I got an email today with an article by Raymond S. Kraft in it.  The article a historical perspective making a kind of comparison of WW2 and now, in how we handle war, the threats and some historical perspective.  It’s very long and I do not have the resources to totally validate the facts or the timeline.  I am certain it is mostly accurate, but zI make no prepresentatoins beyond that.

I have to also note some comments here and there pointing out accuracy problems, but at the same time, some of those commentors were complaining that the Evil Bankers orchestrated Pearl Harbor, so if I fail to take some of them seriously, you know why.

In reading it, it occurs to me that we love to make comparisons.  The left compares Iraq to Vietnam, whereas some on the right compare it to WW2.

Both are right and wrong in some cases, it mostly depends on what they are trying to prove with their comparison. 

For example, the left points out the Vietnam comparison to prove we have a hopeless war we cannot win, and the public no longer supports it.  The resonating lingering bitterness of a generation of hippies and war protesters has a new campaign and it clearly shows.

They are right, it is like Vietnam, but not how they think.  It is like it because we do not enable our troops to win, politicians demogogue the issue beyond the realities, and the public has taken a beating of negative reporting, resulting in a feeling of distaste, which is not surprising.

It is not like Vietnam in that we are not aligned with one side of an internal power struggle.  We invaded and displaced the government.  This is not the commies moving in, and us trying to push them out.

But, it is like Vietnam because the left wants us to lose, and are working hard to make us quit, just like Vietnam,

My honest question lately has been "do you want us to win?" and few have taken the challenge on it from the left.

I won’t post the whole thing, as found on Right Truth, but here are a few excerpts.  Read the rest for yourself.  Makw youe own conclusions.  My thoughts are not going to please everyone and are my own opinions.  Take em for what that’s worth.

The US was in an isolationist, pacifist mood, and most Americans and Congress wanted nothing to do with the European war or the Asian war.

Then along came Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and in outrage Congress unanimously declared war on Japan, and the following day on Germany, which had not attacked us. It was a dicey thing. We had few allies.

This is not too far off of how we were in pre 911 days, in some ways.  Terrosim was something most people hadn’t heard of, and it was something "over there".  Clinton dealt with it like a police matter, there was no sense of war, even though we had suffered many attacks. We didn’t really understand the enemy or the depth of the threat.

After 911 we did.

America was not prepared for war. America had stood down most of its military after WWI and throughout the depression, at the outbreak of WWII there were army units training with broomsticks over their shoulders because they didn’t have guns, and cars with "tank" painted on the doors because they didn’t have tanks. And a big chunk of our navy had just been sunk and damaged at Pearl Harbor.

Again, in a sense he is right, though not how he presents it.  We were unprepared.  The Desert Storm build up that we had in 1989 was gone, and the military troops strengths and weapons programs had been cut by the Clinton Administration.  Even worse, the Intelligence branches were crippled by feel good regulations that prevented them from deal with clear threats, thanks to Jamie Gorelick, she of the 911 commission, who did not have the guts to admit her own contributions to the failures.

There is a very dangerous minority in Islam that either has, or wants and may soon have, the ability to deliver small nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons almost anywhere in the world, unless they are prevented from doing so.

France, Germany, and Russia, have been selling them weapons technology as recently as 2002, as have North Korea, Syria, and Pakistan. These weapons were paid for with billions of dollars that Saddam Hussein skimmed from the "Oil For Food" program administered by the impotent UN with the complicity of Koki Annan and his son.

It is worse then that, since Russia is presently still selling to Iran. 

The Jihadis, the militant Muslims, are basically Nazis in Kaffiyahs. They believe that Islam, a radically conservative (definitely not liberal!) form of Wahhabi Islam, should own and control the Middle East first, then Europe, then the world; that all who do not bow to Allah should be killed, enslaved, or subjugated. They want to finish the Holocaust, destroy Israel and purge the world of Jews. This is what they say.

True.

You want gas in your car? You want heating oil next winter? You want jobs? You want the dollar to be worth anything? You better hope the Jihad, the Muslim Inquisition, loses, and the Islamic Reformation wins.

If the Reformation movement wins, that is, the moderate Muslims who believe that Islam can respect and tolerate other religions and live in peace with the rest of the world, and move out of the 10th century into the 21st, then the troubles in the Middle East will eventually fade away. A moderate and prosperous Middle East will emerge.

This isn’t an idea discussed much but it has some merit.  The real war is with the fanatics against the moderates, but the moderates really are not fighting yet.  If we were smart we would work on that.

(1) We deposed Saddam Hussein. Whether Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11 or not, it is undisputed that Saddam has been actively supporting the terrorist movement for decades. Saddam is or was a terrorist, a weapon of mass destruction, who is responsible for the deaths of probably more than a million Iraqis and two million Iranians.

True. 

(2) We created a battle, a confrontation, a flash point, with Islamic terrorism in Iraq. We have focused the battle. We are killing bad guys there. The ones we kill there we won’t have to kill here, or somewhere else. We have a good shot at creating a democratic, peaceful Iraq, which will be a catalyst for democratic change in the rest of the Middle East, and an outpost for a stabilizing American military presence in the Middle East for as long as it is needed.

I will say I am not a big fan of the idea "fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here".  We fight there because that is where they are.

The Europeans could have done this, but they didn’t, and they won’t. We now know that rather than opposing the rise of the Jihadist, the French, Germans, and Russians were selling them arms - we have found more than a million tons of weapons and munitions in Iraq. If Iraq was not a threat to anyone, why did Saddam have a million tons of weapons?

And Iraq was paying for much of these French, German, and Russian arms with money skimmed from the UN Oil For Food Program that was supposed to pay for food, medicine, and education for Iraqi children.

