Victor Davis Hanson: The Great Stampede. Conservatives are losing their nerve on Iraq

nationalreview.com ^ | March 10, 2006 | Victor Davis Hanson

[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.

Democracy

America is hardly pushing it down anyone’s throat. Only in Afghanistan and Iraq have we used force to dethrone authoritarians and birth constitutional government. That’s pretty much what Ronald Reagan tried in Grenada. George Bush Sr. did the same in Panama, and so did Bill Clinton in the Balkans.

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.

War

There has been a naiveté about the nature of war in the last three years, perhaps explicable by our past abnormal experiences in Grenada, Libya, Panama, Gulf War I, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. Apparently GPS-guided munitions, helicopter gunships, and fast-moving armor had convinced some that the carnage of past conflicts was now thankfully past.

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.

Iraq

There are never good and bad choices in war, but only bad and worse — and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq certainly is a prime example of that dilemma, whether we look at the regime’s internal barbarism or its attacks on four neighbors in a mere decade. We had already fought two prior wars with him — in 1991, and in the 12 years of no-fly zones between 1991 and 2003. Despite conventional wisdom, the verdict is still out on the extent of his connection with terrorists in general and al Qaeda in particular. The painfully slow translation and release of captured tapes and documents, together with a growing anecdotal body of testimony from ex-Baathists, may well suggest things in Iraq were far worse than we thought.

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.

The World Beyond

Things abroad simply are not worse after March 2003. Europe is again growing closer to the United States, in part due to its fright after the French rioting, the Danish cartoons, and murders in the Netherlands. Its multilateral alternative to the United States is in retreat, as we see from the humiliating negotiations with Iran, Hamas, and the Russians.

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.

The Military

Yet another misconception concerns the U.S. military. Almost all the latest grievances against it have proven to be mostly hype. It is meeting its recruiting goals. In the heart of the ancient caliphate, with great sensitivity and tact, it has trained ten Iraqi divisions, after removing a 30-year old fascistic dictatorship with dispatch. If America’s was already the best equipped and disciplined military in the world, it is now also the most savvy and experienced in precisely the sort of asymmetrical war our pundits worry threaten our future. In all the post facto, self-serving, tell-all books by our ex-intelligence agents and diplomats, it is high-ranking military officers who usually escape censure.

Critics

From the very outset, rightist critics such as those in The American Conservative have told us that it was a hopeless waste of America resources to offer pre-modern people of the Middle East democratic government. Those of The Nation assured us that Iraq was yet another amoral attempt at postmodern imperialism. Fine, you get what you hear and read with both sides — and both, through good and bad news, have remained consistent and principled in their vehement opposition to all that we have done.

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.

[LS]

Hehehe. It could hang 130 as far as I'm concerned, but at least they don't hesitate to take care of terrorists in their possession and not put panties on their heads :)

[devolve]

[nuconvert]

The Iranian people won't fight to save the regime.
The regular army won't fight to save the regime.
The rich mullahs in gov't will flee.
The regime will begin to crumble as soon as they realize that the U.S. means business and is coming in after them.

The political reality is, while we wait, people are being killed and the American public is getting fed up. The public will force the President to leave Iraq. That's the reality of waiting.

I think you're wrong about not being able to make a sufficient case to the American people. The Iranian regime has threatened us sufficiently enough to make the case that their threats are an act war against us.

[kabar]

Still, whatever number you use, the fact that everyone seems to forget is that there is a FINITE NUMBER, and it is rapidly decreasing. Further, all previous wars/insurgencies show that with each additional terroist death, it becomes even more difficult to win.

Therein lies our difference of opinion. The number of terrorists/insurgents is not constant or finite. It can increase or decrease depending upon the circumstances. Israel has been fighting terrorists for decades and over generations. Insurgencies are not won by body counts, but by convincing the general populace it is in their interest not to support the insurgents.

Terrorist/insurgent wars can also succeed as was the case in Ireland against the British, which resulted in the formation of the Irish Free State. Chairman Mao was also successful.

