January 15th, 1945
WASHINGTON (Routers) With the “Allied” forces continuing to be bogged down in the Ardennes Forest, many are questioning Roosevelt administration war policies, the unreasonable length of the war, and even whether or not it can be won.
The 7th Army’s VI Corps is waging a desperate, and perhaps futile battle with German troops, surrounded on three sides in the Alsace region. A whole month after the beginning of the renewed German offensive, with almost twenty-thousand American troops dead in this battle alone, there remains no clear end in sight, or hope that the American lines can be closed.
There are serious questions about the competence of Generals Bradley and Patton, concerns that were only heightened shortly after the beginning of the battle, when two armies from Bradley’s army group were removed from his command and placed under that of the British General Montgomery. General Montgomery’s comments in a press conference a week ago have served only to buttress such legitimate doubts. He didn’t even mention their names in describing the limited efforts to recapture lost ground, that remains unsuccessful, with the Germans continuing to take the initiative.
Many point out that these lengthy battles, and lengthy wars, are somehow indicative of a fundamental failure of American policy, not just in waging the war, but in the very decision to enter into it.
“It’s not just that we’re a whole month into this battle with no clear resolution or exit strategy. In a few more months, this war will have gone on as long as the Civil War,” said one Republican critic of the administration. “And that one was Americans against Americans. We should have expected to do much better against Germans. After all, this war has now gone on twice as long as World War I, when we mopped up the Kaiser in a year and a half.” He went on, “It’s clearly the fault of this Roosevelt administration, that lied us into war, and then botched it. I’ll bet that had Tom Dewey won the election a couple months ago, he would have exercised his judgment by immediately implementing his policy of not having entered the war.”
Others disagree. One administration spokesman has said on background that this seems like flawed logic.
“One can’t judge war progress by a calendar. Wars aren’t run on a schedule, and every one is different,” he pointed out. “And neither can one judge the progress of a battle that way, or by the casualty count. Often the heaviest fighting occurs just before victory. Our heaviest losses at Normandy were just before we took the beach and the cliffs.”
“Yes, the fighting is fierce in the Ardennes now, but Hitler is waging a war on two fronts, and he’s down to young boys and old men as soldiers. We will simply have to outlast him, and I’m confident that we will start making serious progress into Germany in a month.”
But war opponents will have none of it.
“This administration has been telling us we’ve been winning for two and a half years, ever since Midway,” said the leader of one of the prominent anti-war groups. After over three years of killing and terror, it’s time to stop the lies, and the war.”
You think satire makes the point — how about the real thing given in all seriousness?
I believe if you search enough on the Web you can find the audio to a speech by Charles Lindbergh — was it given December 11, 1941 — where he speaks against the “rush to war”. argues that the European conflict is not existential to the U.S. and that the Europeans should fight it out and wear themselves out, and yes, he manages to bring Americans of Jewish heritage into the discussion as not being a disinterested party with respect to what happens in Europe. If anything could give one a sense of deja vu about the current anti-war politics, it is Colonel Lindbergh speaking on audio.
Charles Lindbergh was the last isolationist holdout regarding WW-II, unless you count Pat Buchanan, and Colonel Lindbergh came around to help the war effort, even to the point of flying combat missions against Japan in whatever kind of quasi-civilian-military-national-hero-man-who-made-a-public-fool-trying-to-redeem-himself role he had.
But what of WW-II and American involvement? It is hard to pursue the Lindbergh-Buchanan line of discussion without getting into the muck of anti-Semetism very fast, but at some level it was an “elective war” as the present one is, and also a war provoked by the enemy, as the present one is.
We pushed Japan to the wall with the steel and oil embargo, largely over public sentiment about the horrors of Japan’s Imperial Army in China, and we provoked Germany with an undeclared naval war in the North Atlantic in support of the British, with whom we had strong cultural ties, and the attack on Pearl Harbor followed by declaration of war on Japan placed us in declared war with Germany, who had a mutual defense pact with Japan.
