With the might of the US military how come....?

Question

it has taken over three years to secure Baghdad, which isn't done, when the US defeated three countries (Italy, Germany, and Japan) in WW2 in less time?

Answer 1

Simple, my boy. Two TOTALLY different CONCEPTS of violent struggle. Conventional warfare was WWII, this is something else. Terrorists lurk around blasting reconstruction projects to slow reconstruction down to try to turn the populace against the govt and the US.
Recall, there was no formal declaration of war in iraq and no surrender treaty. The future of Iraq is up for grabs and everybody is wrestling. It can not be won by military might alone. The populace needs to reach some consensus.

Answer 2

Because the enemy is so strong in their fanatical belief that they will kill their own countrymen. Most of the people the insurgents kill are fellow Iraqis. Also WW2 was a conventional war fought against sane and rational enemy.

It is taking so long because we are fighting a non-traditional war traditionally. If we let go of the idea of being the good guys (which is debateable) and besides most of the world sees us not as liberators but as conquerers so I say we get serious. Put our strength behind the effort and stop worrying about civillians because the enemy sure doesnt-that is the only way to totally eliminate the insurgency. Perhaps there is a way ideologically though.

Also this war is harder because America is not unified. The liberals and the media will paint a worse and worse picture of the war even when our deaths pale in comparison to single battles in WWII.

Answer 3

well that's partially American pride speaking we didn't secure 3 countries in less time. The War started many (!!!) years before we decided to slip in and take much undeserved credit. as well as our willingness to nuke the enemy into submission! I think Baghdad would go pretty quite if we detonated a nuke in a town not so far away.

But yet and still I like the idea of the question. The truth is policing a civil war is pretty much impossible especially maintaining the appearance of impartiality.

Answer 4

Germany was surrounded by people who did not want them too win, just as we are now surrounded in Iraq, with few friends left! In Germany we had a lot of help, including the Russian winter!

In Normandy alone we lost 29,000 dead and 106,000 wounded!

In Germany we were fighting for our country and others countries. which is not the case in Iraq. We are fighting people who had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorist!

On top of that, it was a Bush blunder not to use more troops initially, nipping the Civil war of in it's infancy, rather than stay the course and allow it to become a full scale war with us caught in the middle! We have an Iraqi government and military that doesn't work, largely because the are more committed to their parties than to Iraq on a whole. I don't think most Iraqi's see the Government in Iraq as their government!!

And religion plays a large role!

Answer 5

Good question. The US is good at fighting Military Industrial type of wars like in World War Two.

Today doesn't cut it all too well. We don't fight against an enemy with a country, permanent base of operations or a unified fighting force. We are constantly fighting irregulars on their home territory.

This war is an assymetrical one which will take decades unless the right tactics are used. Also, to beat an irregular force you gotta be a guy like Sadamm or Mao. It doesn't cut when mass communication can spread the word that your the devil in 10 secs.

Answer 6

Ah, you Americans. You forget that the U.S. had a little bit of help from the Soviet Union (which lost 20 million men) during World War II, along with a number of countries from the British Commonwealth and the partisan forces and home armies of conquered countries. There's a reason it was called "World War II".

Having made that point, I'll say that the U.S. made an effort to commit a reasonable amount of manpower to the effort in World War II, although this was even too low in some areas (there were only 800,000 American riflemen in WWII, resulting in incredibly long times in the field for them--hey, doesn't that sound familiar?). There were enough soldiers on the ground to not only assure victory, but to be able to properly occupy the conquered countries. The U.S. was able to do this because it had the draft and wasn't relying solely on a volunteer military.

The U.S. also had allies (see above), where as George W. Bush threw away the goodwill that America had after 9/11 so that only the United Kingdom was willing to go along with the war in Iraq in any substantial way. As well, during World War II, the threat to civilization posed by the Axis powers was beyond dispute--people knew they were fighting in a noble cause. The war in Iraq was justified by lies and wishful thinking. The rest of the world just didn't buy the ridiculous claim that Iraq had connections to Osama Bin Ladin, and was unwilling to fight a war that seemed to have more to do with George W. Bush's need to outdo his daddy rather than any real threat to North America or Europe.

The American presidents during World War II and after were intelligent, well-read statesman, not incurious complacent morons like G.W.B. They listened to their military commanders and gave them what they needed to win the war. Although Franklin Delano Roosevelt was somewhat blinded to the menace that "Uncle Joe" Stalin posed in the postwar world, there was nobody as blinkered to the real world as Bush the Younger has been.

As someone else put it, had George W. Bush been president during World War II, Americans would now be speaking German.

Answer 7

It is quite simply that our present political leaders do not have the will to allow the military to do the job. The reason Germany, Italy, and Japan was secure is that the "survivors knew that to kill an American soldier was a death sentence not just for you but your whole extended family. It was not widely publicized but it was true. We had just carpet bombed much of Europe to rubble, dropped two atom bombs on Japan and made it clear that armed resistance would be met with overwhelming force no matter who got killed. Who in Washington has the balls to do that now? No one I know!

Answer 8

We were fighting a totally different style of war. My grandfather faught in Germany, and he said that the way they secured a town was simple. They would roll in and explain that if nothing happened, everything would be fine. If anyone took so much as a pot shot at them, they would leave, and hit the town with artillery and fighter bombers, wrecking it and killing lots of people. Then they would roll in again and go house to house, taking every weapon they could find. When places knew that option 2 was on the table, they usually were happy to go with option 1. Now you can't do that. When I was in Iraq, we often times were told that we couldn't shoot at a structure we were taking fire from, or, we could engage with small arms, but weren't allowed to call in heavy fire because of civillian casualties. When the civillians realize that they will suffer as much as the insurgents, they tend to stop supporting them.

Answer 9

A) It wasn't just the US that defeated the axis powers...it was called a world war for a reason...many countries were heavily involved

B) WWII was a conventional war against a country, not groups of insurgents using guerilla tactics.

C) We had a lot more resources invested in WWII.

D) We had a draft at the time of WWII...a lot more soldiers available to fight.

Answer 10

Because we must not upset anyone. We could have taken care of Iraq if we had been as aggressive as we were in WWI or II.
Since we are blamed for killing 650,000 Iraqis anyway -which is absurd- we should have gone in, taken out Saddam, and when the opposition showed up, blow them to kingdom come. That would have finished our business in less than a year and, most likely, set the wackos back a decade or two.