Al Qaeda vs. Japan

Michael Goldfarb makes an analogy:

As soon as I started comparing the war in the Pacific with the war in Afghanistan, Innocent jumped all over me. "You're not comparing Imperial Japan to al Qaeda?" she asked. "No, of course not," I assured her. Respectable people can't compare the wars America is fighting now with the Great and Good War America fought against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

But, you know what? On second thought, Imperial Japan and al Qaeda have a lot in common -- and so do the Second World War and the war in Afghanistan. The Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, killing more Americans than any attack on U.S. soil until al Qaeda launched its own sneak attack on 9/11. The Japanese and al Qaeda also share the same fanatical devotion to their "cause." The Japanese had kamikazes and al Qaeda has kamikazes -- with hundreds of passengers on board. Our enemies in both wars shared a suicidal commitment to an impossible delusion of world domination. The war in the Pacific was a bloodbath as a result. Women and children threw themselves off of cliffs on Saipan rather than surrender to U.S. Marines. Only 1,000 Japanese surrendered on Iwo, the other 22,000 died fighting or were buried or burned alive in the island's caves. On Okinawa the Japanese sacrificed 100,000 men in the service of a lost cause.

All true. But here are some other relevant facts. At its strength, Imperial Japan had:

1. a navy

2. an airforce

3. an empire

Al Qaeda, needless to say, has none of those things. But the differences go beyond mere capacity. The war in Afghanistan is not a war against a territorial aggressor. It is a war to pacify an insurgency. That the insurgency is populated with a lot of nasty people doesn't change the fact that we're not fighting to rebuff imperial encroachment. We're fighting to get tribal Pashtuns to accept the writ of the Western-allied Afghan government.

That can still be a cause worth fighting and dying for, but conflating it with World War II doesn't really help frame the choices we face.

(AP Photos)