Mistakeproof
For those of you who believe that John Kerry will fight a war without the "mistakes", let's look at a successful war.
And let's count up the mistakes:
- During the first wave of attacks to liberate Europe, Intelligence didn't show that the first wave of defenders were not the despirited cannon-fodder that were expected, but in fact some of the enemy dictator's best troops, awash in combat experience and itching to take a shot at the US invaders.
- Intelligence also didn't show that the US invading force, immediately after the invasion, was going to encounter fearsomely difficult terrain - terrain known to British military planners for hundreds of years.
- Although word never got to the home front, the air campaign leading up to the invasion had been fraught with bloody disasters; at one point, aircrew involved in softening up the defenders had a one in three chance of surviving 25 missions.
- The equipment with which the Army went to war, although much-touted by its own PR, was in many cases disastrously bad; the Sherman tank's guns couldn't penetrate even the side, much less the frontal, armor on any enemy tank; its own armor was thin enough to be punched through by nearly any enemy cannon (and many of their guns could blow all the way through a Sherman), and the tank's internal design was such that a penetrating hit usually led to a gasoline fire that would kill or burn some or all of the crew, or an ammunition explosion that would obliterate them. Even fairly easy advances were accompanied by ghastly casualties among tankers, who usually accepted that five of their own tanks would be lost for every enemy tank knocked out - with 25 dead, wounded or badly-shaken GIs for every knocked-out German tank.
- The infantry were plagued with obsolescent machine guns and hamfisted tactics that led to the deaths of staggering numbers of soldiers.
- Worse, the Army's doctrine called for units to be kept in front-line service continuously; casualties would be replaced by pools of "replacements", fed into the line the same way a business feeds temps and new hires into an office, individually; the assumption was that the unit's surviving "old hands" would teach the newbies the ropes. But that's not how combat veterans work; the replacements were fed into the front-line units in the dark, under fire, to interact with men who'd already survived the ordeal and who disdained, usually, communicating with the new men that experience told them would be dead or wounded soon; the newbies learned or, very very often, died or were maimed. In the meantime, the survivors stayed in action until they were killed, got a "million-dollar wound" that sent them home (or a lighter one that kept them out of action for a while), or went mad with "battle fatigue" from the endless stress of combat. The average Infantry Division suffered over 200% casualties in 14 months.
Those, of course, are incidents from the US campaign in the Second World War in Europe - the "Good War". Mistakes - poor intelligence, bad planning, poor design and obsolescent equipment - killed
tens of thousands of American GIs, and nobody-knows-how-many civilians.
And that was a war we won.
John Kerry has trouble with this. Jim Geraghty from
Kerry Spotputs it this way:
I suppose his question was inspired by that press conference a few weeks ago, when reporter after reporter asked Bush if he would admit any mistakes or take the blame for anything that had gone wrong since the invasion of Iraq. Had Bush said anything — "yeah, I wish we had sent a few more troops, and in hindsight, not being able to attack from the north from Turkey meant we didn't attack the Sunni triangle as hard as we would have liked" — then his opponents and the media would have beat him over the head with his comments every day between then and Nov. 2.
Of course mistakes were made in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Coalition operations are executed by human beings, and human beings make mistakes. The point is to avoid as many mistakes as possible and get the job done as quickly and effectively as possible.
I suppose Beers' comment could inspire a new Kerry slogan: "John Kerry: He won't make any mistakes."
The notion that one can fight a war -
any kind of war, especially the ephemeral, intelligence-heavy war against stateless terrorists - is absurd.
And yet a substantial part of the electorate can listen to statements like Kerry's with a straight, even a hopeful, face.
Further proof that liberals should be required to pass a test before being allowed to comment on foreign policy and defense.
I may write this test up for distribution soon...