[LS]

Yeah, but in the case of Britain, they won a true "guerilla war" in Malaya; and of the 11 major "insurrections/insurgencies/guerilla wars" of the 20th century, the government won eight. The Israelis are in a special predicament: they have NO indigenous people who support their presence/government, while the Iraqis have a majority.

When I say "finite number," I'm assuming we don't do something stupid and bomb a bunch of civilians who might, otherwise be on our side. Without such an incident, yes, the number is pretty finite.

As for the Brits in Ireland, a better counterfactual would be if a British-supported IRISH government (not northern Ireland) was facing a rebellion, and if it commanded a majority of the Irish population. In that case, England would have won.

[LS]

Well, in conversations with "people on the street," I don't sense ANY enthusiasm for further military action after Iraq. None. I see none of it in any poll---and of course polls are flawed. In short, there is no real evidence that the American public sees Iran as a threat to take out at this moment.

As for who supports whom, I spoke to this Iranian just last week, and he maintains that while the cities are anti-government (esp. the students), the countryside is overwhelmingly pro-Mullah.

[Billthedrill]

The number you DON'T see---and it's almost impossible to find---is the number of terrorist/"insurgents" being killed.

It's difficult to find for a couple of reasons - first, because guerillas must attempt to hide casualties to create the illusion of victory, and second, because a profoundly hostile press sees the maintenance of this illusion as an expression of political power.

In fact, the entire idea of using Iraq as flypaper for international jihadists has proven very effective, and is in my opinion the critical weakness of the entire concept of jihad - they must fight under disadvantageous circumstances and the foot soldiers don't mind casualties. Unfortunately that's also a recipe for a protracted and disproportionately bloody conflict such as the one we see before us. The locals into which the guerillas blend take awhile to realize that the people ostensibly fighting the outsider are outsiders themselves without their interests at heart. This realization was only spottily achieved in Vietnam but is being achieved with astonishing success in Iraq.

In purely military terms the Iraq intervention itself has been an astonishing success - ground gained, objectives realized, and especially kill ratios. The fight, as in Vietnam, is in the political arena and the playing field is very slanted against success there. Bush will not be in office in 2009 but the current occupants of editorial boards will remain. These are not accountable to the voters, and only the market can correct them. And what I think we see is a struggle and a race between their ability to manipulate the market and the market's ability to manipulate them.

[LS]

Good points. In my forthcoming book, "America's Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror," I liken your "flypaper" to "Ulundi in the Air," the strategy used by the U.S. in WW II to put bombers up as a way to force the Luftwaffe to come out and fight. Even if they had the temporary tactical advantage, as the Germans did for most of 1943, it was still a losing strategy for them because they could not replace pilots as fast as we could.

Likewise, the further down the jihadist ranks you go, you lose a) commitment (meaning more turncoats, delivering more information) and b) skill (de facto, the guys coming in late aren't as professional or skilled as those who were on the team at the beginning. Again, there is a certain inexorability of the math.

See "America's Victories" here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595230211/qid=1139423812/sr=1-18/ref=sr_1_18/104-7528812-1819936?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

[oldbrowser]

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;

"We coulda done it better" cry the democrats when the war is popular.

"We woulda never done this" the democrats cry when the war is not popular.

[kabar]

Yeah, but in the case of Britain, they won a true "guerilla war" in Malaya; and of the 11 major "insurrections/insurgencies/guerilla wars" of the 20th century, the government won eight. The Israelis are in a special predicament: they have NO indigenous people who support their presence/government, while the Iraqis have a majority.

In 2004, Israeli Arab citizens made up about 19.5% of Israel's population. How do you consider them? I don't quite understand your point about the Iraqis. Whose presence are you referring to? Us?

When I say "finite number," I'm assuming we don't do something stupid and bomb a bunch of civilians who might, otherwise be on our side. Without such an incident, yes, the number is pretty finite.

Potential terrorists are being born every day in places like Palestine, Iran, Chechnya, etc.

As for the Brits in Ireland, a better counterfactual would be if a British-supported IRISH government (not northern Ireland) was facing a rebellion, and if it commanded a majority of the Irish population. In that case, England would have won.

