Posted on 03/10/2006 5:26:23 AM PST by Tolik
In recent weeks prominent conservatives — William F. Buckley, Niall Ferguson, Francis Fukuyama, George Will, to a name only a very few — have, in various ways, suggested that the war in Iraq was either a mistake or unwinnable, or both. The blowing up of the shrine at Samarra, together with subsequent sectarian killings in Baghdad and the failure so far to form an executive branch, were the most recent catalysts that apparently pushed a great number of wearied observers over the edge.
Sometimes such remorse is coupled with louder lamentations about the failed foreign policy of the Bush administration — especially the malevolent influence of neoconservatives and their mania for democracy.
There are many reasons why such pessimism, and indeed depression, is unwarranted — although I concede that very few Americans and still fewer pundits would agree with my own explanations.
What then is the real difference with this administration’s effort? Taking out the Taliban and Saddam in the Middle East proved to be far more difficult and costly operations than bombing Milosevic from on high, or decapitating the Noriega regime.
So I fear that it is not the principle of occasionally spreading democracy by arms as much as the messiness of the Iraqi war that bothers most. Take away 2,300 American fatalities and envision a stable government in two or three months in Baghdad, and we would hear very few meas magnas culpas.
There is also the larger question of advocacy of democracy in the Middle East itself. We have no plans to invade Syria or Iran, dethrone their autocrats, and birth constitutional governments. The pressures on others to reform are steady and insidious, but still relatively weak — given the fact that Musharraf has the bomb, the Gulf States have the oil, and the Mubarak dynasty has an aggregate $50 billion in American aid.
Moreover, the pathology of the Middle East — whether defined by the increased stature of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, the involvement of authoritarian regimes with terrorists, or vehement anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism — predated American pressure for democratic reform. One could just as easily make the argument that it was the absence of such principled American advocacy — and instead the prevailing realpolitik of the last 50 years — that helped bring us to the crisis of 9/11.
Certainly the scab of the Middle East that was ripped away on September 11 revealed an old and putrid wound of authoritarians paying blackmail to Islamists in an anti-American unholy alliance. Abruptly leaving Lebanon in 1983, not going to Baghdad in 1991, lobbing cruise missiles at Saddam and the Taliban, trading arms for hostages with Iran, Oil-for-Food, no-fly-zones, giving a pass to Saudi Wahhabism, subsidizing Mubarak and Arafat — none of this made for a more stable Middle East or a safe America.
But that optimism was only true if certain premises were to be enshrined as the new American way of war:
One, that war is always to be waged against small countries without many assets such as Panama or Grenada;
Or two, that war is to be conducted largely by air, whether defined by bomber attacks against Khadafy and Milosevic, or cruise missiles sent into Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s.
Or three, that war is to be solely punitive. We are to go in, defeat the enemy, and leave the ensuing mess to others, on the premise that we either cannot or should not worry about whether the populace deserved the odious regime we were obliged to end.
In other words, we should renounce the type of more holistic and ideological wars of the past, such as those waged against Italians, Germans, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese, where we not only sought to defeat entire belief systems, but to stay on and craft a stable government in the hopes of stamping out fascism, Nazism, militarism, or Communism.
There is an easy logic to the first three methods of warcraft, but we cannot rule out the occasional need for the tougher fourth option — one that will always involve greater costs and casualties.
For all the tragedy of our fallen in Iraq, if a constitutional government stabilizes in Baghdad, and liberalization follows in the surrounding region, then our losses will not be measured against the far lighter casualties suffered in Panama, Gulf War I, or Grenada, but against the far worse losses of Korea and World War II.
We have not yet experienced a sizable antiwar movement coalescing around Cindy Sheehan and Michael Moore. Donald Rumsfeld has not done a Robert McNamara sweaty-brow resignation. And why haven’t at least a few senior generals confessed that this is a hopeless task? Cannot the Congress update something like the old Cooper-Church Amendment — or won’t we at least see a Eugene McCarthy-like candidacy in the next Republican primary, or a bloodbath in 2006 that wipes out a war-stained Republican Congress?
There are various answers, but the chief one, besides our leaders’ belief in the righteousness of the cause and our proximity to success, is that Americans themselves are still unsure about the Iraqi outcome for a variety of reasons.
They are confused about the war’s coverage. They cannot ascertain whether the daily drumbeat of explosions is just the media’s story, and should be set against the silent counter-narrative of three successful elections and a growing Iraqi security force. For all the unease, even the most dubious citizen still thinks the United States may, in fact, win. And had we reported Okinawa minute-by-minute as we do Iraq, we might we have lost that close-run encounter.
The enemy is not idealistic or egalitarian, but clearly pre-modern and fascist. The more we are told that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, the more al Qaeda’s methods surface in Iraq and its leadership boasts that it is the new front, after Manhattan and Afghanistan. At least some in this country still believe that victory in Iraq, and the emergence of a viable government there, would have implications far beyond Iraq, inflicting a terrible defeat and humiliation on the Islamists in their own backyard.