But could we have sued for peace with Japan and Germany and stayed out of both conflicts? We will never know because we can never run that experiment. It is claimed that Japan or Germany or both had plans for being more than regional empires but plans on the Americas, but are German plans for joining with Mexico and invading the U.S. for real or simply British propaganda?
But sometimes to act is to decide, and for whatever chain of historical events, America fought Japan and Germany with the aim of prevailing, and for similar accidents of history we are in Iraq. It is well put that “back then” we were unified and willing to spend 50 percent of GNP on the war effort while “now” we are fractered and 1 percent of GNP is regarded as bankrupting us.
Whenever I read something like this, I can only think of Ralph Kramden’s immortal retort: “Well, hardy-har har!”
I don’t know why I think of this. Perhaps it’s because Kramden’s retort seemed so forced and represented an attempt to distract people from how accurate Norton or Alice’s putdown had been. Or in this case, a rather forced attempt to distract people from debating the real issues at hand.
Stick to space analysis. Leave the comedy to comedians.
Almost perfect. Could have been stronger if you would have also mentioned, in the competence part, General Patton running his tanks out of fuel, or the complete destruction of an entire infantry division in the first day’s fighting because of the practice of placing green units in the less critical points of the line (which is precisely where the Germans attacked).
This pathetically tired analogy between World War II and the Iraq War would be more credible if Hitler had been defeated in six weeks and Churchill had been a Nazi. If our objectives in World War II had been that bass-ackwards, then sure, it would have been fair to conclude that the war was a fraud.
Paul Milenkovic wrote:
“We pushed Japan to the wall with the steel and oil embargo, largely over public sentiment about the horrors of Japan’s Imperial Army in China, and we provoked Germany with an undeclared naval war in the North Atlantic in support of the British, with whom we had strong cultural ties, and the attack on Pearl Harbor followed by declaration of war on Japan placed us in declared war with Germany, who had a mutual defense pact with Japan.”
Excuse me but are you blaming America for the second world war? A war that started years before the US joined? A war that in the realpolitik of Axis powers had everything to do with truly imperial ambitions in relation to resources of all kinds including cheap labor in the form of automatic slavery? With an extremely loose definition of labor including the act of more or less immediate death either for the sake of removal or otherwise. It wasn’t just Germans who embraced the core ideas of lebensraum, all the Axis powers did, enthusiastically.
Are you saying it was unjust to wage war against Imperial Japan and the third Reich?
There’s some factual errors in there as well like portraying the “undeclared naval war” as an American aggression.
Since I notice your Slavic last name I have a final question; did your relatives become Americans before or after WWII? Or put another way: are you arguing for or against your own destruction by alternative history?
It’s not an analogy between World War II and the Iraq war. Sorry you continue to miss the point.
Habitat Hermit:
IMHO there’s no doubt whatever that WW2 was a just war and a war that needed to be fought. Also no doubt that the losing regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were among the most evil in modern history, and destroying them made the world a better place.
However, an honest student of history must reluctantly admit that the US’s involvement in the War wasn’t particularly unexpected, nor did it come out of nowhere. Paul is right when he says FDR took actions that he knew would probably provoke war, and that that outcome is precisely what FDR wanted. The steel and oil embargos against Japan left that nation no choice but to retreat from China or strike at the US. Our generals expected a Pacific strike in early December, but they expected an attack on the Philippines, not on Hawaii. And FDR did in fact get the US Navy into the Battle of the Atlantic months before Pearl Harbor by putting US destroyers on escort duty for British convoys, and then giving them “shoot on sight” orders against U-boats — at a time when U-boats were under strict orders not to attack US-flagged warships.
It’s not an analogy between World War II and the Iraq war.
Oh yes of course, it’s about “World War IV”, the much wider war that they are pretending to fight.
Oh yes of course, it’s about “World War IV”, the much wider war that they are pretending to fight.
Again, sorry that you remain too dim to get the point. Most others manage.
Rand Simberg wrote:
It’s not an analogy between World War II and the Iraq war. Sorry you continue to miss the point.
