Hi Neocon; Re: "My point is that the Japanese had no reason to think that it was hopeless to take on the United States based on pig iron production."
Maybe there's another way to explain this. When analyzing dog fights, remember that it's not the dog in the fight that counts, it's the fight in the dog. A bigger dog is only certain to win when he's trying as hard or harder than the smaller dog. And dog fights aren't a very good metaphor because every dog fight I've seen pretty much completely involved the two (or more) dogs. War between states is not like this at all. The Vietnam war barely changed the day to day life of most Americans, while radically altering the lives of most Vietnamese. Vietnam was "in" the fight, most of the US was just a spectator.
The US versus Japan in WW2 was a total war. Each side completely altered their economy so as to make the maximum effort against the other. In cases like this, the size of the dog tells you how much fight it can put out, and one can predict the outcome by simply comparing the economic abilities, if there is a large enough disparity between those abilities.
The primary dogs in the Vietnam war (measured in terms of total casualties as well as in many other ways) were North Vietnam and South Vietnam. It is an undeniable fact of history that during colonial times, the industrial part of Vietnam was the North, while the South was largely agricultural. On average and all other things being equal, industrialized states beat agricultural states like scissors beat paper, because industry produces weapons, while agriculture does not.
Both North Vietnam and South Vietnam fought the war extremely hard, in terms of willingness to accept casualties. They had to, they lived there. Everyone else, like the US, the USSR, or China, had a MUCH SMALLER stake in what happened in Vietnam. Of course China had a higher stake than the two superpowers as China was a lot closer geographically and culturally.
The "fight" in a country, in any given war, is largely dependent on how far away the battlefield is. It is fairly rare that countries are willing to accept high casualties in distant foreign lands. So it's not reasonable to compare the economic strength of the US to the economic strength of North Vietnam when testing which will win in a conflict in Vietnam.
It is an interesting observation that while soldiers are more likely to desert when fighting on their home ground, which decreases military strength, on the other hand, countries are more willing to accept casualties at home, which increases military strength. Of these two effects, the second is the one that dominates, as most deserters eventually rejoin the fight (or the guerilla fight that happens afterwards).
If there was a "war for survival" (like the Pacific War between the US and Japan) between the US and North Vietnam, the US would easily win. But the Vietnam War was NOT a war for the survival of the US. Thus the economic calculus does not apply.
By the term "war for survival", I mean a war for the survival of the state. You say we didn't "prevail" in the Vietnam war, but the fact is that "losing" the war didn't result in the destruction of our government. A state that loses a "war for survival" disappears and is replaced with a new state. Examples of this would be Germany and Japan in 1945, or Iraq in 2003.
Similarly, the US occupation of Iraq is NOT a war for the survival of the US (except in the trembling rhetoric of a few cowards), but is a "war for survival" for the Iraqis. The war is NOT being fought in the US, it's being fought in Iraq. And as with so many similar conflicts, the advantage in the conflict cannot be trivially calculated by looking at the relative sizes of the economies.
The fact that these conflicts cannot be predicted on the basis of economic considerations does not imply that conflicts of total war (for example, North versus South in the US Civil War) cannot be so predicted.
It's true that our economic strength does, to some extent, allow us to overcome our lack of "fight". If Iraq had been a really really tiny little place like Haiti, we could, if we chose, pacify the place at a price that would be low enough that the public might accept it. But Iraq has 25 million people, and to pacify a country that size requires an army proportional in size.
The lesson of history is that the minimum proportion for this sort of occupation is 20 occupying soldiers per 1000 local population. Since we only have about 5 occupying soldiers per 1000 population, we will undoubtedly lose, unless we somehow manage to quadruple our forces.
But even if a miracle happened and Washington started a draft and sent the soldiers over, we'd still eventually quit because the pacification (while it could eventually work out if the US were, for example, a dictatorship), would cause so much domestic unrest in the US, that our political leaders would give up on it.
-- Carl
P.S. Re: "I worked on the McGovern campaign in 1972, in a local campaign office. I was a registered Democrat until 1988, although I voted for Reagan earlier."
I've always been a Republican. It pisses me off that a small number of Democrats came into my party and, through a mixture of stupidity, arrogance, and cupidity got my country into a losing war. When we are finally forced to pull out of Iraq, the ramifications will be bad for the Republican party for the following 10 years. |
