Hanson is brilliant. This statement, in a nutshell, summarizes our policy and purpose in Iraq.
Response to Readership
Victor will post a response to readers' questions daily.
Niall Ferguson, in the Opinion Telegraph, claims that the current insurrections in Iraq are identical to those the British faced (1918-20) when they occupied the region and that we were naive to expect anything different. How do you respond to this claim?
With all due respect, the British were not pouring billions into the country or promising democratic autonomy or dealing with a society that had just been liberated from 30 years of reign by a mass murderer. The point? The resources at our disposal are far greater, and the magnitude of the problem equally more formidable. Are we naïve? I don’t think so at all. Defeating Iraq was always a difficult task. Those who predicted 5,000 dead and millions of refugees now feel vindicated; when in fact much of the current problem is explicable in the fact that the US military simply overran the country so rapidly and at so little cost, that many Baathists and fundamentalists themselves woke up and realized that they had been awed rather than militarily defeated. Despite the tragedy of the constant bombing and sniping, the very fact that an entire country has been liberated and is operating again in less than a year— at the rate of losses not unusual for a single week or two in Vietnam -- is unprecedented.