I interpret it as a clear comparison of anti-war moonbats, past and present. They’re the same regardless of the point in time or the threat.
SCF MAC
Man has created over 15,000 wars and has only enjoyed less than 300 years on peace. Man is a fighter That is why we need Jesus. He has Risen!!!
There actually was a similar piece in Life magazine about 1946 which went on about how troops were bogged down in Europe even though the fighting had ended.
Rand,
Jim Harris will not see that you’ve made a valid point, unless you take his side on why we went to war, why we shouldn’t have gone to war, until you call GWB names and until you say the war is and was JUST about oil.
HH,
we are to blame for all the woes of the world, ask Jim.
Paul,
you missed a very important part of your facts and figures,
It is well put that “back then” we were unified and willing to spend 50 percent of GNP on the war effort while “now” we are fractered and 1 percent of GNP is regarded as bankrupting us.
Back then we weren’t spending the other 50% on social welfare / social engineering programs.
Plus, we were unified by being AMERICANS. I doubt that AFRICAN-Americans, MEXICANS-Americans, POLISH-Americans, ITALIAN-Americans, ETC-Americans, ETC-Americans, ETC-Americans, would have ever defeated anyone. They would have been too busy in-fighting at home to do so. Like we are now.
I interpret it as a clear comparison of anti-war moonbats, past and present. They’re the same regardless of the point in time or the threat.
The idea that all opposition to war is always the same is certainly one reading of this stale theme. It’s the easiest way for a nation to make a big mistake and keep on making it. Not all wars are the same, so of course opposition to them is also not all the same. Some wars make sense and others don’t. For example, World War II made sense, but the Iraq war is a farce. As I said, World War II would have been more like the Iraq War if Hitler had been routed in six weeks and Churchill had been a Nazi.
Jim Harris will not see that you’ve made a valid point, unless you take his side on why we went to war, why we shouldn’t have gone to war, until you call GWB names and until you say the war is and was JUST about oil.
The war is just about oil? That’s certainly not my position. It would be better if it were. Right now the Iraq war is a war in search of a purpose. That is what makes it so dangerous. The idea is to keep reaching victories until they find one that they like. It will never happen.
Actually, it is – and was – not in search of a purpose. The war (which ended with the fall of Baghdad and Saddam Hussein) had as its purpose the defeat and destruction of the Hussein regime. That was accomplished quite rapidly.
The pacification process which followed that war also had an avowed purpose: the establishment of a stable democratic government capable of defending itself against other regional powers, as a salutory (and disruptive) example to the Islamist tyrannies that dominate the region.
That has not been accomplished at this point.
It is certainly sensible to question the purpose of the pacification, and even the war itself, especially aainst the context of the larger struggle against belligerent Islamofascism in all its forms. I question the Bush strategy of pinning all its hopes on the “democracy” strategy, because we are likely to end up with a middle east dominated by a nuclear Iran as the outcome. That said, to claim that the entire Iraq adventure had no purpose is, simply, wrong. And silly, as well.
Jim Harris: “For example, World War II made sense, but the Iraq war is a farce.”
Newsflash Jim: Hussein was a WMD-wielding megalomaniac who cavorted with al Qaeda. He thumbed his nose at every resolution enacted by the U.N. including Res. 1441, which in conjunction with Congressional approval, gave us the authority to use military force. You ought to read it some time. We also found tons of cyclosarin, among other discovered WMDs, and I�m damned glad we took out the sonofabitch before he had the chance to use what he had. Hussein should have been finished off in 1991 when we were there the last time.
Secondly, the al Qaeda will cross borders no matter where we struck back, which is why I would have transformed Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan into asphalt parking lots on 12 September 2001. (for starters) That’s how you fight a “jihad”. But, I’m a former Soldier, not a politician.
Afghanistan, like Iraq, is just one more battlefield in the war against Islamofascism. We made a mistake by walking away in 1989 after we helped kick out the Soviets.
