Why Did FDR Invade North Africa?
One of the clichéd questions of the Left is “Why did Bush invade Iraq? We were attacked by Saudi Arabians on 9/1 !” Or so goes the customary narrative.
This mantra is supposed to expose President Bush’s stupidity. But in fact The Question reveals the asker’s own clueless blunder about war and strategy. The proper answer is to point to other presidents and other wars. Like FDR after Pearl Harbor.
After the “day that will live in infamy” FDR’s first land attack took place in Morocco and Algeria, then French colonies, in alliance with the British.
Why? Morocco is about as far from Pearl as you can get. Why punish the poor North Africans for what the Japanese did to us? Well, FDR understood the enemy, and so did the American people. It wasn’t just Tojo who attacked the US on December 7, 1941. It was the Axis imperial alliance—Germany, Japan and Italy. They were bent on world conquest, had already conquered most of Europe, and had to be stopped at a time and place of our choosing.
So our first land attack came in North Africa, not the Pacific. It was the other side of the world. We fought Rommel in the desert, along with the British Army and the Free French, cut off his supplies by sea, and step-by-step drove the Germans and Italians back across Sicily and Italy.
Meanwhile the US Navy and Marines beat the Japanese at sea in the Pacific, and started a heroic and bloody island-by-island conquest of the Philippines, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa and all the rest.
In the upshot, the Allies invaded France before we finally reached Japan. So by the “logic” of our friends on the Left, FDR attacked all the wrong places and all the wrong people—the Germans and Italians (who only fought back once we attacked), not the Japanese who assaulted us at Pearl.
Our highbrow strategists on the Left must believe that FDR should have just done a tit-for-tat for the attack on Hawaii, avenged two thousand plus American lives, and the war would have been over in six months. Which is a load of nonsense, of course, because the Japanese, the Germans and Italians, were long-term, world-wide, imperialist fanatics.
So are the Islamic fascists.
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So the next time somebody asks you why we are in Iraq, you might want to ask what FDR would have done. Don’t expect a thoughtful answer. Yet FDR is still a Hero of the Left, and that question bears repeating until they start to think.
Six years after 9/11, half the country still can’t figure out what all the fuss is about. It’s important to remind them.
Read the whole thing.
It’s also important to remind ourselves about the wisdom of what we’re doing right now to fight terrorism, and how it fits into the overall strategy which will bring us victory.
