Monday, September 27, 2004

Senator Ted Kennedy invoked the word quagmire on TV yesterday with regard to Iraq. Others opposed to the war in Iraq have invoked that term as well.

quag·mire n.
1. Land with a soft muddy surface.
2. A difficult or precarious situation; a predicament.

Using the modern politician’s definition of quagmire, then every war through history would fit. War is never won overnight. War is never won without casualties. War is never won without difficulty. War is never won without resolve.

It doesn’t help the soldiers in the field of battle when their political leadership tells them that they’re losing. It doesn’t help the soldiers in the field of battle when their political leadership tells them that they’re fighting for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t help the soldiers in the field of battle when the political leadership won’t let them do their jobs - which is to fight and win the war.

If I were on the Left, I’d be wary of using the word quagmire these days. That word helped our political leadership to lose Vietnam pretty effectively and our country paid dearly for that loss. That word will not help them to gain the White House in 2004 because more Americans believe that Iraq is a war we will and have to win because the safety and stability of the world depends upon it.

UPDATE: Interestingly, I found this comparison of Iraq and Guadalcanal by Powl Smith right after posting.

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.

[...]

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.