Outrageous!

In the editorial below, the WaPo implicitly compares our ongoing campaign to the disastrous Operation TORCH (the initial invasion of Vichy-controlled Morocco) in Nov 42. With US men & women dying in combat as I write--executing one of the boldest, most audacious war plans the US has ever undertaken--is morally equivalent to dressing up like a civilian or feigning surrender and then ambushing US troops.
The simultaneous tone of schadenfreude and self-congratulation is not assuaged by the passing reference to "rapid progress."

How dare this filthy fifth-communist opine about "avoidable losses!" Friction is a fact of war, as much today as in 1942. But the military executing today's plan is NOT the military of Operation TORCH. This is a daring and complicated plan, one that is bound to entail losses. To compare it to TORCH breaks faith with those fighting in the field. This article is a disgrace.

Monk

Washington Post
March 24, 2003
Pg. 12
"Grievous Losses"

IN NOVEMBER 1942, U.S. and British forces began a desert war -- the North Africa campaign of World War II -- with a three-day amphibious landing operation against French forces, then aligned with Nazi Germany. Operation TORCH ended in victory, and was reported as such back home. But the three days were marked by confusion, error and avoidable loss, as a recently published history, "An Army at Dawn," makes clear. The narrative (by Rick Atkinson, a Post reporter now "embedded" with the 101st Airborne Division in the battle zone) describes boats capsizing in calm seas, messages to headquarters going unread because signalmen forgot to code them urgent, shells failing to explode because of 35-year-old fuzes. A coxswain mistakes a French ship for a U.S. Navy destroyer and approaches; the French sailors machine-gun his crew, killing or wounding 28 Americans. "TORCH revealed profound shortcomings in leadership, tactics, equipment, martial elan, and common sense," the narrative concludes. Eleven hundred American and British fighters died during the three days.

Yesterday was also a day of painful loss for American and British service men and women, the costliest in combat for the American military since Somalia in 1993 or maybe even since the Persian Gulf War. And whereas Americans 60 years ago learned of setbacks and mistakes long after the fact, if at all, the nation yesterday felt the blows almost as they occurred: a British plane mistakenly shot down by an American missile, U.S. prisoners and bodies displayed before television cameras, a helicopter down in Afghanistan, a fragging suspect hauled away, the videotape replayed again and again. There's no way to know how public support for the World War II effort, and for all the generals welcomed home as heroes, might have been affected by more immediate reporting. Nor is there any call for nostalgia: certainly not for the primitive military technology, which produced far higher casualty totals, but also not for the media technology, so much less capable of bridging time and distance. In the long run, more information surely is better than less, and sooner better than later, as the Pentagon calculated when it allowed so many journalists to travel with fighting units. But the tidal waves of information place a higher demand on everyone for perspective and patience. The war is only in its fifth day. More losses are to be expected, but overall U.S. forces are continuing to make rapid progress toward their goals.

What has not changed in 60 years, or 600, is the anguish of each loss. Some relatives may learn the dreaded news on CNN, instead of by telegram or from the solemn visitor on the front porch; but the sacrifice remains unbearable. "People are [saying] they are sorry," said Michael Waters-Bey of Baltimore, who lost his son, Marine Staff Sgt. Kendall Damon Waters-Bey, 29. "But the word 'sorrow' cannot fill my pain." There will again be wreaths and burials and, eventually, monuments to those who gave their lives. Ultimately the monument that matters will be victory and a sustained commitment to a rebuilt Iraq -- a commitment that will leave Americans safer and the Iraqi people better off.