Victor Davis Hanson: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly —Part Three of Three [The Good]

pajamasmedia.com ^ | March 30, 2009 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Tolik]

Ok—after those depressing six “bad” and “ugly” trends, here are three things that bring at least some optimism in otherwise trying times.  

The Good

1) Technology. For all the dangers and  destruction inherent in access to instant electronic information and communication (cf. the subprime mortgage bundles and computer programs that accelerated  innate human idiocy), there often can be much good in such a radically egalitarian enterprise. Today’s peasant in Guatemala with a cell phone or a stop at an Internet café, has more knowledge of market futures at his hands than had aristocratic grandees of the 1940s.

I used to tote books and magazines on trips to do research and write contemporary commentary. Now? I can confirm in 10 seconds on the Internet that once again Sen. Dodd is not telling the truth or reread the Melian Dialogue of Thucydides in Greek, or learn what Sun Maid paid on free tonnage for raisins in 1982—whether in rural Fresno County or in a dingy hotel in Mexico. In a debate once, an audience member with his laptop in the first row was able to correct the record instantaneously during the question and answer period. In some sense, the many have gained an enormous amount of power, and, for good or evil, the old hierarchies are crumbling (Who cares whether the debater has a MD or law degree if he is stating things that can instantly be proven inaccurate?)

Most of us would be long dead without Westernized/globalized medicine—something we seem to forget in the near hysterical demonization of the US health care system. In 1979 an emergency operation and antibiotics saved me from a severed ureter cut by a staghorn calculus; in 2006 the degree to which Libyans had access to Flagyl, Augmentin and Cipro, and Westernized notions of surgical protocoal, saved my life after an operation for a ruptured appendix. Urocit-K (potassium citrate) alone provided relief from nearly weekly kidney stones.

All of us have similar stories of our own possibly short, unpleasant lives had it not been for brilliantly-trained doctors, courageous nurses, wonder drugs, and high-tech instrumentation. Unfettered reason, free speech, rationalism protected from zealotry and tribalism, and free-market capitalism have given us years of physical comfort and relief that premodern man could only dream of. Thousands of Western-trained doctors, researchers, and scientists daily provide us with breakthroughs that are making our lives far less nasty, solitary, poor, brutish and short.

I won’t deny that modern medicine—especially from my experience with lost family members undergoing failed regimens of chemotherapy—can be insensitive, misleading, and often excruciating painful. But by and large, American medicine has improved the lives of billions on the planet. 

We forget how life has been transformed just from the 1960s alone. As a student, I used to drive a beat up car with spare points, plugs, an old alternator and starter replacement in the trunk. The clutch went out frequently—so I ended up at the side of rural highways quite often. In 1969 it was common to see California freeways littered with broken down cars; now it is a rare occurrence. I grew up with a father taking apart our dryer, washer, vacuum cleaner, and refrigerators almost monthly; today, they seem to run on autopilot.

 In often insidious ways, technology is making daily life ever easier—and providing a much needed counterpoint to a culture and politics that get worse, as popular civility and wisdom vanish. (Wait! Some of you object: ease of life, affluence and leisure brought on by technology explain the end of the old cherished culture. It is not exactly so simple.)

 

2) Competent people. There is an entire nation of brilliant hardworking and uniquely gifted people within the United States like none other in the world—of all politics and beliefs. Critics of America fault our crime rate, growing illiteracy, and dismal education system (as I pointed out last time). But much of that pathology arises from America’s ambitious plans to educate, house, and take care of 300 million souls at levels found nowhere else in the world, amid all sorts of endemic poverty, the arrival of nearly 1 million illegal aliens per year (12-20 million already here), and millions more who have arrived legally in the last three decades abjectly poor from Asia, Africa, and South America. We notice our failures to ensure a massive equality of result in a generation, never the magnitude of the undertaking.

The fact is that one out of five Americans—an enormously large hidden nation of, say, some 60 million—is better educated, more innovative and optimistic than anyone else abroad. This meritocracy of the hyper-hard-working and talented—of all races, both genders, of varying ages, and no set religion—by and large, commits very little crime, follow the law, and pay their taxes without cheating. They’re either highly educated or magnificently trained by family and vocational schools in the various trades.

