still support our occupation of Berlin. See? It’s all just a matter of perspective. Grotesquely. Stupid. Perspective.
