V.D. Hanson Compares Wars

Victor Davis Hanson wrote this piece for NRO, National Review Online. He's comparing the screwups involving the Iraqi conflict with the second World War. He is basicaly saying that war is hell and shit happens.
He's one of the best writers out there. Agree or disagree, he will make you think.
---Larry Everett

"July 16, 2004, 8:27 a.m.
History’s Verdict
The summers of 1944 and 2004

About this time 60 years ago, six weeks after the Normandy beach landings, Americans were dying in droves in France. We think of the 76-day Normandy campaign of summer and autumn 1944 as an astounding American success - and indeed it was, as Anglo-American forces cleared much of France of its Nazi occupiers in less than three months. But the outcome was not at all preordained, and more often was the stuff of great tragedy. Blunders were daily occurrences - resulting in 2,500 Allied casualties a day. In any average three-day period, more were killed, wounded, or missing than there have been in over a year in Iraq.

Pre-invasion intelligence - despite ULTRA and a variety of brilliant analysts who had done so well to facilitate our amphibious landings - had no idea of what war in the hedgerows would be like. How can you spend months spying out everything from beach sand to tidal currents and not invest a second into investigating the nature of the tank terrain a few miles from the beach? The horrific result was that the Allies were utterly unprepared for the disaster to come - and died by the thousands in the bocage of June and July."

[snip]

"We should probably have shot the looters who wrecked Iraq and smashed thugs like those in Fallujah last spring, when they were still in their vulnerable chrysalis stages. Iraqis should have been far more prominent in governance and on television almost immediately. Aid was tied up and delayed - as postwar goodwill ebbed away in the heat. All this and more we now know from hindsight, even as we suspect that had we sent 400,000 troops, shot looters, blasted the killers in Fallujah, properly patrolled the borders, and kept the Baathist army intact, the New York Times would now be railing even more vehemently against U.S. overkill, brutality, puppet governments, and security at the expense of social justice."

[snip]

"In the short period between June and August 1944, military historians can adduce hundreds of examples of American amateurism, failed intelligence, incompetent logistics, and strategic blundering - but not enough of such errors to nullify the central truth of the Normandy invasion. A free people and its amazing citizen army liberated France and went on in less than a year to destroy veteran Nazi forces in the West, and to occupy Germany to end the war. Good historians, then, keep such larger issues in mind, even as they second-guess and quibble with the tactical and strategic pulse of the battlefield.

We should do the same. Errors were committed in the Iraqi campaign as they always are in war and its aftermath. Saddam didn't use WMDs as we had expected - neither did Hitler, and as a result thousands of GIs carried bothersome and superfluous gas masks across France and Germany for nearly a year."

[snip]

"Given that there were many valid reasons to remove Saddam in a post 9/11 climate, we can lament that the administration privileged the casus belli of worries over WMDs, which proved to be based on flawed intelligence - a shortcoming that the United States in wartime has often experienced. As far as the war itself, we removed Saddam from power in three weeks under impossible conditions of driving nearly 400 miles from a single small front without tactical surprise. We have paid a steep price for the reconstruction - perhaps 900 combat dead, tragically. Yet due to our soldiers' courage and sacrifice, after little more than a year there is the beginning of the first consensual government in the Arab Middle East, and elections are slated on a schedule far ahead of our efforts after World War II. Just as the liberation of France and the final defeat in Germany overshadowed the horror and stupidity of the war on the ground in 1944, so too, when all is said and done, the fact of a free Iraq - not the hysteria about Abu Ghraib, Joe Wilson, or Richard Clarke - will remain."

[snip]

"For all their triangulation, deep down inside both he and John Kerry are not foolish. They don't want a post-9/11 world with Saddam's petro-tyranny intact, more wounded al Qaedists seeking refuge in Baghdad, an unimpressed Qaddafi back to his terrorist machinations, Dr. Kahn franchising his nuke-mart, or the Saudi royal family fueling fundamentalist killers even as 10,000 Americans are on its soil."

[snip]

"With extremists like Michael Moore and ANSWER breathing down their necks, Kerry and Edwards cannot accept history's tragic verdict that there are terrible costs to pay in any necessary war. Yet they also don't know what else could or should have been done to get us where we are now.

[Read The Whole Thing]