"One thousand three hundred and forty-seven days"

Great column by Jonah Goldberg over at NRO: We're Not Losers.

Jonah compares the statistics on deaths, days, and more from WWII and the War in Iraq.

Here is an excerpt:

One thousand three hundred and forty-seven days.

That's how long America was involved in combat in World War II, and Sunday, U.S. involvement in Iraq passed that "grim military milestone," as one TV anchor called it. This factoid has become a fixture of respectable talking points about the futility of the Iraq war. Newscasters and pundits note its gravity with sober foreboding and slight head-shaking.

What they don't note is the grotesque stupidity of the comparison.

Let's start with the obvious. America's involvement in World War II may have lasted 1,347 days, but it cost the lives of 406,000 Americans and wounded 600,000 more. Losses among Allied civilians and military personnel stretched into the tens of millions. Whole cities were razed, populations displaced, economies shattered. The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq remains below one percent of our WWII losses.

World War II ended when the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Were it not for those grave measures, the war might have lasted longer and cost many more lives. So maybe those wielding the WWII yardstick as a cudgel would prefer we gave Sadr City and Tikrit the Hiroshima-Nagasaki treatment? That would root out even the most die-hard insurgents and shorten the war. The phase of the Iraq war that was comparable to World War II ended in less than three weeks. Remember "shock and awe"? As far as such things go, the conventional war in Iraq put World War II to shame; the initial U.S. military victory in Iraq was akin to defeating all of Italy in less than a month.

The current phase of the Iraq war — whether we call it post-occupation, reconstruction, civil war or whatever — is really a separate war. It's at once a Hobbesian nightmare in which chaos rules and a complex, multi-front battle between regional factions and their proxies. But as insurgencies go, it hasn't lasted very long or cost very many American lives.

(Emphasis added.)

For some reason, Liberals cannot comprehend these facts (they must have gone to American public schools). Can you imagine how they would have behaved if they had been alive during World War II?

First of all, they would have pretended to love America on 7 December 1941, just as they did on 11 September 2001. Then, they would have pretended to support the war on those who attacked us.

And then, they would have begun criticizing FDR for every single move he made to eliminate those who attacked us and murdered our fellow Americans. Don't forget, the Liberals would have begun eliminating any and all laws, bills, and provisions that helped make America safer and punished traitors, spies, and the enemy.

We would have been sunk at Pearl Harbor, just like the USS Arizona.

Technorati Tags: WWII, War On Terror, Liberals, Democrats,