This war ain’t over by a long shot. Al Qaeda and Taliban are funded, aided and supported throughout the Middle East. The Islamofascist vision of a world Caliphate will continue unless we kill them all off. Our policy should be simple: you attack us, we annihilate you, your supporters, your country, everything.
Jim, perhaps you have been baited into anger and not at your best, but your claim to have better points in opposition to the Iraq War than the average moonbat is undermined by your making some of the same points as the average moonbat. Yes, there were non-delusional reasons to oppose the war. Those critics were few in number. If you would be taken as loyal opposition, you might stress the loyal part a bit more.
When someone is the object of a parody, it’s very easy to miss the point of it, as Jim demonstrates multiple times.
In 1993 the WTC bomb was laced with cyanide compounds shipped from Iraq. The intent was to create a cloud of poison gas, in addition to toppling one WTC town into another.
Those terrorists had funding from Al Queda and Iraq. They used passports stolen by Iraqi intelligence from Kuwaitt during the Iraqi occupation.
Saddam Husayne was in league with terrorists, had violated the armistice agreement, and had attempted to use WMD against the US, inside the US. In response to this trifecta, Clinton did nothing, until he needed a distraction from impeachment proceedings.
Bill Quick: Actually, it is – and was – not in search of a purpose.
I’m not saying that no one can avow a purpose to the Iraq War. Especially before the war began, the purpose seemed clear enough: Knock off Saddam Hussein and the world will be a better place. So they knocked off Hussein and the world wasn’t a better place. Of course they can’t admit that, but if they truly thought that they had made progress, they wouldn’t predict catastrophe if we don’t keep spending $100+ billion per year on Iraq. Of course in the interim they have grabbed at other reasons to keep fighting: We need to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq. We need to help them set up democracy. We need to prevent civil war there. We need to face up to Iran there. Many of these mandates are easy to think of, all they have to do is find out what Iraq now has — e.g. civil war — and then declare that that is what they want to prevent. So it’s not that not one can propose any conceivable purpose to this operation. No, the problem is that they can’t settle on a purpose that actually satisfies them.
If you clear away all of the smoke of the 8th, 9th, and 10th mode of victory in Iraq, what you are left in Iraq is a great gift to “Islamofascism”. It’s not that Saddam Hussein is 100% secular or 100% unconnected to terrorism. What is true is that he was more secular and less connected to terrorism than many other actors in the Middle East, including in particular what Iraq has now. The United Arab Emirates — they of the Dubai Ports deal — is more Islamist and more pro-Al-Qaeda than Saddam Hussein was. The United Iraqi Alliance, which is the main political coalition in Iraq, is more Islamist and more terrorist than Saddam Hussein was. Ultimately, Bush et al will never be satisfied with the Iraq war because they have made things worse.
It certainly would be a good idea to fight against “Islamofascism”. It’s a sucky name, but it will do for this conversation. If we’re going to do that, Iraq needs to stop being more than half of our foreign policy. We need to walk away from that failure and fight elsewhere — although not with the imperialist, obsessive-aggressive approach used in Iraq. There are dozens of other Arab and Islamic countries and we should be doing more in all of them.
Jim Harris wrote:
“Knock off Saddam Hussein and the world will be a better place. So they knocked off Hussein and the world wasn’t a better place. Of course they can’t admit that, but if they truly thought that they had made progress, they wouldn’t predict catastrophe if we don’t keep spending $100+ billion per year on Iraq. Of course in the interim they have grabbed at other reasons to keep fighting: We need to defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq. We need to help them set up democracy. We need to prevent civil war there. We need to face up to Iran there. Many of these mandates are easy to think of, all they have to do is find out what Iraq now has — e.g. civil war — and then declare that that is what they want to prevent. So it’s not that not one can propose any conceivable purpose to this operation. No, the problem is that they can’t settle on a purpose that actually satisfies them”
There are also knuckleheads who would argue that our involvement in WWI and WWII really didn’t change anything in the long run, and technically, they would be right to the extent that there will always be despots and hostile aggressors that pop up across the globe. Sometimes, even after we went in, kicked ass, and left.
