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.
Wingnuts | 10 Comments
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I've managed to pick up a rough notion of the origins of the Sunni/Shiite split
StoriesThe Volokh Conspiracy – Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite?::
Anderson (mail) (www):
but do policy makers and administrators really need to know the origin of the split in Islam?Love the spin here. That’s not what Stein asked. A functioning knowledge of how the Sunni/Shiite split works in today’s politics was enough to win the lollipop.
The FBI official didn’t even know that Iran and Hezbollah were Shiite.
For that matter, I’m nothing but a health-care attorney, with two kids, who glances over the paper and the blogs more days of the week than not … and somehow, over the past 5 years, I’ve managed to pick up a rough notion of the origins of the Sunni/Shiite split, let alone the lineup in today’s Middle East. And it ain’t even my job to know it.
At some point, defending the pathetic becomes pathetic itself.
FUBAR
StoriesFUBAR – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:
BEIFT – Behold, Every Indicator Forebodes Trouble; pronounced “beefed”
The DCCC just tabbed Chris Van Hollen to take Rahm Emanuel’s place
StoriesCrooks and Liars » 2006 » December » 19:
The DCCC just tabbed Chris Van Hollen to take Rahm Emanuel’s place. Pachacutec and Howie are very encouraged by his appointment. I’ve done a bit of asking around today. Chris Van Hollen won his primary in 2002 against a better financed Democrat, and then went on to beat incumbent Republican Connie Morella. He gets some praise from progressives for his policy positions, has been a strong fundraiser and is reputed to be a helluva nice, down to earth guy. Just telling you what I’ve heard, and I’m hopeful all of this will prove to be on the mark…read on
I no longer care who, if anyone pulls Bushs’ strings
StoriesI no longer care who, if anyone pulls Bushs’ strings. The responsibility for this uncontrolled chaos in the Middle East is his, whether he likes it or not. This lunatic is bringing us close to world war. He’s obsessed. He’s fixated. He’s compulsive. And impulsive. The Democrats AND the Republicans had better figure out how to contain this madman. Quick.
DiggDigg
Stories"Evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction"
StoriesIndependent Online Edition > UK Politics:
Diplomat’s suppressed document lays bare the lies behind Iraq war
By Colin Brown and Andy McSmith
Published: 15 December 2006
The Government’s case for going to war in Iraq has been torn apart by the publication of previously suppressed evidence that Tony Blair lied over Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. A devastating attack on Mr Blair’s justification for military action by Carne Ross, Britain’s key negotiator at the UN, has been kept under wraps until now because he was threatened with being charged with breaching the Official Secrets Act. In the testimony revealed today Mr Ross, 40, who helped negotiate several UN security resolutions on Iraq, makes it clear that Mr Blair must have known Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction. He said that during his posting to the UN, “at no time did HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] assess that Iraq’s WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests.” Mr Ross revealed it was a commonly held view among British officials dealing with Iraq that any threat by Saddam Hussein had been “effectively contained”. He also reveals that British officials warned US diplomats that bringing down the Iraqi dictator would lead to the chaos the world has since witnessed. “I remember on several occasions the UK team stating this view in terms during our discussions with the US (who agreed),” he said. “At the same time, we would frequently argue when the US raised the subject, that ‘regime change’ was inadvisable, primarily on the grounds that Iraq would collapse into chaos.” He claims “inertia” in the Foreign Office and the “inattention of key ministers” combined to stop the UK carrying out any co-ordinated and sustained attempt to address sanction-busting by Iraq, an approach which could have provided an alternative to war. Mr Ross delivered the evidence to the Butler inquiry which investigated intelligence blunders in the run-up to the conflict. The Foreign Office had attempted to prevent the evidence being made public, but it has now been published by the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs after MPs sought assurances from the Foreign Office that it would not breach the Official Secrets Act. It shows Mr Ross told the inquiry, chaired by Lord Butler, “there was no intelligence evidence of significant holdings of CW [chemical warfare], BW [biological warfare] or nuclear material” held by the Iraqi dictator before the invasion. “There was, moreover, no intelligence or assessment during my time in the job that Iraq had any intention to launch an attack against its neighbours or the UK or the US,” he added. Mr Ross’s evidence directly challenges the assertions by the Prime Minster that the war was legally justified because Saddam possessed WMDs which could be “activated” within 45 minutes and posed a threat to British interests. These claims were also made in two dossiers, subsequently discredited, in spite of the advice by Mr Ross. His hitherto secret evidence threatens to reopen the row over the legality of the conflict, under which Mr Blair has sought to draw a line as the internecine bloodshed in Iraq has worsened. Mr Ross says he questioned colleagues at the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence working on Iraq and none said that any new evidence had emerged to change their assessment. “What had changed was the Government’s determination to present available evidence in a different light,” he added. Mr Ross said in late 2002 that he “discussed this at some length with David Kelly”, the weapons expert who a year later committed suicide when he was named as the source of a BBC report saying Downing Street had “sexed up” the WMD claims in a dossier. The Butler inquiry cleared Mr Blair and Downing Street of “sexing up” the dossier, but the publication of the Carne Ross evidence will cast fresh doubts on its findings. Mr Ross, 40, was a highly rated diplomat but he resigned because of his misgivings about the legality of the war. He still fears the threat of action under the Official Secrets Act. “Mr Ross hasn’t had any approach to tell him that he is still not liable to be prosecuted,” said one ally. But he has told friends that he is “glad it is out in the open” and he told MPs it had been “on my conscience for years”. One member of the Foreign Affairs committee said: “There was blood on the carpet over this. I think it’s pretty clear the Foreign Office used the Official Secrets Act to suppress this evidence, by hanging it like a Sword of Damacles over Mr Ross, but we have called their bluff.” Yesterday, Jack Straw, the Leader of the Commons who was Foreign Secretary during the war – Mr Ross’s boss – announced the Commons will have a debate on the possible change of strategy heralded by the Iraqi Study Group report in the new year.
The Canon-ZR100
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NOT BAD
EVERYBODY KNEW
StoriesEVERYBODY KNEW:
Everybody Knew Valerie Wilson’s Identity
Matalin: “Everybody in town knew” that Plame was at the CIAOn the November 21 edition of MSNBC’s Imus in the Morning, Mary Matalin, a former assistant to President Bush and counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney, was the latest among many defenders of the administration to repeat the unsupported claim that former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV himself disclosed the identity of his wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame. Criticizing special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s investigation into the leak, Matalin asked, “What’s the crime here?” She contended that “[e]verybody in town knew that, and who outed her was her husband — ‘my wife, the CIA wife’ and all this stuff.” Matalin offered no evidence to support her assertion that Wilson himself had introduced his wife in public settings as a CIA employee.
The New York Herald Sun 