No, it depends on what that IRISH government represented, how big a majority it commanded, and whether that majority had the same committment and intensity of the minority. If it was a puppet government like the Soviet-supported AFGHAN government in the 1980s, there would still be an insurgency and the IRISH PEOPLE would have triumphed.

Remember, only one-third of the people supported the American Revolution.

[LS]

With Iraq, I'm saying a majority (and likely a large majority) support us there. I'm not sure the same was true of the Arabs in Israel. Some, but I don't know how many.

[nuconvert]

"there is no real evidence that the American public sees Iran as a threat to take out at this moment."

That's why the President needs to spell out to them exactly what the regime has threatened. When he's finished with the laundry list of threats they've made, including suicide bombers and explained what they've already done and continue to do every day to our troops and the Iraqi people and their own people, he'll have made the case.

I speak with and get news from Iranians too. The countryside is not overwhelmingly pro-mullah. It is more pro-mullah than the cities for sure (as the people are less educated and less sophisticated) But not overwhelmingly. They are poor and suffering the affects of a do-nothing regime too.

[LS]

Well, we just disagree. Bush spent all the political capital he had on Iraq (rightly, in my view), but I don't see anyone in Congress coming to his side if he tries to take a case to the American public for any military action against Iran. I think he knows it too.

Meanwhile if the anti-government factions are one-tenth as powerful as you think, we won't have to do much.

[nuconvert]

"Meanwhile if the anti-government factions are one-tenth as powerful as you think, we won't have to do much."

The numbers are certainly there. The power they need help with.
But I think you're right about "we won't have to do much". That's why I don't think his taking a stand of "get out or we're coming in" would result in a lengthy confrontation. Most of the mullahs and people with power would flee. (or try to)

[Southack]

Victor Davis Hanson is a Democrat.

VDH's Private Papers:Democratic Implosion
Democratic Implosion Can the party of the people be saved from itself? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online. The idea that we are going to win this ...
www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson120905.html

[Grampa Dave]

"Victor Davis Hanson is a Democrat."

http://victorhanson.com/articles/dowd082705.html


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August 28, 2005
America’s Historian in Chief
by Alan W. Dowd
American Legion Magazine

This interview with Victor Davis Hanson by Alan Dowd of the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research was conducted on April 5, 2005 in Indianapolis, Indiana, and published in the September 2005 issue of the American Legion.
Victor Davis Hanson emerged from the relative obscurity of his academic post at Fresno State University on September 11, 2001, to become something akin to America’s “Historian-in-Chief.” Spurred by a legion of eager editors, Hanson has translated his expertise in classical military history to the war on terror. The result is some 300 essays (and counting) and a literal army of devotees. He notes with pride that he receives 10 to 20 supportive emails each week from U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His primary platform for explaining this first war of the 21st century has been a decidedly modern mode of communication — the World Wide Web. With the dependability of Old Faithful, Hanson’s weekly commentaries have poured forth from the web-based daily of National Review, one of the forbears of the modern conservative movement. But Hanson reminds those who dismiss him as a Republican shill that he’s a registered Democrat. Underscoring the broad appeal of Hanson’s perspective, his essays on war have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Times, The American Legion, The Wall Street Journal, and City Journal.

[Southack]

"Only in Afghanistan and Iraq have we used force to dethrone authoritarians and birth constitutional government." Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson knows not of what he speaks.

The U.S. under President Bush used force to dethrone the Taliban from Afghanistan, Hussein from Iraq, and Charles Taylor from Liberia's Presidential Palace.

This use of force gave so much credibility to American foreign policy that Syria surrendered without a shot being fired; withdrawing its military from its illegal occupation of Lebanon.

Likewise, this use of force compelled Libya's Khadafy to surrender his extensive WMD program.

Haiti just underwent a "revolution" as well, though in no official part due to the U.S.

[Southack]

" But Hanson reminds those who dismiss him as a Republican shill that he’s a registered Democrat."

No doubt.

[humint]

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.

[carton253]

Whereas I agree with you, do you really think this country, in its current ideological condition, will want to go to Iran?