Midway, Kursk, El Alamein, The Atlantic, the Election

Let's tie the election to some history.

Work with me here.

World War Two turned on four key battles:

• Midway, where an outnumbered US force sank the bulk of the Japanese carrier fleet, destroying their ability to control the initiative in the Pacific
• While Stalingrad, where the German Sixth Army was surrounded and wiped out, turned back the deepest German penetration into Russia, the defeat at Kursk thwarted the last German attempt to gain the initiative on the Eastern Front.
• At El Alamein, the British sent the Germans reeling back from their high-water mark and ended the threat to the Suez canal, effectively the beginning of the end of the German effort in the West
• In 1942, the Allies finally started figuring out how to sink U-boats faster than they could be built, ending German threat to strangle Britain's economy.

And yet the war continued for 2-3 years after each of these battles: After Midway came the bloody hell of the Solomons, Tarawa, Peleliu, Guam, Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, with hundreds of thousands of casualties. After Kursk, the Russian Front ate millions of lives for two more years. El Alamein was followed by Kasserine, Salerno, Dieppe, Anzio, the Volturno, D-Day, the Battle of France, Market-Garden, the Scheldt, the Huertgen, the Rhine Crossings - all supremely difficult and bloody. U-boats sank thousands of ships after 1942, and Britain's economy didn't recover from the submarine depredations until the 1950's.

All by way of saying that "turning point" doesnt mean "end of the war". A lot of dim leftybloggers seem to think that any rational commentator on the right is saying that - by way, no doubt, of being able to crow with sick partisan joy when there are problems of any sort in a few months.

Yet in hindsight, the outcome was in no doubt after each of those four pivotal battles of World War II, subsequent bloodshed notwithstanding.

And I suspect - and obviously, can not prove - that hindsight will regard this past season's two elections in the same light; turning points in the war on terror. There will be bloodshed, even fiascoes and debacles (the Huertgen miasma happened two years after El Alamein) - but the genie, if you will, is out of the bottle in the Moslem and Arab worlds.

To link this to another war - the Cold War - I wager than in ten years, we'll see the same reconstruction of history over this election that we've seen in the last decade over the Cold War; the sort of "the fall of the USSR was inevitable" caterwauling that the lefty media have fallen back on to try to expiate their short-sightedness in the '70s and '80s. Perhaps in ten years we'll learn how inevitable Arab and Moslem democracy was - no doubt thanks to the foresightedness of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy.

History is interesting, viewed from the middle of it.

Posted by Mitch at January 31, 2005 05:23 AM | TrackBack