Americans are sensitive to charges of imperialism and ruthlessness, but less so to those of misplaced idealism or naiveté. Whatever one believes about Iraq, the facts counter realpolitik and oil diplomacy. Petroleum skyrocketed after the invasion. Oil-for-Food was exposed, along with French and Russian petroleum shenanigans. The loss of life over the last three years must be weighed against the yearly butchery of Saddam Hussein — deaths that were not part of the struggle for a democratic future, but the annual carnage that consolidated a fascistic regime and had no end in sight.
India and Pakistan are closer to us now than before Iraq. China is China; Japan is a military ally as never before. England and Australia are strategic partners; Canada and New Zealand are similarly beginning to follow a wiser course. The world is catching on to Iran, and the theocracy must subvert the new Iraqi democracy or itself be undermined by the nearby democratic experiment.
There is, of course, heightened anti-Americanism in places, but it is largely confined to specific areas. The Middle East Street resents deeply the humiliation of seeing Muslim leaders so easily dethroned. The European cafés abhor the spread of American popular culture and muscle, and are starting to recoil in shock that the world did not turn out to follow the rules of the Hague or the EU charter. And then there is the trans-Atlantic elite, who, after calling for three decades for a more principled American policy, finally got it in spades — but splattered with all the gore and mess that such radical changes always entail.
But the latest criticism is more troubling, since it often comes from the “my perfect war, your lousy peace” school that, for some reason, never critiques the three-week removal of Saddam Hussein. Instead, it defends its evolving opposition to the war by advancing particular pet theories of reconstruction that were never followed. Rarely do we hear that most postbellum efforts are long, messy, and necessary, much less that the essence of war is lapse and tragedy, with victory going only to those who in the end err the least and endure. Anyone back in the United States can post facto write up a list of what ought to have been done in Iraq amid the heat and fire; but they at least need to factor in the conditions at the time that led the supposedly less bright on the ground not to anticipate their own inspired wisdom from afar.
Especially troubling are those who even before 9/11 demanded that President Clinton or Bush remove Saddam Hussein, but now consider such a move an abject blunder of the first order. Their advocacy helped us get in when there were dubious reasons to go, and their vehement criticism may well get us out when there are now better reasons to stay until Iraq is secure.
So here we are — close to victory abroad, closer to concession at home.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
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
Well said. But even more troubling should be the vote yesterday by Republicans in the Appropriations Committee. Holding hostage an appropriation for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for nothing more than a political statement is outrageous and disgusting. They are worse than Democrats because they (Republicans) know better.
Unless someone brings down the regime in Iran, this war is indeed unwinnable.
Forget the nukes. Get rid of the regime and the nukes won't be a problem. Get rid of the regime and the terrorist support starts to dry up. Get rid of the regime and al Sadr's support dries up. Get rid of the regime, and Syria's support dries up. Get rid of the regime and the Taliban support dries up. Get rid of the regime and Hezbollah's support dries up.
GET RID of the Iranian Regime NOW and we can get out of Iraq.
Well said!
I believe not only the points made here, but that the average American did have the stomach for this war, and was glad we fought it, but that the msm simply talked them out of it.
I believe the enterprise has been a clear, undeniable success, and I am deeply pleased with the policy.
Once we ascertained that there were no WMD's (which we had every right-indeed a responsibility-to look for)we should have divided Iraq amongst the Kurds, Shii'as and Sunnis while maintaining bases in the newly created Kurdistan. To force these 3 to live in peace in lines drawn in the sand by the Wilsonians is an exercise in futility. I applaud the administrations and our troops efforts though.
I think they can live together without interference from Iran. Though they can choose to split up if they want.
But they will NEVER live peacefully as long as the current regime in Iran exists.
think one of the problems is that many Americans, having watched the Hsitory Channel, knows that WWI and WWII were each over within three or four years and conducted on a much larger scale.
Here, it seems like this thing will go on forever, with only a bunch of ungrateful and inept muslims left to run the place.
The bottom line is that as bad as the Germans and Japs were, they were far more suited for civilized society than appears those in the ME.
So very true. We are winning in Iraq as the transition to Iraqi forces to assume more and more control of their own security continues. Our casualties are declining for the sixth straight month.
October 05-- 96 (78 KIA; 18 non-hostile)
November 05-- 84 (70 KIA; 14 non-hostile)
December 05-- 68 (57 KIA; 11 non-hostile)
January 06-- 62 (42 KIA; 20 non-hostile)
February 06-- 55 (46 KIA; 9 non-hostile)
March 1-10, 2006-- 7 (7 KIA; 2 non-hostile)
Conservatives are losing their nerve
BTTT
And everyone who has actually gone to Iraq and been in the field with the troops has reported that the morale of the American troops is EXCELLENT, the Iraqi soldiers are doing a very good job and that there is NO CIVIL WAR!
In fact, people are working, businesses are flourishing and the children are actually PLAYING IN THE STREETS!
I would wager that none of these naysayers has actually been to Iraq in the last year if at all!
Of course there are problems, but there are problems in L.A.,N.Y.C. and everywhere else in America for Pete's sakes!
I agree with your commments.
exactly
Lol. funny tag line
Agreed-and that's an a$$ kicking that's long overdue.
Ain't it the truth. Their actions will guarantee Dem wins in 2006... and God forbid... Hillary in 2008.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.