Posted by Mitch at
August 12, 2004 05:37 AM
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Well said! I've studied 20th century history -- the bloodiest century in the history of mankind -- and it's amazing that people who consider themselves well educated can be so ignorant of what war was like to the people who ran it and fought in it. Here's another good example of a wartime screwup for you:
Posted by: velocette at August 12, 2004 05:33 AMWWI was the first war we fought where we tried to put the whole economy on a war footing. After we declared war on Germany, Wilson's gov't put a guy in charge of making sure that the troop ships were well supplied with coal for the trip across the atlantic. He promptly took control of the rails and commanded that all of the stockpiles of coal near railways be brought east to the Atlantic harbors. There was a giant snafu, the rail network ground to a halt until further emergency measures were taken to get the trains moving again. It seems the beaureaucrat had forgotten that the stockpiles of coal had originally been intended to be train fuel.
So because mistakes have been made in the past means it's okay to give Bush II a "pass" on this war? I can't refute the fact that war is bloody and mistakes will inevitably be made. But I can say this: we shouldn't be in this conflict in the first place. Iraq was not the appropriate target for 9/11 retaliation.
Posted by: Travis at August 12, 2004 10:49 AMTravis: You're right, arguably, in the strictest sense of the term. But the War on Terrorism is not about "retaliating for 9/11" - and that's my biggest worry about a Kerry administration, that that's what the WOT will devolve into. "retaliating for 9/11" is fundamentally defensive - and no wars are *ever* won on the defensive.
Iraq sponsored terror - lots of it. Iraq was definitely involved in the '93 WTC bombing, the attempted assassination of GHWBush, sponsored the worst of the Intifada, was very likely involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, and the links to Al Quaeda and the other amorphous terror clearinghouses are fairly apparent.
The liberation of Iraq has introduced both social and military pressures on the other terror-supporting regimes in the area, which have already paid dividends (the moderation of Libya, the strengthening of moderates in Pakistan, the pushing of Iran's mullahs to a tipping point).
The notion that the War on Terror is "retaliation" and "against Al Quada" is further proof that Democrats should be required to pass a test before commenting on foreign policy...
Posted by: mitch at August 12, 2004 11:14 AMWow, now I've heard it all.
1. War on Afghanistan was wrong becaues retaliation is the barbarian's way;
2. War on Iraq was wrong because it wasnot retaliation.
Somewhere in between those two opposing reasons to um oppose the US lies nuance, I suppose.
Posted by: Brian Jones at August 12, 2004 12:50 PMYou guys seem to believe the War on Terror is truly about terror. I believe it's about oil, Haliburton, corporate profits and, um, more oil. Going into this war was not about liberation. Bush sold this war to the American people as a war of retaliation and of WMD (whatever happened to them?). Did you know that, at the start of the war, 72% of Americans believed that "it was either very or somewhat likely" that "Saddam Hussein (was) personally involved in the September 11 attacks?" http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/03/11/Iraq.Qaeda.link/ We were misled at best; lied to at worst.
I'll stoop to your level: maybe you should have to take a test on how to see through the Whitehouse spin.
Posted by: Travis at August 12, 2004 10:53 PM"ou guys seem to believe the War on Terror is truly about terror. I believe it's about oil, Haliburton, corporate profits and, um, more oil."
If so, then they've done a lousy job: we turned full control of their oil back to Iraq in January.
We're not the ones eating spin for breakfast, Travis.
Posted by: mitch at August 13, 2004 07:52 AMI need to correct my earlier post. I was going by memory & just laid hold of the the original reference work today. It's "The Great Adventure", by Pierce J. Fredericks, an Ace paperback published in 1960, and now, regrettably, out of print. The relevant passages on pp. 65-67 do not say that the problems of mismanagement by the War Industries Board were caused by the conflict between the demands for coal by troopships and the railways, but rather by the demands for coal by war equipment makers and the need for home heating in the East during the especially cold winter of 1917-1918. My apolagies for the error.
Posted by: velocette at August 13, 2004 01:08 PMHey Travis, you lackwit fucktard, Halliburton got more no-bid contracts during then Clinton years than they have gotten from Bush. If Bush had wanted to get cheap oil, he would have pushed for ending the sanctions against Saddam and just BOUGHT Iraqi oil. Control of Iraqi oil has gone to the interim Iraqi govt., and they are selling it at world market prices. You lefty asshats keep chanting "The war is for oil," but you are utterly unable to give an example of how it is for oil.
Posted by: John Cunningham at August 14, 2004 11:15 PM