Victor Hanson reminds us that such cries could have been leveled at the Allies every day of the week during World War II:
Our forefathers made several mistakes. They attacked nonexistent artillery emplacements. Planes dropped paratroopers far from intended targets. Critical landing assignments on Omaha Beach were missed.
Once they left shore, it got worse. Indeed, D-Day was soon forgotten in the nightmare of GIs being blown apart in the Normandy hedgerows by well-concealed, entrenched German panzers. Apparently, no American planners — from Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall down to the staff of Allied Supreme Commander Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower — had anticipated either the difficulty of penetrating miles of these dense thickets or the deadliness of new German model tanks and antitank weapons.
So we landed in Europe with the weaponry we had — and it was in large part vastly inferior to that of the Wehrmacht.
The most brilliant armored commander in U.S. history, George S. Patton, had been sacked from theater command for slapping an ill soldier the prior year in Sicily. Gens. Omar N. Bradley and Bernard L. Montgomery lacked his genius and audacity — and tens of thousands of Allied soldiers were to pay for Patton's absence at Normandy.
We finally broke out of the mess after using heavy bombers to blast holes in the German lines. But again, these operations were fraught with foul-ups.
On two successive occasions we bombed our own troops, altogether killing or wounding over 1,000 Americans, including the highest-ranking officer to die in the European theater, Lt. Gen. Lesley J. McNair. The nature of his death was hidden from the press — as were many mistakes and casualties both leading up to and after Normandy.
When the disaster in the bocage near the Normandy beaches ended over two months after D-Day, the victorious Americans, British, and Canadians had been bled white. Altogether, the winners of the Normandy campaign suffered a quarter-million dead, wounded, or missing, including almost 30,000 American fatalities — losing nearly ten times the number of combat dead in four years of fighting in Iraq.
And let me remind you of what Orson Scott Card wrote in early January 2006:
Well, dumb-guy Bush and his team have been leading us in the best-run war in American history -- not a flawless war, but one with far fewer and less costly mistakes than the norm. (Dear Furious Letter Writers: Don't even bother arguing this point with me until you've studied the mistakes made in all our other wars so you have some kind of perspective.)
Yes, this was before the Samarra mosque bombing in February which changed the nature of the war. But after failing to handle the new situation under the old rules through the rest of 2006, we've revamped and resorted to directly confronting the enemy as I speculated we should consider within a couple months of the Samarra bombing.
War is a series of blunders and errors. Our sins have been minor but well publicized. Only Allah knows how much our enemy is hurt. We may appear stuck in the bocage again, but the breakout and pursuit will follow.The enemy has made the gravest error of all, in my opinion. And we'll carry that error to victory.