I have known brain surgeons who navigate through the mass of cerebral tissue to extract tumors without peripheral damage twice  a day. I’ve seen electricians weave a spaghetti ball of wires through massive houses as if done by second-nature. I have been astounded by farmers who can walk through a five- acre orchard of peaches, glance at the hanging crop on 620 trees, and then determine almost to the box how many hundreds of boxes of fruit can be harvested from the grove.

In other words, there are millions of impressive Americans, who get up in the morning at 5AM, go to bed at 10PM, avoid the bars, the drugs, the crime—and carry the rest of the country on their backs. My only worry is that those in Washington misunderstand this rare cohort, and so demonize them as the “wealthy,” as if they bundled subprime mortgages on Wall Street and took $10 million annual bonuses. What President Obama should be doing is allotting a mini-second timeout from all the Chicago demagogic rhetoric about the “rich and powerful”, the noble needy and victimized, instead to praise those who paid their mortgages without a hitch, aren’t late on their rarely used credit cards, pay their bills when they arrive, and thereby allowing by their code others to default without ruining the country.

He needs to thank this invisible nation for paying most of the taxes, for creating the wealth to pay for community organizers and politicians, for not costing the government billions for self-induced health problems, crime, parole, counseling, drug rehab, and all the other pathologies that instead garner our attention. We are lucky to have these brilliant Americans of the old school; in toto they comprise a nation larger than France or Britain, and more or less ensure that the world abroad does not completely look like Libya, Venezuela, North Korea or Iran. 

3. Soldiers. We are protected by the most competent, judicious—and lethal—military in the history of civilization. The great tragedy of Iraq is that no one really credits our soldiers for doing the near impossible: they went into the heart of the ancient caliphate, took out a genocidal monster, stayed on to foster consensual government, endured often poisonous attacks from critics at home (Cf. Harry Reid’s the war is “lost”, the slurs from Durbin, Kennedy, Kerry, and Murtha that our boys were terrorists or analogous to Baathists, Pol Pot, Stalin, etc.), and triumphed at a cost less than during a major campaign in World War II (e.g., far less than say Iwo Jima, the Bulge, Okinawa, etc).

Today Obama was boasting that he could redirect soldiers to Afghanistan now that Iraq was quiet—as if in his mere 70 days he had anything to do with the bravery and skill that brought Iraq to its improving state, as if we’ve forgotten that he wanted all troops gone by March 2008, declared the surge a failure, and voted to cut off funding for the war. Iraq was won despite the politicians, contrary to the conventional wisdom, and largely due to the ingenuity of our soldiers.

What is the key to the success of our military, other than the traditional civic militarism as outlined in the Constitution and honed over two centuries of fighting?  I can think of five reasons why the 21st -century American military is so successful

1)   There is an officer corps whose members are, to be frank, relics of an American past. They are ossified in amber as it were, and really do believe in passé things like honor, duty, country, God, sacrifice, and the continuation of the American experiment. Meet a Marine colonel, an Army major, an Air Force one-star, or a Navy captain and it is often as if you are talking to a younger version of your grandfather, as if we packed thousands of our best in ice around 1945, and then thawed them out in the 21st century. These odd men and women of the old breed will do almost anything as outlined in the Constitution to ensure that their country—you and I—is safe and continues on in perpetuity.  

2)  Our enlisted men have a rambunctious, upbeat attitude, if you will. This generation of youth seems unafraid, reckless even, and—despite the demonization in popular culture of the military, the male, physicality, etc—seems to pride in being on the cutting edge of danger. They are superb fighters. Few would wish to test the US Marines; the Marines or Rangers I had met in two visits to Iraq seemed to me far scarier than a masked al-Qaeda terrorist rambling on videos waving his scimitar. Indeed, they were scarier. Talking to a 20-year old Marine in Ramadi with bulging biceps, loaded down with 70 pounds of gear and weaponry, smiling as he lets on that he’s been up for 30 straight hours is a surreal experience.

