My thesis, clearly stated at the beginning, was:
It took a long time -- 15 years -- but guess what.My point was insurgencies can be defeated.
We won.
So rather than seeing this current struggle as intrinsically unwinnable, we can learn from history how to win it.
However, this commenter resorts to the tactic of first claiming disbelief I could possibly be serious (I suppose nobody he knows embraces non-defeatist views), and then dismisses me as mentally deficient -- and in the meantime, makes an illogical claim:
Leo Bloom said...His claim is, essentially, that since the Philippine campaign was "stupid", by extension so is Iraq.
I read this most of this thinking it was satire. Gradually I realized you were serious. The whole Phillipines episode was one of the stupidest endeavors we ever embarked on. We "won"? Exactly what did we win? The Philipines was an albatross all the way through WWII, just as Iraq will be, best case.
The problem with you guys is you want to have all this grit and determination and you spend 0 time trying to figure out if what you are doing is actually helping or hurting. Your tellingly abstract explication of the glories of the Phillipines is a perfect emblem of your general mental unfitness.
1:40 PM, October 02, 2007
That's how he avoids dealing with the issue that insurgencies can be defeated -- he wants to claim victory will amount to nothing anyway.
The very definition of defeatism!
Now, there are three more things about this that I find very, very funny!
The first is the claim of my mental unfitness, of which I'm sure my readers who know me personally will share in my amusement.
The second is the disdain for "grit and determination" to win, when it apparently actually has succeeded, in all but recognition by the New York Times and their ilk, as I report here.
And finally, the nut of his argument: the Philippine victory, in the face of eerily similar defeatism and criticism by the press at the time, has to be discounted by calling it a worthless endeavor, "all through WWII".
Interesting.
I'll take an "albatross" anytime for myself if it equates to a Stalingrad-like graveyard of the enemy forces!
As Belmont Club recounts here, some well-known Pacific campaigns of WWII had the following casualties as Killed in Action:
Iwo Jima: 20,700 Japanese; 8,200 AmericansWretchard of Belmont Club, who grew up in the Philippines, writes:
Guadalcanal: 26,000 Japanese; 1,800 Americans
Okinawa: 66,000 Japanese; 12,500 Americans
All the campaigns listed above, including the massive battle for Okinawa, are dwarfed by the Sixth and Eighth Army's Philippine Campaign of 1944-45. The raw statistics are astonishing. The Philippine Campaign was the graveyard of the Imperial Japanese Army: IJA KIA exceeded the estimated (300,000) German and Axis dead at Stalingrad.Take that in.
In terms of raw effort, Wikipedia notes that "in all, ten U.S. divisions and five independent regiments battled on Luzon, making it the largest campaign of the Pacific war, involving more troops than the United States had used in North Africa, Italy, or southern France." It also included the largest urban battle of the Pacific War, the Battle of Manila, in which 100,000 civilians were killed. Two of the most famous divisions in the US Army, the 1st Cavalry and 25th Infantry, participated in the Philippine Campaign. And yet it is nearly forgotten. It will not even be remembered in Spielberg's sequel to the Band of Brothers.
336,000 Imperial Japanese Killed in Action in the retaking of the Philippines, to a loss of 14,000 Americans!
A stunning kill ratio of 24 to 1.
What is even more striking is the phenomenal economy with which the US Sixth and Eighth armies inflicted these losses on the Imperial Japanese Army. Here are tables calculating the ratio of US to Japanese KIA in each campaign. Yet these remarkable ratios were inflicted in terrain that included urban battlefields, the dense jungles of Leyte and the rugged mountains of Luzon's Cordilleras against a first rate Japanese commander -- Tomoyuki Yamashita, the famed "Tiger of Malaya".The Japanese initially invaded because our control of the Philippines was a stratgic thorn in the side of their plans to dominate the Southwest Pacific.
And it became a disastrous graveyard for the Imperial Army.
336,000 of them, and every death, and more, well-deserved by these yellow bastard(*) criminal savages; about those 100,000 civilians killed in the Manila Massacre mentioned above? Slaughtered for sport by these Japanese!
The massacre was at its worst in the Battle of Manila. During the battle for control of the city, Japanese troops took out their anger and frustration on the civilians caught in the crossfire. Japanese troops brutally looted, burned, executed, decapitated and abused women, men and children alike, including priests, Red Cross personnel, prisoners of war and hospital patients. Manila was called the "Warsaw of Asia", being the most devastated city in Asia during World War II.And that was a drop in the bucket of their evil:
The Manila massacre is one of several major war crimes committed by the Imperial Japanese Army from the annexation of Manchuria in 1931 to the end of World War II in 1945. It was a major event in Japanese war crimes, where over 15 million Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indonesian, Burmese, and Indochinese civilians, Pacific Islanders, and Allied Filipino and American POWs were killed.Just like their Nazi friends.
And the Philippines was their Stalingrad.
And Iraq is becoming a graveyard of similarly despicable jihadists.
One by one, the world is being made a better place as each is snuffed out.
(*) Yes, I'm using a vicious, nasty racial slur here. The Imperial Japanese Army deserves it. They were evil and needed to be dehumanized and exterminated for the good of civilization. Yet, I'm sure many emasculated so-called liberals will take more offense at my words than outrage at the IJA's documented atrocities. They don't want to admit the awful truth that violence is unfortunately sometimes necessary, and thus hatred is sometimes useful. Gates of Vienna defends "hatred" here. To avoid the distaste of hatred, many resort to refusing to recognize evil at all, leaving their only response to give in to any and all demands made by the most brutal.