That “civil war” you lefites salivated for never materialized. There is no civil war in Iraq or Afghanistan and wishing will not make it so.
Every war we’ve been in cost millions. Funding and providing the necessary wepons, ammunition, logistics, and equipment costs money. Just think of the REAL cost had we pulled a Bubba Clinton and virtually ignored the terrorist attacks, like he did on his watch. Want me to name them? USS Cole, Khobar Towers, the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the FIRST World Trade Center attack in 1993.
Oh that’s right, he did have a response; he wagged the dog in Somalia and the Balkans.
In the mean time, al Qaeda plotted another attack to be carried out on U.S. soil, and Bubba basically gave them the green light.
If you’ve actually been paying attention, you’d know that the Iraqis are rebuilding their infrastructure, a military, security forces, and a working government. They ARE developing a democracy. It’s just that you need to take your nose out of the WaPo and NYT and read some other sources for a change.
Like these:
http://www.mnf-iraq.com/
http://www.michaelyon-online.com
http://www.longwarjournal.org/
Those are sites and dispatches from boots-on-the-ground Soldiers who participate and see the results first hand.
I was there as well, and I can state unequivocally that what I saw in the MSM came no where near a lot of things that actually happened. (READ: SUCCESS)
Whenever I read the comments from clueless people like you, I’m amazed at how smart you can be about so little.
sfcmac
Let’s just say I came of age towards the end of the Vietnam Era draft and I am well-read on the literature regarding regarding conscientious objector status.
It was said that expressing moral objection to all war would convince your draft board to grant you CO status. Expressing the view that some wars were justified but that this war was provoked, immoral, unjustified, and a waste of human and material resources was the way to get your draft status stamped “1-A” and get a free airplane ride to Southeast Asia.
Not wanting to have my patriotism impuned on account of the etymology of my surname (Ever seen a Russian drink water, Mandrake? {I am not Russian, but I couldn’t pass up that quote}), I will refrain from further discussion of choices available and alternate histories to WW-II.
But I have long suspected that many of the people opposed to the Iraq War would qualify for that airplane ride. If you are going to be anti-war, be against war. If you are for some wars and against others, it is your right to complain how President Bush is incompetent and you would be a better Commander in Chief in the long war, but you are basically conceding that the ability, means, and choice of waging war is a prerogative of our nation, and you pretty much relinquish the pacifist narrative about the futility of war in terms of lives lost and treasure spent.
Well done. A lot of the comments here make good points, but some are idiotic. This satirical piece isn’t so much a comparison between wars, but a comparison to the way the ‘greatest generation’ shouldered the responsibility for their war and persevered in it. Contrast that to our own present public attitude toward a war that may or may not have been a wise one but which nevertheless exists–and with the lives of many brave Americans at risk. No war is ever morally ideal, but no true patriot can ever cherry-pick his or her support. It is always better for a nation’s health to win an unjust or unpopular war than it is to abandon it halfway through. That, I believe, is the point of this piece–and those who criticize it for making that point deserve to live under a Saddam.
I’m not saying that no one can avow a purpose to the Iraq War. Especially before the war began, the purpose seemed clear enough: Knock off Saddam Hussein and the world will be a better place.
That’s clear only to leftists that like to prop up lies and straw men. The fact that they do so puts us under no obligation to believe them, or even waste time and neurons responding to them, because we know that you’ll just come up with some new set. Attempting to rewrite history is what you folks do.
I wonder if there is a cost in soldiers and money that the left would accept?
I’m thinking Jim probably can’t quantify such amounts.
Worst of all, some people are saying we could have troops in Germany for 50 years!
At today’s rates, that would mean hundreds of millions of dead Americans, in a war we could stayed out of by not provoking the Axis with Lend-Lease.
No more blank checks for an open-ended war!
Furthermore, by committing an act of war through Lend-Lease and the oil embargo on Japan, Roosevelt has usurped the powers of Congress. And there are rumors we will bomb civilians in Dresden and even use nuclear weapons against whole cities! FDR and Truman should be impeached and convicted of war crimes.
