Like the vast majority of Americans, I concur that the Iraq War has been horribly bumbled in its execution.
But there’s plenty of basis for criticizing the war effort without relying on misleading soundbites and catchphrases. The one I’ve heard most of late is how “the Iraq War has now lasted longer than World War II,” with the implications that (a) it only took us X time to defeat Hitler and Tojo, but it’s taken us more-than-X time to “win” in Iraq, so obviously things are being seriously mishandled, and (b) we’ve been asked to sacrifice our soldiers for far longer than in WWII, which seems patently unreasonable.
The problem is, I don’t think the implied metaphor works, for two major reasons.
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The scope of the two conflicts are significantly different. In Iraq, we have about 150,000 US troops on the ground. In WWII, the use fielded about 13 million troops (close to 9 million in the Army and Marines), though that included a significant number not actually in combat zones. In Iraq we have lost now over 3,000 troops; WWII casualties were more like 310,000. There were, of course, substantially greater opposition forces in WWII — and, conversely, they were far more straightforward
to identify and, well, oppose. -
The timeline/nature of the two conflicts is also significantly different. US military actions in WWII stretched from December 1941 to August 1945 (V-J Day). But the military occupation of Germany went from 1945-49 (in Japan it extended to 1952). In contrast, the actual major military operations in Iraq took only a few months (March to April or May 2003). The subsequent period in Iraq hasn’t quite been an occupation, hasn’t quite been a war — it is not, despite what difficulties
there were in the post-WWII occupation, analogous to anything in WWII. But it’s unreasonable to compare (time-wise) the military operations + post-war insurgency operations in Iraq with just the military operations in WWII.
This isn’t to justify how the war has been handled (or even, per se, the war itself). But the metaphor is an apples-to-oranges comparison — it’s no more valid to compare the duration of US involvement in Iraq to WWII, than to compare it to the first Gulf War, or the Civil War, or the American Revolution or the Thirty Years War. Mismanagement, bad politics, bad strategy, corruption, whatever, there’s plenty you can point to in criticism of the war in Iraq without relying on bad, if glib, historical
comparisons.