Author, editor, and former embedded war reporter Karl Zinsmeister says we should use history to help us comprehend where we stand in Iraq. A useful reminder.
We are now 16 months into the Iraq war. At a similar stage in earlier American wars, how were our forces faring?Posted by Alan at July 5, 2004 06:25 AMWell, at about this point in the French and Indian Wars George Washington had been defeated and forced to surrender at Fort Necessity (he was released after being disarmed), and then disastrously beaten in a fight where his unit of 1,400 men took 900 casualties and ended up running away. (Washington himself was not injured but had two horses shot from under him, and took four bullets through his coat.)
Washington's next experience of war, in the American Revolution, began with equal tribulation. Sixteen months into his command, the American army was suffering through a series of traumatic defeats. They'd lost every single battle since the Declaration of Independence, and had depleted 90 percent of their military strength in heavy fighting. Most of the remaining soldiers declared they were going to go home when their enlistments expired, and in many parts of the new nation citizens were pledging fresh oaths of allegiance to the tyrant King George.
Sixteen months into the Civil War, a permanent breakaway of the southern states looked like imminent reality. The Union army that marched on Richmond had been beaten with tens of thousands of casualties. Robert E. Lee had launched an invasion of the north, and Washington, D.C. was on the brink of being overrun.
Sixteen months into U.S. involvement in World War II, the Japanese had taken control of all of the Pacific and Southeast Asia. Our British allies had suffered the most catastrophic defeat in their history when they lost 130,000 fighting men in Singapore. The Japanese had just as thumpingly ejected the U.S. from the Philippines, and were actually in their tenth month of occupying American soil in Alaska. It would take 1,000 American dead (far more than our total losses in Iraq to date) merely to eject the enemy from this Aleutian Island foothold over the course of a few days in the seventeenth month of the war.
At month 16 of the war in Europe, meanwhile, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Yugoslavia, and other countries had all been lost. German submarines were in the process of wiping out Atlantic shipping. And death camps like Treblinka had been opened and were in the process of killing millions. By the end of that year, 40 percent of the world's Jews, for instance, would be dead.
We have had some tough moments in Iraq this year. But we must remember that every war has tough stages and low points that victorious nations must grind through. The difference between civilizations that triumph and civilizations that surrender is often simply a matter of keeping your determination and fighting spirit intact through the down days.