My post about Michael Moore's obnoxious and factually-challenged opinion piece has generated quite a bit of comment over at Common Sense Political Thought. There seem to be a number of themes going on there, but they can be broken down into a couple of categories:
1. Michael Moore's a genius and anybody who can't see that he's 100% right about everything he's ever said is just a mindless, brainwashed, Republican sellout who has blood on his/her hands from every possible casualty since 9/11.
2. Sure, Michael Moore's a buffoon, but he's got a right under our Constitution to be a buffoon.
I never argued that Moore didn't have a right to be a buffoon (I don't think the Constitution addresses it, though), but Moore's amateurish comparisons of the Revolutionary War, our involvement in World War II, and the War in Iraq does a disservice to both those supporting our efforts and those with intelligent disagreement about the conflict.
I ran across this piece by Victor Davis Hanson which answers every lefty argument presented there (with the exception of the Michael Moore as buffoon argument).
It’s been five years since Sept. 11. After such a terrible provocation, why can’t we bring the ongoing “global war on terror” — whether in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere — to a close as our forefathers fighting World War II could?...
(T)here are significant differences between the "global war on terror" and World War II that do explain why victory is taking so much longer this time.
The most obvious is that, against Japan and Germany, we faced easily identifiable nation states with conventional militaries. Today’s terrorists blend in with civilians, and it’s hard to tie them to their patron governments or enablers in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan, who all deny any culpability. We also tread carefully in an age of ubiquitous frightening weapons, when any war at any time might without much warning bring in a nuclear, non-democratic belligerent.
The limitations on our war-making are just as often self-imposed. Yes, we defeated the Axis powers in less than four years, but it was at a ghastly cost. To defeat both Japan and Germany, we averaged over 8,000 Americans lost every month of the war — compared to around 50 per month since Sept. 11.
So far the United States has encouraged its citizens to shop rather than sacrifice. The subtext is that we can defeat the terrorists and their autocratic sponsors with just a fraction of our available manpower — ensuring no real disruption in our lifestyles. That certainly wasn’t the case with the Depression-era generation who fought World War II.
And in those days, peace and reconstruction followed rather than preceded victory. In tough-minded fashion, we offered ample aid to, and imposed democracy on, war-torn nations only after the enemy was utterly defeated and humiliated. Today, to avoid such carnage, we try to help and reform countries before our enemies have been vanquished —putting the cart of aid before the horse of victory.
Our efforts today are further complicated by conflicting Internet fatwas, terrorist militias and shifting tribal alliances; in short, we are not always sure who the enemy cadre really is — or will be.
I tried to make some of these points in the comments at CSPT. If we simply went into Iraq (or wherever) to win, regardless of casualties, it would have been done already. But the cost to both American and Iraqi lives would have been much greater. Americans' revulsion at casualties has caused our Presidents to use less efficient and effective means of warfare (namely air raids) to do work that used to be done by soldiers on the ground. And it is the air raids that have caused so many civilian casualties (although the numbers are much fewer than the 655k quoted in the moonbatosphere).
This isn't simply a phenomenon of this war. You can look back to President Clinton's strategy in Bosnia and Kosovo. He used bombs dropped from 20,000 feet because he was terrified of any American soldier's death. Why? Because American citizens, distrusting the man who "loathed the military" and dodged the draft, would not have tolerated any loss of American life in a conflict that didn't include any direct national interest.
The same attitude persists today among the hand-wringing sob sisters who think 3,000 American soldiers' deaths in 3 1/2 years of fighting isn't an amazingly low casualty rate.
Hanson's column presents the paradoxes between World War II and this war:
A stronger, far more affluent United States believes it can use less of its power against the terrorists than a much poorer America did against the formidable Japanese and Germans.
World War II, which saw more than 400,000 Americans killed, was not nearly as controversial or frustrating as one that has so far taken less than one-hundredth of that terrible toll.
And after Pearl Harbor, Americans believed they had no margin of error in an elemental war for survival. Today, we are apparently convinced that we can lose ground, whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, and still not lose either the war or our civilization.
More than the rest, it is this last paradox that could be our undoing. That we aren't more worried about losing this war and our civilization is most troubling.
Cross-posted at Common Sense Political Thought.
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