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Guadalcanal

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Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith has an article in the latest Weekly Standard, alluded to below by DJW. I will reserve judgement as to whether LTC Smith actually believes the argument that he making; this is, after all, the Weekly Standard, and you don’t actually have to believe your argument in order to get it printed (see Stephen Hays).

LTC Smith argues that Iraq is the equivalent of the battle of Guadalcanal in World War II. For those unfamiliar, The Thin Red Line, film and book, covers an aspect of that battle. The US decided to invade Guadalcanal in order to prevent the Japanese from using a newly constructed air base to cut off trade with Australia. Unwisely, Isoruku Yammamoto, the Japanese commander, decided to fight for Guadalcanal, and ended losing much of his air and naval power in a series of engagements that lasted several months.

LTC Smith repeats all of the conservative talking points on the war. A sample:

Historical apologists say that the Japanese were “forced” to attack us because we were strangling their trade in Asia. Sound familiar? American foreign policy in the Middle East is responsible for the anger and rage that has stirred up al Qaeda, right?

Americans understood there was no recourse but to win, despite the fearful cost. This was the first and foremost lesson of World War II that applies today: Wars of national survival are not quick, not cheap, and not bloodless.

Only three Japanese surrendered after six months of combat–a statistic that should put today’s Islamic radicals to shame.

We lost the first battle of that war on September 11, 2001, and we cannot now afford to walk away from the critical battle we are fighting in Iraq any more than we could afford to walk away from Guadalcanal. For the security of America, we have no recourse but to win.

Alright, this is all really too rich. First, the neocons have repeatedly argued that American foreign policy is responsible for September 11; see Norm Podhoretz and his argument about reputation and Islamic terrorism. I plan to tear apart Podhoretz’ article in a couple of days, so stay tuned.

Second, as many have pointed out, attacking Iraq after 9/11 is somewhat akin to invading Brazil as a response to Pearl Harbor. Fortunately, George Bush was not president in 1941.

Third, Japanese soldiers were not suicidal in the way that has traditionally been argued. The Japanese Army did not favor surrender, and shot soldiers and officers who tried to do so. However, a large number of Japanese tried to surrender anyway, and all too often were executed on the spot by Americans. See John Dower, War Without Mercy, for the gory details. That the Japanese executed American prisoners doesn’t justify this behavior, any more than the beheading of Nick Berg justified Abu Ghraib.

Finally, Smith’s argument is amazingly stupid. He can’t even manage to rise to the level of “flypaper theory”, which is the only thing that might make sense in relation to Guadalcanal. Guadalcanal proved a strategic victory because the Japanese expended large numbers of ships and aircraft in its defense. The Americans also sustained heavy losses, but produced new ships and planes to replace those destroyed. The Japanse didn’t run out of people, either at Guadalcanal specifically or in the war as a whole. Guadalcanal was brutal, but it had a strategic point; Iraq does not. Individual terrorists can be replaced in a way that fast battleships cannot. Moreover, when an American soldier dies in Iraq, we lose a tremendous amount of intellectual capital. Terrorists and insurgents have much shorter training periods.

Indeed, the Japanese experience at Guadalcanal is a more apt analogy to the current situation in Iraq than the American experience. What’s most irking to me is that this is a piece that any sixth rate hack intern at the Heritage Foundation could have written. It gets published because the author has an LTC in front of his name, which presumably lends him “cred”. The exact opposite conclusion is more warranted; any officer in the US Army should have enough of a sense of its institutional history to shy away from such a terrible argument.

Of course, none of this applies to Ph.D.s; we never write stupid things.

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