3)  The military has married intellectual life with command. Some of the brightest PhDs I have encountered are Army officers at the LTC and colonel level. The service’s recent efforts to send its best and brightest to graduate history and political science programs are paying real dividends. During the Anbar awakening, I watched a number of presentations by Army colonels on the Iraqi tribal system; they were often more sophisticated and astute talks than what I had usually heard as an academic at scholarly symposia. In short, we have some brilliantly educated and inquisitive—and outspoken—officers who do not see “book” learning at odds at all with Pattonesque audacity. (Now let us hope we can promote this new generation of colonels to generals.)

4)  Technology. Something is changing with military technology. New applications and tools seem to be evolving at warp speed. The easily caricatured, clumsy massive industrial complex seems to be outmatched by near instantly created decentralized efforts involving new innovative new drones, body armor, and munitions. The soldier adapts to battlefield electronics as he does video games and the Internet. For all the slander directed at Donald Rumsfeld, few realize very early on he tried to articulate how new high-tech weaponry had added enormous lethality to military units, without a commensurate increase in manpower. When 90% rather than 10% of bombs and artillery shells hit the intended target it really does mean that in some situations (tragically not always in boots-on-the-ground counterinsurgency), technology can substitute for mere numbers.  Technology has not redefined war—itself a human enterprise that stays constant as long as human nature remains the same—but it has surely accelerated its processes, and so far Americans have mastered it like none other.

5)  The sinews of war. Someone at Wal-Mart must have taken over the logistics of the US military. Our troops are drowning in “stuff”. Mountain-high pallets of bottled water in the desert. Cat scanners in a tent city. On-line “cafes” amid the IEDs. 3,000-calorie dinners in the middle of nowhere. Bar-codes on everything from ammo boxes to boxes of plastic forks. We joke about this surfeit of things, and how it makes our military slow and plodding. In truth, they can go almost anywhere in the world, and in hours clone almost any landscape in America, from the sewage and power systems to the communications and food. There has never been any logistics remotely comparable to that of the present-day American military.

The real story of the last eight years is not really the political blunders in Iraq, but the ability of the military to adapt, change, and find victory when all said it was lost. In the dark days ahead, I suspect President Obama, once his soft-power initiatives to find peace with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, radical Islam, and Syria, begin to falter (I hope they do not, but suspect they will), will thank god he is commander-in-chief of the military we have. In his accustomed  Novus ordo seclorum fashion, he talks always of the “mess” he inherited, never of the rare military he also inherited.

In short, many things are not all that bad.

[Tolik]

Victor Davis Hanson: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly —Part Two of Three [The Ugly]

Victor Davis Hanson: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly —Part One of Three

[Tolik]

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/victordavishanson/index:

Victor Davis Hanson: American Mob Rule. We need a Socrates in Washington right now

Victor Davis Hanson: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly —Part One of Three

Victor Davis Hanson: Thoughts About Depressed Americans

Victor Davis Hanson: Bush Did It. What a difference an election makes [Brilliant Parody]

Victor Davis Hanson: Dr. Obama: First, Do No Harm. Let nature do its work

Now You Tell Us, Mr. President!

Victor Davis Hanson: The "Depression" for Us Idiots

HANSON: Maxing out a crisis card

Now, Obama Tells Us?

Victor Davis Hanson: Europeanizing Europe. They may have got more than they bargained for [Obama]

Victor Davis Hanson: Fast and Thick in the Age of Obama

NOW OBAMA TELLS US?

The "They Did It" Presidency (Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn, Andy McCarthy)

Oh, the Debts We Will See! (What's in store for us and our children after this Stimulus/Budget)

5 Reasons Wall Street Is Worried

Have-It-All Californians Squander Blessings In Era Of Complacency

Victor Davis Hanson: Obamafusion [Why is Wall Street Worried? — Let us count the ways]

Accounting for California's suicide

Obama: The Great Divider

Victor Davis Hanson: More on Rush

Accounting for California’s Suicide

Victor Davis Hanson: The Great Divider? [five modest recommendations to Obama - that he won't use]

Victor Davis Hanson: The Triumph of Banality [Obama's talent for dishonesty in political discourse]

[Tolik]

    Victor Davis Hanson Ping ! 

       Let me know if you want in or out.

