Stephen Lockhart calls attention to a comment House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi made last week, after a speech by Donald Rumsfeld that likened those who wish to appease terrorists today to those who took the same approach to the Nazis.
Sneered Pelosi: "If Mr. Rumsfeld is so concerned with comparisons to World War II, he should explain why our troops have now been fighting in Iraq longer than it took our forces to defeat the Nazis in Europe."
To which Lockhart responds:
This is very offensive to some people, like me, who lost non-American relatives in World War II (in my case, Canadian). I've seen my uncle's grave site in northern Denmark, and the Australian graveyard in Singapore, and countless military grave sites in England. While I have not yet seen similar sites in Africa or Russia (among other venues), I hope to before I die.
The U.S. provided an invaluable service in World War II, clearly tipping the balance of the war. But Nancy Pelosi's we-beat-the-Germans-in-a-relatively-short-war perspective is extraordinarily myopic. Rumsfeld's comments about not learning the lessons of history were intended for people exactly like Nancy Pelosi.
A check of the Information Please Almanac shows that victory in World War II was anything but easy. More than 16 million American servicemen took part in the war, of whom 291,557 were killed in battle and 113,842 others died in service. That's a total of 405,399, well over 100 times as many U.S. servicemen as have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. This casts Pelosi's glibness about World War II in an even more withering light.
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