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| Iraq is Not Vietnam, It's Guadalcanal |
| 2004-09-24 |
| PUNDITS THESE DAYS are quick to compare the fighting in Iraq with the American loss in Vietnam 30 years ago. Terms like "quagmire" evoke the Southeast Asian jungle, where America's technological advantages were negated and committed Vietnamese guerrillas wore down the U.S. will to fight. People love to draw historical analogies because they seem to offer a sort of analytical proof--after all, doesn't history repeat itself? In fact, such comparisons do have value, but like statistics, it's possible to find a historical analogy to suit any argument. And Vietnam's the wrong one for Iraq. In fact, World War II is a far more accurate comparison for the global war we are waging to defeat terrorism. Both wars began for the United States with a catastrophic sneak attack from an undeclared enemy. We had many faint and not-so-faint warnings of the impending Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, not least the historical precedent of Port Arthur in 1904, when the Japanese launched a preemptive strike against Russia. We had similar ill-defined warnings and precedents about al Qaeda and Islamist terrorism (the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998; the USS Cole bombing in 2000), but in 2001 as in 1941, we lacked the "hard" intelligence requisite to convince a country at peace that it was about to pitched into war. Historical apologists say that the Japanese were "forced" to attack us because we were strangling their trade in Asia. Sound familiar? American foreign policy in the Middle East is responsible for the anger and rage that has stirred up al Qaeda, right? In fact, there is a crucial similarity between the Japanese imperialism of 50 years ago and Islamic fundamentalism of today: both are totalitarian, anti-Western ideologies that cannot be appeased. As Japan amassed victory after victory in the early days of the war, America and our allies could see that we had a long, hard slog ahead of us. Americans understood there was no recourse but to win, despite the fearful cost. This was the first and foremost lesson of World War II that applies today: Wars of national survival are not quick, not cheap, and not bloodless. In one of our first counteroffensives against the Japanese, U.S. troops landed on the island of Guadalcanal in order to capture a key airfield. We surprised the Japanese with our speed and audacity, and with very little fighting seized the airfield. But the Japanese recovered from our initial success, and began a long, brutal campaign to force us off Guadalcanal and recapture it. The Japanese were very clever and absolutely committed to sacrificing everything for their beliefs. (Only three Japanese surrendered after six months of combat--a statistic that should put today's Islamic radicals to shame.) The United States suffered 6,000 casualties during the six-month Guadalcanal campaign; Japan, 24,000. It was a very expensive airfield. Which brings us to the next lesson of World War II: Totalitarian enemies have to be bludgeoned into submission, and the populations that support them have to be convinced they can't win. This is a bloody and difficult business. In the Pacific theater, we eventually learned our enemies' tactics--jungle and amphibious warfare, carrier task forces, air power--and far surpassed them. But that victory took four years and cost many hundreds of thousands of casualties. Iraq isn't Vietnam, it's Guadalcanal--one campaign of many in a global war to defeat the terrorists and their sponsors. Like the United States in the Pacific in 1943, we are in a war of national survival that will be long, hard, and fraught with casualties. We lost the first battle of that war on September 11, 2001, and we cannot now afford to walk away from the critical battle we are fighting in Iraq any more than we could afford to walk away from Guadalcanal. For the security of America, we have no recourse but to win. Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith, U.S. Army, is the former chief of counterterrorism plans at U.S. European Command and is currently in Baghdad with Multi-National Forces-Iraq. |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #8 I think the genie is out of the bottle. Both the Russians and the Chinese are proliferating like crazy, and there is nothing we can do about it. We need (ballistic and cruise) missile defense - yesterday. Once that gets implemented, we need to work towards full coverage against a Chinese missile attack, and then a Russian missile attack. After that, the only way anyway can come after us is by shipping a nuke in. But this will be a lot more difficult to do and keep secret than launching an ICBM out of the blue. And shipping more than one in will involve big risks with respect to ensuring secrecy. Meaning that they can smack us upside the head but not actually destroy these United States. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-09-24 11:39:43 PM |
| #7 Zhang - My only quibble with your comments above is that you seemingly haven't factored in the relentless march of technology. Specifically the destructive technology of modern warfare in the form of WMD. E.g., had Napoleon possessed the ability to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of seconds, the power to level cities in the blink of an eye, and the capability to project that power worldwide in minutes, joining the forces allied against him would have been viewed with more urgency. Even WWII, as terrible as that was, was a war fought by the old rules: sheer number of men and industrial capacity were strong indications of which side would prevail (and strong indicators of the precise location of dangers that required our attention). "Winning" entailed capturing and holding territory. This new war is quite different. National sponsors of terrorism must be: a) prevented from acquiring WMD and related delivery capabilities by any means necessary (short term objective), and b) forced to cease and desist in their sponsorhip of terrorism. If we fail on either or both of those objectives this war will, at best, simmer along as a stalemate indefinitely and, in a more ominous scenario, degenerate into a series of open military campaigns by the west answered by covert WMD strikes from the enemy. There exists the very real potential that this conflict will claim more lives than all the wars of the last century combined. There's still time (IMHO) to head off the worst of this ... but not much. |
| Posted by: AzCat 2004-09-24 11:14:40 PM |
| #6 The War on Terror is going to end on terms more like that of the Cold War than WWII. Think of Afghanistan as our Korean War, and Iraq as our Vietnam War, except this time, we get to keep the victory our troops have won. Unconditional surrender of all the bait-and-switch sponsors of terror is not going to happen, but they will at least make a show of cracking down on their jihadis to avoid incurring Uncle Sam's wrath. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-09-24 10:35:18 PM |
| #5 Article: Like the United States in the Pacific in 1943, we are in a war of national survival that will be long, hard, and fraught with casualties. I have serious doubts that WWII was a war of national survival. That's like saying the proper response to the Napoleonic Wars would have been to join in to defeat Napoleon, the Hitler of his time. WWII was undertaken to destroy the long-term threat from Japan and prevent either Hitler or Stalin from dominating the European continent. OK - it was wrapped up in simple terms like freedom, which most of the liberated nations never got, for one reason or another, but the point was to destroy both Japanese and German power and their empire-building tendencies. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-09-24 10:32:45 PM |
| #4 Moose, good post, but I wouldn't underestimate the possibility that the jihadis are just sick bastards who like to kill people. (The corrective action remains the same.) |
| Posted by: Matt 2004-09-24 10:32:26 PM |
| #3 It's been an interesting day for opinions on Iraq. We've had Old Sarge from LewRockwell.com, the peace studies perfessor, and now the colonel in Baghdad. I tend to trust the colonel more than the other two, but maybe that's just me. |
| Posted by: Fred 2004-09-24 10:02:51 PM |
| #2 I would disagree, in that the Colonel doesn't go far enough. For this is not a conflict between warring nations, it is a war between civilization and vandalism. (My choice of words are very specific.) Civilization has reached out to every corner of the planet, and in a Darwinistic model, has supplanted archaic social models and cultural traditions. It has conquered them all, shown them to be inferior to modernity and all that is civilization. The defeat is total, there is no way to ignore the fact. There is no place where one can escape civilization. The only hope left is to utterly destroy civilization. To break the machine. To tear down and obliterate that which you cannot grasp, in which you have no part. To vandalize. The Luddites, the fundamentalists, the nostaligics, Taliban, and anyone else who embrace the past and shun the present, are the enemy. Their path is clear, they have no choice: to fade away or to be destroyed. Or to destroy. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2004-09-24 10:00:46 PM |
| #1 Probably a good analogy. Glad he left out the Okinawa part. |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2004-09-24 9:41:17 PM |