The SNAFUs of War

Max Boot in the LATimes, on Rethinking the Iwo Jima Myth and not understanding that such are the nature of war:

In modern parlance, you might say that Iwo Jima was a battle of choice waged on the basis of faulty intelligence and inadequate plans. If Ted Kennedy had been in the Senate in 1945 (hard to believe, but he wasn't), he would have been hollering about the incompetence of the Roosevelt administration, which produced many times more casualties in five weeks than U.S. forces have suffered in Iraq in the last two years.

No such criticism was heard at the time, in part because of the rah-rah tone of World War II press coverage but also because Americans back then had a greater appreciation for the ugly, unpredictable nature of combat...

It's a shame that so many sentimental tributes to the veterans of the Good War elide this unpleasant reality, leaving us a bit less intellectually and emotionally prepared for the trauma of modern war.

6,000 Marines killed and 20,000 wounded in a five weeks battle, for an island which wasn't all that important? I don't know enuf about the War to have an opinion on that characterization, but imagine the response today if that had been the cost of fighting in Fallujah. The only monument in DC would be an impeachment trial.