Iraq is Not Vietnam, It's Guadalcanal

Iraq is Not Vietnam, It's Guadalcanal

Friday, September 24, 2004

By Powl Smith
[ Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith, U.S. Army, is the
former chief of
counterterrorism plans at U.S. European Command and is
currently in
Baghdad
with Multi-National Forces-Iraq. ]


Pundits these days are quick to compare the fighting
in Iraq (search)
with
the American loss in Vietnam (search) 30 years ago.
Terms like
"quagmire"
evoke the Southeast Asian jungle, where America's
technological
advantages
were negated and committed Vietnamese guerrillas wore
down the U.S.
will to
fight.

People love to draw historical analogies because they
seem to offer a
sort
of analytical proof?after all, doesn't history repeat
itself? In fact,
such
comparisons do have value, but like statistics, it's
possible to find a
historical analogy to suit any argument. And Vietnam's
the wrong one
for
Iraq.

In fact, World War II is a far more accurate
comparison for the global
war
we are waging to defeat terrorism. Both wars began for
the United
States
with a catastrophic sneak attack from an undeclared
enemy. We had many
faint
and not-so-faint warnings of the impending Japanese
assault on Pearl
Harbor
(search), not least the historical precedent of Port
Arthur in 1904,
when
the Japanese launched a preemptive strike against
Russia.

We had similar ill-defined warnings and precedents
about Al Qaeda
(search)
and Islamist terrorism (search) (the East Africa
embassy bombings
(search)
in 1998; the USS Cole bombing (search) in 2000), but
in 2001 as in
1941, we
lacked the "hard" intelligence requisite to convince a
country at peace
that
it was about to pitched into war.

Historical apologists say that the Japanese were
"forced" to attack us
because we were strangling their trade in Asia. Sound
familiar?
American
foreign policy in the Middle East is responsible for
the anger and rage
that
has stirred up Al Qaeda, right? In fact, there is a
crucial similarity
between the Japanese imperialism (search) of 50 years
ago and Islamic
fundamentalism of today: both are totalitarian,
anti-Western ideologies
that
cannot be appeased.

As Japan amassed victory after victory in the early
days of the war,
America
and our allies could see that we had a long, hard slog
ahead of us.
Americans understood there was no recourse but to win,
despite the
fearful
cost. This was the first and foremost lesson of World
War II that
applies
today: Wars of national survival are not quick, not
cheap, and not
bloodless.

In one of our first counteroffensives against the
Japanese, U.S. troops
landed on the island of Guadalcanal (search) in order
to capture a key
airfield. We surprised the Japanese with our speed and
audacity, and
with
very little fighting seized the airfield. But the
Japanese recovered
from
our initial success, and began a long, brutal campaign
to force us off
Guadalcanal and recapture it. The Japanese were very
clever and
absolutely
committed to sacrificing everything for their beliefs.
(Only three
Japanese
surrendered after six months of combat?a statistic
that should put
today's
Islamic radicals to shame.) The United States suffered
6,000 casualties
during the six-month Guadalcanal campaign; Japan,
24,000. It was a very
expensive airfield.

Which brings us to the next lesson of World War II:
Totalitarian
enemies
have to be bludgeoned into submission, and the
populations that support
them
have to be convinced they can't win. This is a bloody
and difficult
business. In the Pacific theater, we eventually
learned our enemies'
tactics?jungle and amphibious warfare (search),
carrier task forces,
air
power?and far surpassed them. But that victory took
four years and cost
many
hundreds of thousands of casualties.

Iraq isn't Vietnam, it's Guadalcanal?one campaign of
many in a global
war to
defeat the terrorists and their sponsors. Like the
United States in the
Pacific in 1943, we are in a war of national survival
that will be
long,
hard, and fraught with casualties. We lost the first
battle of that war
on
Sept. 11, 2001, and we cannot now afford to walk away
from the critical
battle we are fighting in Iraq any more than we could
afford to walk
away
from Guadalcanal.

For the security of America, we have no recourse but
to win.

Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith, U.S. Army, is the
former chief of
counterterrorism plans at U.S. European Command and is
currently in
Baghdad
with Multi-National Forces-Iraq.



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