Links:    FR Index of his articles:  http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=victordavishanson
                His website: http://victorhanson.com/
                NRO archive: http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp
                Pajamasmedia:   http://victordavishanson.pajamasmedia.com/

[BOBTHENAILER]

Today Obama was boasting that he could redirect soldiers to Afghanistan now that Iraq was quiet—as if in his mere 70 days he had anything to do with the bravery and skill that brought Iraq to its improving state

Great post

[PGR88]

The US Military is by far the most competent, forward thinking, and NON RISK-AVERSE branch of Gov’t.

For that reason, we are seeing the military in greater use (and disuse) in things like diplomacy, disaster relief, domestic crisis management, technology development, etc... Expect this trend to continue.

[Billthedrill]

What happened in Iraq was so stunning, counterintuitive, unprecedented, and flat-out impossible that it’s only slowly dawning even on professional military historians. My concern is that the amateurs now in command in D.C. will treat the military as some sort of magic wand, forgetting the price Bush and his subordinates had to pay in order to stay the course, and that when the going gets tough as it inevitably does in war, they will do what they did with respect to Iraq - deny they ever voted for it, claim they were lied to, and return to a comfortable, penalty-free antiwar posture with our people still engaged in the field. I wouldn’t be so impolite as to accuse even Democrats of pursuing that option if they hadn’t just done it.

[Tolik]

It’s even more “stunning, counterintuitive, unprecedented, and flat-out impossible” considering 24x7 barrage of anti-war propaganda by American and the world’s media (minus few exceptions) that sustained hopes of our enemies and encouraged them to fight harder. I am absolutely sure that if the West was united in the goal of ousting Saddam and giving no quarter to the terrorists, the whole Iraq operation would have taken half the time and half the casualties.

Similarly, the whole idea that terrorism can be a successful tactic was borne out by the Wests acquiescence to terrorist acts of 70th and 80th by Palestinians, etc.

[gargoyle]

...Once again, Thanks fer the ping...

[mainepatsfan]

It was about as sudden and shocking to western politicians as was the Wehrmacht smashing of the French army in six weeks.

[mainepatsfan]

I often wonder what the mindset was among the terrorists in the aftermath of the 2006 mid term elections. With the MSM all but declaring that the election result wass proof of the American people’s refutation of the war they must have felt that victory was just over the horizon. The idea that the Americans would be sent reinforcements must have been inconceivable to them at that time.

[Yardstick]

VDH *Bump*

(Look Ma, I’m surfing FR on a blackberry!)

[Tolik]

I often wonder what the mindset was among the terrorists in the aftermath of the 2006 mid term elections.

You are giving me an opening to go on a rant with my pet peeve. Thank you!

There is a billion plus of Muslims in the world. Some of them are active in terrorism, some provide support and safe haven, but the vast majority is just watching. It's counterproductive to make the whole billion into our enemies, as some hot-heads were/are itching to do. Besides that it is not true that any Muslim is an enemy - our experience in Iraq alone testifies to that. So how do you convince the majority to follow you and not your enemy. Osama Bin Laden provided the answer. He said clearly and openly that he believes that he is "The Strong Horse" and America is a "Paper Tiger". I think that this approach is correct: if they will believe that Osama and Jihad inc. are "The Strong Horse", they will follow them. If they'll believe that America and Co are "The Strong Horse", they'll follow us.

All our actions after 9/11 were essentially to force a long term attitude adjustment convincing them that America is and will be "The Strong Horse". What did we do? In simple terms, we killed the "bad" guys and helped the "good" guys. Despite all well publicized mistakes and step-backs, the Bush administration was largely on the message, with Libya being a poster boy of the forced attitude adjustment. There is no way to predict what's going to happen to Iraq in 10-20 years, but as we can see now, after so many elections there and so many changes - a long term attitude adjustment there is at least a possibility and is not a pipe-dream.

In the light of the above, all actions of the western media work against the notion of America as "The Strong Horse". Media as a watch-dog is absolutely essential to democracy. But the dog got rabies, and attacks only the sheriff now, ignoring all the criminals. Or using another analogy - there is no successful company in the world that ignores feedback - positive or negative. Critique is essential. I am all for criticism and telling the truth to the power. But the Media stopped providing a feedback - it only shouts negatives one way regardless of the reality. Listening to it would be suicidal. If you tell them that they provided aid and comfort to the enemy, they'd be offended. Unfortunately, minus some exception, that is exactly what they did.