Looking back over the last couple of years, the president and his allies have struggled mightily to draw a helpful historical comparison between Iraq and other major military campaigns. At different times, the Bush gang has referenced Korea, the Revolutionary War, WWI, and the Civil War. By mid-2005, the president had settled on World War II as a personal favorite.
I mention this because Joe Lieberman, at the American Enterprise Institute today with John McCain to talk about their delusional support for the war in Iraq, launched into what Paul Kiel described as “a death-defying string of historical analogies.” Perhaps you can make sense of it:
“There are people who have spoken of this moment in history as if it were the 30’s, and there are some parallels, I fear, there. People say the war in Iraq is comparable to the Spanish Civil War, and the war in Iraq, to the larger war against Islamist terrorism, comparable to the Spanish Civil War, to the Second World War, the late 30’s and the failure to grasp the growing threat of fascism in Europe until it was almost too late. The painful irony of this moment in our history, is that while in some senses it is comparable to the 1930’s, it’s also already 1942. Because Pearl Harbor [9/11], in this war, has already happened.”
I never got that neocon decoder ring I ordered in the mail, so maybe someone can translate this one for me?
I suppose the point is that Iraq and WWII are somehow similar, except for the fact that Iraq didn’t attack the United States, there were no civil wars in Germany or Japan, Saddam was not poised to take over a continent, the allied powers were a massive international cooperating force, and FDR didn’t launch a war under false pretenses.
It’s an oldie, but Slate’s Fred Kaplan took on the WWII comparison in a fine piece in August 2005.
Accept for a moment the argument that Iraq is but one theater in a global war on terrorism. Overlook that, to the degree this is true, it’s because Bush’s invasion of Iraq — and his many miscalculations afterward — helped make it so. Even so, it would be an enormous leap to claim that the war in Iraq — or the broader war on terror — is the political, strategic, or moral equivalent of World War II.
Al-Qaida or its sundry offshoots could crash many more airplanes, wreck many more buildings, and bomb many more subways—and the magnitude of their power, and the urgency of their threat, would still fall far short of that posed by Nazi Germany. The panzers of the Wehrmacht rolled across the plains of Europe, toppling governments with ease, imposing totalitarian regimes, and killing millions in their wake. This was a war of civilization on a level that today’s war — however you might define it — doesn’t begin to approach.
But let’s say that the two wars — World War II and Iraq (or the broader war on terrorism) — are comparable, that their stakes are even remotely as high. Then why is President Bush fighting this war so tentatively?
From December 1941 to August 1945 — the attack on Pearl Harbor until the declaration of Allied victory — the United States manufactured 88,430 tanks and 274,941 combat aircraft. Yet in the two years after the invasion of Iraq, much less the four years since the attack on the World Trade Center, the Bush administration has not built enough armor platings to protect our soldiers’ jeeps from roadside bombs.
To fund World War II, the United States drastically expanded and raised taxes. (At the start of the war, just 4 million Americans had to pay income tax; by its end, 43 million did.) Beyond that, 85 million Americans — half the population at the time — answered the call to buy War Bonds, $185 billion worth. Food was rationed, scrap metal was donated, the entire country was on a war footing. By contrast, President Bush has asked the citizenry for no sacrifice, no campaigns of national purpose, to fight or fund the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. In fact, he has proudly cut taxes, heaving the hundreds of billions of dollars in war costs on top of the already swelling national debt.
If this war’s stakes are comparable to World War II’s, the entire nation should be enlisted in its cause — not necessarily to fight in it, but at least to pay for it. And if President Bush is not willing to call for some sort of national sacrifice, he cannot expect anyone to believe the stakes are really high.
Of course, there’s the one obvious historical parallel that Lieberman overlooked and Bush doesn’t want to talk about. I can’t imagine why.