Well Dave, as you can see our sixty year illegal occupation of Germany has only led to more terrorism.
The daily IED attacks outside of Ramstein AB are proof enough of that.
I wonder if there is a cost in soldiers and money that the left would accept?
There is no way to calculate an exact value for how much it’s worth. That said, if the cost of liberating 25 million people is $40,000 per liberated person, that ought to be too rich for anyone’s blood. It indicates that it would be cheaper to just bribe the insurgents than shoot them, and in fact that is the whole secret of the Anbar “Awakening”. They have been awakened by American cash.
Let’s say that if the Iraq war cost 1/10 as much as it will cost, $100 billion instead of a trillion, then it could plausibly have been worth it. Spending a trillion on such a small country is by itself an admission of failure.
The soldiers who died are beside the point. Let’s say that the military gave a two-million-dollar apology to the family of each dead soldier. Then very few of these families would say that war is evil, and it would cost almost nothing compared to the rest of the war.
…if the cost of liberating 25 million people is $40,000 per liberated person, that ought to be too rich for anyone’s blood.
And if the only purpose in gong into Iraq was to liberate the Iraqi people, you might have a point. But once again, we are presented with a straw man, unworthy of a response. My prediction continues to be born out.
Of course the Iraq war can not be won. Because there is no definition of “win” that is extant. The only thing that anybody can say is the war will be won when we know it has been won.
There are no peace treaties to be signed. The country is occupied. They’ve held democratic elections! There is nothing definitive that says when “this” happens, we will consider the war won.
Just like the War On (some) Drugs that has been derided in this very blog, there is no end point, it’s just keep going and going and going. And maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, since the Iraq war was started as part of the War On Terror that will never end, just like the War On (some) Drugs.
If we’re trying to stop the terrorists there and eliminate them when we sure as hell haven’t done that on our OWN soil (Muslim, Christian, Jew or otherwise) means your still not giving a realistic definitive end point to this war.
Of course the Iraq war can not be won. Because there is no definition of “win” that is extant.
That is the biggest problem with the “War on Terror” (a [phrase I hate, though of which Iraq is currently not necessarily the central front, but certainly a key one).
But to make another analogy, World War II was never really “won,” if it was a war against totalitarianism. Because of the nature of the deal and betrayal that Roosevelt cut with his fellow fascist in the Soviet Union, it segued pretty much smoothly into the Cold War. And the Cold War segued into this new war against yet another (albeit ancient) form of totalitarianism, even if it doesn’t have a specific address in the form of a nation state.
The reality is that Westphalia is dead. We have to come up with new ways of fighting these new kinds of asymmetric wars against vile ideologies.
Paul Milenkovic; it wasn’t my intention to impugn your patriotism in any way (the word impune means something else so I assume a typo) and your name doesn’t strike me as Russian at all (I would guess at an origin somewhere in the vicinity of what used to be Yugoslavia, perhaps further up, maybe even as far up as what used to be Czechoslovakia). For all I know your ancestors came to America over a century ago, that’s part of the beauty of the US as I see it. In my opinion all this has little to do with patriotism per se (no matter which patria –mine is Norway) but a clear understanding of exactly what one was up against in WWII and rejection of it with the consequences that entail. Of course one can add patriotic arguments and causes on top of that and most did/do so but I don’t see it as the core issue.
If I read your last post correctly you hold to a thoroughly pacifist conviction and that answers the last question I had.
Paul & wolfwalker; I write from an European perspective or even a Nordic one and I still balk at portraying the issues surrounding lend-lease as an act of aggression no matter what the intention behind it was for the simple reason that the U-boat wolf-packs were there first, as was the war in Europe and Asia, as was the expansionism and resource hoarding of the Imperial Japanese. Thus playing the eventual US involvement up as aggression seems to me to be pretty close to reversing the causal chain.
