With the war in Iraq now in its sixth year, the White House keeps running into an awkward dilemma — it’s run out of arguments. In trying to spin a policy that doesn’t work, the Bush gang has relied on every argument imaginable, and with little success.
So, left with no other choice, the White House has decided to re-use old arguments, in the hopes the public won’t remember the talking points from several years ago.
Bush and his cohorts are especially fond of historical analogies for Iraq. At various times, administration officials and their allies have argued that Iraq is like World War I, World War II, the U.S. Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War, and the U.S. Revolutionary War. (Bush even, oddly enough, once connected Iraq and Vietnam.)
Yesterday, the president returned to one of the comparisons he’d given up a while back.
President Bush on Wednesday called the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan a “great struggle” akin to World War II and warned anew against those who would waver in it. […]
Mr. Bush was speaking to graduating cadets at the Air Force Academy here. As he has before, he cited the experiences of Germany and Japan, World War II enemies that after defeat became democracies and allies.
“Today, we must do the same in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Mr. Bush said. “By helping these young democracies grow in freedom and prosperity, we’ll lay the foundation of peace for generations to come.”
This comparison really doesn’t work.
At the outset, let’s put aside some unpleasant realities, such as 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. Those points aren’t important right now.
Reading over Bush’s speech, the WWII comparison seemed to be two-fold — there are similarities between post-invasion Iraq and post-war Japan and Germany; and the seriousness and scope of the wars are similar.
On the first point, Bush’s argument has no foundation in reality. It certainly doesn’t apply to Japan, and it really doesn’t apply to Germany.
But it’s the second point that I find especially annoying. 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.
Few do.