Last October, when many liberal commentators in the media were predicting that America and its allies would end up in a quagmire in Afghanistan—“another Vietnam,” they foretold—they would have been better advised to ponder the statistics compiled by Victor Davis Hanson about the previous conflict between a Western and an Islamic power.[1]
On January 17, 1991, Hanson reminds us in his book Carnage and Culture, a coalition of U.S. allies faced the veteran army of Iraq, which included 1.2 million ground troops, 3850 artillery pieces, 5800 tanks and 5100 armored vehicles. The Iraqis were entrenched on their native soil, easily supplied by highway from Baghdad, and equipped with the best military hardware, from poison gas to tanks and mines, that petrodollars could buy. Yet the Western allies defeated them in just four days, leaving tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers dead for a loss of one hundred and fifty American servicemen and -women, most of whom were killed by friendly fire, random missile strikes, and other accidents. The media skeptics would also have been wise to consider the implications of another of Hanson’s points. The Iraqi army was obliterated not far from the ancient battlefields of Cunaxa and Gaugamela, where Western forces—Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in 401 B.C. and Alexander the Great in 331 B.C.—had also annihilated indigenous Asian armies.
Hanson’s book is subtitled “Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.” It describes in considerable detail nine battles between 480 B.C.and 1968. It