True.  The UN has still not answered all the questions about that.  The very countries who obstructed so many UN resolution had their hands deep in his aresenal.  The Axis of Weasels.

Americans have a short attention span, conditioned I suppose by 60 minute TV shows and 2-hour movies in which everything comes out okay. The real world is not like that. It is messy, uncertain, and sometimes bloody and ugly. Always has been, and probably always will be.

True.

The bottom line here is that we will have to deal with Islamic terrorism until we defeat it (or are defeated by it), whenever that is. It will not go away on its own. It WILL NOT go away if we ignore it.

True

We can be defeatist peace-activists as anti-war types seem to be, and concede, surrender, to Jihad, or we can do whatever it takes to win this war against it.

The history of the world is the history of civilization clashes - cultural clashes. All wars are about ideas. Ideas about what society and civilization should be like. The most determined always win.

Those who are willing to be the most ruthless win. The pacifists always lose, because the anti-pacifists kill them.

True. 

In the 20th century, it was Western democracy vs. communism, and before that Western democracy vs. Nazism, and before that Western democracy vs. German Imperialism. Western democracy won, three times, but it wasn’t cheap, fun, nice, easy, or quick. Indeed, the wars against German imperialism (WWI), Nazi imperialism (WWII), and communist imperialism (the 40-year Cold War that included the Vietnam War, itself a major battle in a larger war) covered almost the entire century.

True.

Senator John Kerry, almost daily, makes three scary claims:

(1) We went to Iraq without enough troops. Actually, we went with the troops the US military wanted. We went with the troop levels General Tommy Franks asked for. We deposed Saddam in 30 days with light casualties, much lighter than we expected.

Kerry, however, is right.  We did go short handed in some respects.  But the next paragraph shows why this was so critical.

The real problem in Iraq is that we are trying to be nice - we are trying to fight a minority of the population that is Jihadi, and trying to avoid killing the large majority that is not. We could flatten Fallujah in minutes with a flight of B52s, or seconds with one nuclear cruise missile - but we don’t. We’re trying to do brain surgery, not amputate the patient’s head. The Jihadis amputate heads.

That’s why more might have been better.  We went in short and hampered by too many constraints.

(2) We went to Iraq with too little planning. This is a specious argument. It supposes that if we had just had the right plan the war would have been easy, cheap, quick and clean.

That is not an option. It is a guerrilla war against a determined enemy and no such war ever has been or ever will be easy, cheap, quick, and clean. This is not TV.

Perhpas the speed of Desert Storm and the speed at knocking out Saddam’s government in the early stages of Iraqi Freedom contributed to that.

(3) We proved ourselves incapable of governing and providing security. This too is a specious argument. It was never our intention to govern and provide security. It was our intention from the beginning to do just enough to enable the Iraqis to develop a representative government and their own military and police forces to provide their own security, and that is happening.

Well true, but the Iraqis are not stepping up as we expected.

World War II began in 1928, lasted 17 years, plus a ten year occupation, and the US still has troops in Germany and Japan. World War II resulted in the death of more than 50 million people, maybe more than 100 million people, depending on whose estimates you accept.

The US has lost about 2,100 KIA in Iraq. The US took more than 4,000 killed in action on the morning of June 6, 1944, the first day of the Normandy Invasion to rid Europe of Nazi Imperialism. In WWII the US averaged 2,000 KIA a week for four years. Most of the individual battles of WWII lost more Americans than the entire Iraq war has done so far.

See this is why comparisons are dangerous.  His numbers are likely accurate aside from being out of date.  But the reality is that WW2 was a completely different war.  I am not sure that using such comparisons to make us see the number of dead in Iraq as not that bad, even if accurate, is how I want to address the picture.

Yes, in terms of a war of this magnitude our rates of casualties are low, and their’s much higher, but they are still not insignificant, though I don’t think he means it in that sense. 

Today, in Iraq, the stakes are at least as high . . . a world dominated by representative governments with civil rights, human rights, and personal freedoms . . . or a world dominated by the radical Islamic Wahhabi movement, by the Jihadist under the Mullahs and the Sharia.

Frankly while that sounds like a Clancy or Orwell plot, I think there is some real truth in there.

I do not understand why the American Left does not grasp this. Don’t they know that the Sharia considers women as property, that the whim of the Mullah is the law, that there is absolutely NO freedom of choice? The American left seems to favor human rights, civil rights, liberty and freedom, but evidently not for Iraqis. In America, absolutely, but nowhere else.

The 300,000 Iraqi bodies in mass graves in Iraq are not our problem. The US population is about twelve times that of Iraq, so let’s multiply 300,000 by twelve. What would you think if there were 3,600,000 American bodies in mass graves in America because of George Bush? Would you hope for another country to help liberate America?

"Peace Activists" always seem to demonstrate where it’s safe - in America. For this privilege, they should thank US veterans. Why don’t we see peace activist demonstrating in Iran, Syria, Iraq, Sudan, North Korea, in the places in the world that really need peace activism the most? Why? Just look at what happened to the four peace activists from the Christian Peace Maker Teams recently taken captive by the Muslim "insurgents" near Baghdad.

The Liberal mentality is supposed to favor human rights, civil rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. But if the Jihad wins, wherever the Jihad wins, it is the end of civil rights, human rights, democracy, multiculturalism, diversity, etc. Americans who oppose the liberation of Iraq are coming down on the side of their own worst enemy.

If the Jihad wins, it will be the death of Liberalism.

Sadly, American Liberals just don’t get it.

An interesting piece.  His conclusion has some merit.  It is often lately that we are seeing the Liberals shoot their liberal values in the foot in the name of liberalism.

My bottom line is I think we need less senationalism and politicing and more focus on clear objectives and goals.

Less use of cliches and more plain talk.

And we really need unity behind the boots on the ground.

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