Iraq is Not Vietnam, It's Guadalcanal (huh?!)

Great Debates
1

Browsing through FoxNews I saw this little gem from the Weekly Standard.

Apparently Lieutenant Colonel Powl Smith, U.S. Army, thinks that Iraq is not Vietnam, It’s Guadalcanal

I’ve seen some very good debates in the GD about similarities of the Iraq conflict with Algeria, Vietnam, etc… but Guadalcanal and the Pacific War had not been among them. I thought it would be nice to see this article ripped apart in here…

Some chosen excerpts:

Hhmmm … I thought the USSR was defeated without “submission”… I suppose that isn’t the lesson they want to pay attention too. As for the populations of WWII totalitarian regimes were never “convinced” they coudn’t win. The bombing campaigns (this is what I imagine he means) weren’t very effective against morale.

Grandiose “national survival” ! Oh !

Is this an attempt to change the common “it’s becoming like Vietnam” attitude by comparing it to some horrible jungle victory gained long ago ?

2

First off, the war in Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror. That itself is a misrepresented issue.

3

Funny, I thought we were *liberating * them, not defeating them - and that the totalitarian regime was long gone, unless we’re creating a new one.

4

Actually, the comparison makes some sense. Guadacanal was a bloody victory, achieved by the US willing to stand fast and take high casualties. The Japanese were defeated because they:
-(1) put their faith in courage over technical superiority (“banzai” charges)
-(2) were lead by people like Colonel Ichikara (who sacrificed his entire force in a hopeless frontal charge of the American position)
If we are willing to kill possibly tens of thousands of Iraqis, we can achieve “victory”. However, there won’t be too many people left who like us.

5

oh well… maybe beheadings were common in Guadalcanal too ? :smack: Might have missed that similarity.

6

OK. I give up. Just who were we trying to “liberate” and bring democracy to when we invaded Guadalcanal in 1942? And who was the Saddam Hussein of Guadalcanal? And where were the WMDs that FDR assured us were on Guadalcanal? I guess the Japanese were just a bunch of “dead-enders” who fought against us only because they hated our freedom. Hey, at least Guadalcanal was directly related to the attack on Pearl Harbor, just like the invasion of Iraq was directly related to the attack… oh, never mind. :confused:

7

One of the keys to winning Guadalcanal (other than bloody-minded perseverence) was winning the logistical battle. Stopping the “Tokyo Express” from resupplying and reinforcing the Japanese forces on the island.

From the words of Powell, Rumsfeld, and Allawi, the insurgent’s Tokyo Express in no danger of being closed down.

American progress on Guadalcanal was pretty much monotonic. Not quite so with Iraq.

Guadalcanal did mark the high-water mark for Japanese adventurism in the Southwest Pacific. Whether Iraqt marks the high water mark for the US adventurism in the early 21st century or not is TBD.

I think that the analogy is off. To continue the WWII comparison Japan worked long and hard at bludgeoning China into submission with dubious results at best - insufficient forces to compensate for the large areas and populations upset by Japan’s presence even without the leavening of mistreatment. I don’t think that Japan’s problem was an insufficiently willingness to inflict and take casualties or an unwillingness to accept the broken eggs of (enemy) civilian casualties in order to make the omelet of some sort of face-saving peace that would be acceptable at home.