The 'experts' were wrong

This is not the way some "experts" said the U.S.-led war for liberating Iraq would unfold: a military campaign of astonishing speed with a minimum of casualties, given the lethality of the weapons. So many of the experts derided this as a fantasy of the warmongers.

There was supposed to be, according to these experts - we shall not embarrass them by mentioning their names - a grotesque carnage of innocent civilians. It would be a war with the scenario of hell gratuitously visited upon Iraqis: cities reduced to rubble; an unprecedented humanitarian crisis following fierce battles.

However, there were those who disagreed with these predictions, knowing Saddam Hussein's Iraq was one huge gulag that would fold with a sufficiently determined knock from the outside.

The huge question that looms above the debris of expert opinions is why so many pundits have been so frequently wrong - i.e., when assessing the wars in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Their record would have demanded they proceed with caution instead of making more erroneous predictions.

These experts believe they have a privileged insight into politics and history. They possess a certain frame of mind that is skeptical of common sense, dismissive of ordinary people and prefers the unexamined certainty of their own ideological constructions - such as that America is a retrograde imperialist power, and hence its motivations are always suspect - over simple truths that human longings for decency, respect, freedom and peace are universal.

From such certitude it is only a small step into that seductive world of thinking and acting where an anti-democratic elite, suspicious of freedom, knows what is right, or deserving for the multitudes.

The French writer, Jean-Francois Revel, discussed this matter in his wonderful little book The Totalitarian Temptation.

Revel observed: "It seems to me that the totalitarian temptation is really driven by a hatred on principle of industrial, commercial civilization, and would exist even if it were proved that people in that civilization were better fed, in better health and better (or less badly) treated than in any other. The real issue lies elsewhere: money is sinful, the root of all evil; and if freedom was born of economic development, then it too suffers from that original sin."

Revel's subject was extensively explored earlier by Sir Karl Popper, an Austrian who emigrated to Britain, in a widely acclaimed study titled Open Society and Its Enemies, written in the midst of World War II.

Anyone truly concerned about Iraqis and their welfare would have known that the vast majority of them, Shiites and Kurds together constituting more than 80% of the population, had no stake in Saddam's tyrannical regime.

Only the fearful memories of 1991, when Saddam crushed the popular uprising the Americans had called for - and then betrayed - stood between Iraqis and their embracing of American and British soldiers as liberators. Once this fear dissolved, the celebration followed as spring follows winter.

Moreover, anyone with an inkling into the politics and history of demagogues and dictators in the Arab-Muslim world would know how great is the disregard for human lives there among rulers and their courtiers.

The death toll of Iraqi civilians three weeks into the military campaign, tragic as it is, was a fraction of the deaths Saddam visited upon the Kurds in Halabja, for instance, one March morning 15 years ago.

In the spreading joy of freedom, despite the many losses that will be mourned, what we witness in Iraq as tyranny crumbles, is no more unique than what other peoples have felt in similar circumstances.

Experts have made freedom into an abstraction - a subject for study with a proper dose of cynicism. This is why they also scorned an American president who showed no pretension of being an intellectual heavyweight, but who spoke of freedom for the Iraqi people - and meant it - in no uncertain terms.

And, not surprisingly, experts are caught unprepared when people are willing to bear the costs of freedom, and when the walls of prisons come tumbling down.

Embarass away. They need to be named. They need to be advertised for the doom sayers they are, they are most of the same who said we would need 1,000's of ground forces in Afghanistan and the same who claimed 10,000 body bags in the first Gulf War.

Robert MacNemerra comes to mind. He was so much the expert on Viet Nam. (HAHAHAHAHA) The only good thing he did was to push into service the M16, but he did not allow it to be chromed inside the barrel hence the first was subject to failure in a tropical setting. Once chromed the M16 in a good weapon. Where ever MacNemerra goes he leave a trail of death.

The MacNemerra Project or Prject 100,000. is an example. Send 100,000 troops to Nam who the Army would not take even if they ran out of men. A lot of these guys were unfit to be in combat and caused a lot of men who did feel sorry for them to die, along with a lot of the 100,000 dying because they could not make it. MacNemerra is the spectre of death to the American serviceman. And they call on him as an "Expert" to speak before Congress on the Gulf War, then Afghanistan. Both time he was WRONG at the outcome, and the casualty levels.

This describes "intellectuals" in general. See college professors.

Let's be a little more clear:

The liberals were wrong.

There was another group that was wrong. A minority of military officers (active and retired) who believed in the old maxims of big slow military buildups. These people had a mix of agendas (job justification, genuine belief in the idea of the old style of war) but for the most part meant well. It's a good thing that Bush, Rumsfeld, Franks, and company are of the new school of military action. We see how well that turned out!

But the liberals didn't mean well. They were wrong about Gulf War I and now they are wrong about Gulf War II.

Come to think of it, can anyone here come up with a time when the liberals were ever right about anything? I'd be genuinely interested in reading that.

Anyway, the liberals didn't mean well. They are mostly (always?) wrong and they wanted to be right about this action so badly that I'm sure many of them (all?) were secretly hoping for "a million Mogidishus".

But enough about the drugwarriors/lifestylepolice, this is an article about Iraq.

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