Bryan Price; the way I see it and as Bill Quickly pointed out the actual Iraqi war was won amazingly fast (probably the most striking victory in the human history of warfare). However the Iraqi peace has not been completely won yet just as German peace wasn’t truly won until almost half a century after the defeat of the NSDAP & Hitler. Peace is not simply the absence of war (or for that matter armed conflict). Right now the US armed forces are still shouldering almost all of the burden, the aim is to make Iraqis capable of doing it themselves (it’s still early days, things take time).
Don’t put too much importance on the name of something and don’t assume that a choice of name must dictate the content or any details. As an example the Cold War was so named as a figure of speech, a lot of it happened in places that were tropical (I’ve lived in S. E. Asia so I know ^_^;) and some of it happened as regional war not even solely by proxy. Did the name somehow make that invalid or vice versa? Of course not.
The War on Terrorism can end in many ways, one positive way it can end is by having a world where nation state support of terrorism does not exist any more or at least have become exceptionally rare and truly inexcusable and reacted upon, swiftly and physically, by all other nation states. In such a world terrorism would become a police and special operations matter but as long as nations abet terrorism the war has to go on. I’m afraid it’s not a choice, it’s now or never as the knowledge and technology becomes increasingly widespread and sophisticated. And yes just as the Cold War it will take a long time, when people in general really start to realize what is on the line then calling it the Long War might win out.
Randy,
I’d be careful with this kind of humor. An increasing segment of the Left views World War II precisely the way you are depicting in your satire:
http://www.nysun.com/article/72723
Randy ?
The amazing ting about the Democratization nay sayers is that the same phrases were used after WWII, ith respect to the Germans and the Japanese.
You may NOT capture the hearts and minds of the 60 and 70 y/o Iraqis, but they aren’t the target audience. The minds that we have to change are the kids and the younger family men and women. The word I get from guys we know over there is that we have made that change.
Finally.
If $40,000 per head is TOO much to spend in Iraq thus far, why is it OK to spend that much and more HERE yearly per recipient, to prop up welfare programs for native born Americans and illegal aliens, who have many more opportunities to succeed than the Iraqis had / have? Personally, I’d rather see the money in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing ‘some’ good for people who appreciate it, than the money being spent on people who won’t gt off their lazy asses to get out of the system, or who blame their indigence on someone else.
At least the Iraqis really had “The Man” to blame for their woes.
Habitat Hermit: The problem with Germany is our own fault. If we hadn’t stopped in Berlin, there would never have been two Germanys. I don’t see a country that originally started out being held by allies that flipped instantly to enemies a continuation of WW II. That just started the Cold War.
And yes, the original war objectives were completed in very short order, and our forces should be commended for that. We ran out of objectives. While one could call that the end of the war, nobody (including this administration) is saying that we won, and we’re just occupying. We are still at war.
We still don’t know what our objectives are. And objectives are not details. We DO have to have some objectives to finish this war. Playing chess without any end rules is mental masturbation. And that’s exactly where I put the continuing conflict’s progress, masturbation. If you don’t know what the objectives are, especially an end objective, you don’t know what to sacrifice and what to finesse. You just play a game that goes nowhere. Which is exactly where we are at today in Iraq. It’s possible that we might have some objectives, but certainly not an end objective. This administration is too stupid to have one.
The Cold War had nothing to do with weather. I lived through it.
As far as your thinking about the War on Terror. Do you think your positive outcome will end, this century? Next century? The DHS already considers roughly 1 out of 300 Americans terrorists now. What kind of prerequisites are there to even getting to what you propose to be the end of terrorism? One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. And that IS why the War on Terror will never end.
You are asking for maturity out of the human race that we won’t see for at least a few more centuries, if we actually survive that long.
Jim says: Let’s say that if the Iraq war cost 1/10 as much as it will cost, $100 billion instead of a trillion, then it could plausibly have been worth it.
