Griper News: Griper Blade: Jonah Goldberg Argues that Rumsfeld Saved Lives

Jonah Goldberg has a piece where he argues that comparisons between Iraq and WWII are off base, because the casualties in WWII were so much greater. Like all Goldberg pieces, he begins with a valid point -- which he uses as an excuse to take a romp into Crazytown. He's like George Will with ADD -- one minute you're reading about how the economy might not be as bad as people think, the next you're reading that there's no poverty in the US because almost everyone has a toilet

This week's column wasn't that funny, but it was funny. First, his seeming point:

Let us start with the obvious. World War II may have lasted 1,347 days, but it cost the lives of 406,000 Americans and wounded 600,000 more. Losses among Allied civilians and military personnel stretched into the tens of millions. Whole cities were razed, populations displaced, economies shattered. The number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq remains much less than 1% of our WWII losses.

True enough. But later we go into Crazytown, where Goldberg's point really lives:

The man who probably deserves the most credit for the low number of American deaths in Iraq is Donald H. Rumsfeld. The outgoing Defense secretary decided from the outset that U.S. forces would have a "light footprint" and would opt for surgical efficiency over the kitchen-sink approach that characterized World War II. That approach, historian Paul Johnson writes, was of a piece with the "giganticist philosophy" of 1940s American capitalism. Leslie Groves, the Army engineer who directed the U.S. pursuit of the atomic bomb and who built the Pentagon, represented this mind-set. Groves was the anti-Rumsfeld. When he asked the Treasury Department for thousands of tons of silver for use in the Manhattan Project, he was rebuffed by some functionary, who said, "In the Treasury, we do not speak of tons of silver. Our unit is the troy ounce."

See, this argument for the superiority of the Rumsfeld's genius over WWII planners has one little, tiny hitch -- we won WWII and Iraq's FUBAR...