To the Editor:

Anyone buying into Gabriel Schoenfeld’s overreaching analogy between the state of American armed forces at the end of World War II and the woeful condition in which we now find ourselves in Iraq is going to be badly misled [“Iraq: Prophets of Defeat,” December 2004]. Mr. Schoenfeld argues that the military failures of Iraq—too few troops, too little good intelligence, Tolstoyish generals—duplicate those of the Allies in the European theater toward the end of World War II. Therefore, he concludes, we should not be so hard on the current establishment for failing to make good on the twin goals of victory and democracy.

But by the fall of 1944 the U.S. was fully engaged on two major fronts, the Pacific and post-liberation France. Some 12,000,000 people (including myself) were under American arms. This was a massive citizen army, which had largely been drafted.

In Iraq today, by contrast, we have an all-volunteer army, and Republicans have made it clear that there will be no draft while we try to win on the cheap.

Harold Ticktin

Shaker Heights, Ohio

To the Editor:

I admire how honestly and precisely Gabriel Schoenfeld portrays the argument of the critics of our Iraq policy. But his counterargument seems based on an inadequate analogy. In 1944 in Europe we may have made terrible mistakes of judgment and there may have been a loss of morale, but we were not fighting the French whose land we were occupying/liberating. We faced an army, not a people. In Iraq we face attacks by the people we are trying to help. And not one group but many. I feel much less hopeful than Gabriel Schoenfeld of creating a “postwar” Iraq like the postwar Europe of the late 1940’s.

John J. Clayton

Amherst, Massachusetts

Gabriel Schoenfeld writes:

It is easier than shooting fish in a barrel to point out the many differences between the U.S. role in conquering Nazi Germany and the U.S. role in pacifying post-Saddam Iraq. Although my two interlocutors seem to have skipped over this, I did some fish-in-the-barrel shooting myself when I noted in my article that “juxtaposing the two conflicts might appear to be a stretch” and pointed to some of the more obvious difficulties with the historical parallel: “[I]n Iraq we are now engaged in a clean-up operation against terrorists and insurgents, not attempting to subdue a major power like Nazi Germany.”

But I also suggested that, for this very reason, the parallel should “not be lightly dismissed.” In the last stages of World War II, “the U.S. was in its military prime, battle-hardened, united at home as never before, and fighting a war that might justly be called a supreme national emergency. And if things nevertheless went badly awry in the endgame of the ‘good war’ fought by the ‘greatest generation,’ might that not suggest the folly of entering summary judgments concerning the more ambiguous conflict in which we are now engaged?”

Harold Ticktin believes that, in contrast to World War II, we are fighting this war “on the cheap.” In relative terms, he is of course right, but he is wrong to blame this on the evil “Republicans.” For better or worse, “on the cheap” is typically how democracies prefer to fight wars, unless they are forced by events into total mobilization.

For his part, John J. Clayton writes that in Germany, “[w]e faced an army, not a people. In Iraq we face attacks by the people we are trying to help.” But this assertion rests on a serious misreading of both wars. There were plenty of German civilians who in Hitler’s name fought alongside the Wehrmacht to the bitter end. In Iraq, on the other hand, it is misleading and morally tenuous to say that we “face attacks by the people we are trying to help.” We face attacks by a relatively small segment of the population that has been hell-bent on stopping Iraq from establishing democratic rule. The deeds of those included in this segment—suicide bombings and hostage-taking and brutal murders—speak for themselves. So do their leaflets. One recent one, distributed on the eve of Iraq’s election, read as follows: “To those of you who think you can vote and then run away, we will shadow you and catch you, and we will cut off your heads and the heads of your children.”

It is those Iraqis who, in the face of such threats, summoned the courage to vote in Iraq’s historic democratic election that America is trying to help. Or at least some Americans are trying to help them. As Mr. Clayton surely knows, many others would have preferred the easier course of leaving the Iraqis to their fate.