I’ve been wondering a lot lately, where those numbers come from. You see, I wouldn’t put it past the left to calculate the cost correctly, but in addition add the total cost of payroll across the entire military, including all bonuses and everything, world-wide, just to get a sufficiently high number. When I was serving in ’96, we found out that the vehicles used in ’91 were the vehicles we were going to use in ’96 and motorpool got the lovely job of fixing them so they worked. The leaders in place refused to spend money on anything at all. So I question the trillions number, because I think it encompasses many things that are not part of the conflict.
Shorter Jim Harris:
Victory is too expensive, but defeat is cheap; let’s go with defeat.
Hey, just wondering if anyone’s checked out Satires.net or not. It looked cool but every link goes to an external page. Nice site though!
Bryan Pierce I lived during the Cold War and I tried to make the point that the name of it was neither about temperature nor a definition. It was a figure of speech classifying the general nature and/or main characteristic of the conflict in temperament/attitude/methodology, that’s all, and there were plenty of exceptions in all sorts of ways.
“If we hadn’t stopped in Berlin…”
What “we”? The Soviets took Berlin. Sure there was sort of a race but the Soviets won that by a huge margin and Berlin ended up a very odd city. Just look at Cold War era maps of Europe with East and West Germany and locate the “island” of Berlin (thus the air bridge, wall, and all that). In case you think the western powers should have started fighting the Soviets right there and then remember that the Soviets were part of the plan for invading Japan in case a conventional invasion proved necessary (which would likely have ended up splitting Japan into North and South Japan just like East and West Germany).
I gave you some objectives of the War on Terror including an ultimate one in my previous post. I also gave you what must be close to the official ultimate objective on Iraq (which is nothing but one of recent theaters of the bigger war). Of course there are many other objectives as well and they will come and go as the conflict changes and evolves over time. If you don’t see any of them at all I’d be tempted to say you don’t want to but if you just don’t see it then you just don’t see it, perhaps later you will.
Setting a timeline is very difficult but it could last a very long time, longer than the Cold War. However the war is in some ways also a race against technology and if we’re unlucky it could be lost quickly. So if we do a good job it will continue to drag on but if we lose we might lose within a decade or even less. In that way it resembles the Cold War but in many other ways it doesn’t.
Saying “One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” is incredibly insulting to the memory and sacrifices of freedom fighters throughout history as well as current and future ones.
The definition of a terrorist and terrorism isn’t too complicated: a terrorist is someone who supports or participates in terrorism, and terrorism is the deliberate and mostly undiscerning use of physical violence against civilians for political, ideological, religious, and/or military gains.
Let me give you a comparison:
– If Hamas and Hesbollah almost exclusively targeted the Israeli military they could claim to be freedom fighters.
– If the Norwegian resistance movement during WWII almost exclusively targeted civilians they would be terrorists.
Now of course neither did/do that and even so it isn’t that clear cut because sometimes Hamas and Hesbollah do target the Israeli military and sometimes the Norwegian resistance did target collaborators (and sometimes they fainted attacks on collaborators who were in fact acting as agents for the resistance). However the Norwegian resistance never perpetrated attacks on civilians in order to cause mass casualties simply in order to try to force an agenda of any kind but Hamas and Hesbollah do this all the time as a matter of intentional policy.
I hope you do see the difference and realize why Hamas and Hesbollah (and all like them) are considered terrorists while the Norwegian resistance movement during WWII (and all like them) were/are considered freedom fighters.
I doubt the DHS considers 1 out of every 300 Americans to be actual terrorists however I wouldn’t have the slightest trouble believing that they consider 1 out of 300 Americans to be likely to become potential terrorists under various not-too-farfetched circumstances. But maybe I’m wrong, perhaps 0.33% of the US population consciously support the likes of Hamas and Hesbollah, Islamic Jihad, FARC, the “real” IRA splinter group and so on. Then they would actually be terrorists. Mostly dormant misguided useful idiots perhaps and people that might not warrant more than keeping track of but still…
Sunday, March 23, 2008 11:11 PM
Rand Simberg: War Critics Decry Interminable And Unwinnable Conflict (from 1945). Not everyone will pick this up as satire…