GWOT is not WWII

John Derbyshire writes for the National Review, writing a blog tracking the election and political issues. In an recent post, he ponders:

"The folk who direct our armed forces have spent four and a half years struggling inconclusively with a rabble of fanatics who have no navy or air force, no armored units, no regular formations at all in fact, and munitions they operate with cell-phones and lengths of string. In three and a half years, our grandfathers turned two mighty, sprawling fascist empires to rubble. What am I missing here?"

I hate this line of argument. You hear this brain-dead idiocy from so many people these days - we only took three and a half years to win World War II, so why do we still have troops in Iraq after four and a half years? I hate to break it to you, but we still have troops in Japan and Germany and they faced resistance and civil unrest after the war. During World War II, we lost over 270,000 members of our armed forces and tens of millions of civilians died. In Iraq, we've lost barely more than 1/100 of that number in both service members and Iraqi civilians. Then, of course, there's the messy bit that World War II had been going on for several years before we got there. Oh, and don't forget how we ended up winning that war: we used nuclear weapons to annihilate two cities and kill a few hundred thousand civilians.

So, until we're willing to lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers, willing to kill millions of civilians, and willing to use such tactics such as firebombing Dresden or nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki while rounding up all American Arabs to put them into concentration camps, let's hold off on comparing the war in Iraq to World War II.