Lando 
Posted on 12/29/2005 10:33:24 AM PST by smoothsailing
December 29, 2005, 8:21 a.m.
The Plague of Success
The paradox of ever-increasing expectations.
After September 11 national-security-minded Democratic politicians fell over each other, voting for all sorts of tough measures. They passed the Patriot Act, approved the war in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the removal of Saddam Hussein, and nodded when they were briefed about Guantanamo or wiretap intercepts of suspect phone calls to and from the Middle East.
After the anthrax scare, the arrests of dozens of terrorist cells, and a flurry of al Qaeda fatwas, most Americans thought another attack was imminent — and wanted their politicians to think the same. Today's sourpuss, Senator Harry Reid, once was smiling at a photo-op at the signing of the Patriot Act to record to his constituents that he was darn serious about terrorism. So we have forgotten that most of us after 9/11 would never have imagined that the United States would remain untouched for over four years after that awful cloud of ash settled over the crater at the World Trade Center.
Now the horror of 9/11 and the sight of the doomed diving into the street fade. Gone mostly are the flags on the cars, and the orange and red alerts. The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia, and as beneficiaries of the very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention al Qaeda very little and Islamic fascism hardly at all.
Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a relieved Left — deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and Scooter Libby.
Afghanistan in October, 2001, conjured up almost immediately warnings of quagmire, expanding Holy War at Ramadan, unreliable allies, a trigger-happy nuclear Pakistan on the border, American corpses to join British and Russian bones in the high desert — not a seven-week victory and a subsequent democracy in Kabul of all places.
Nothing in our era would have seemed more unlikely than democrats dethroning the Taliban and al Qaeda — hitherto missile-proof in their much ballyhooed cave complexes that maps in Newsweek assured us rivaled Norad's subterranean fortress. The prior, now-sanctified Clinton doctrine of standoff bombing ensured that there would be no American fatalities and almost nothing ever accomplished — the perfect strategy for the focus-group/straw-poll era of the 1990s.
Are we then basking in the unbelievable notion that the most diabolical government of the late 20th century is gone from Afghanistan, and in its place are schools, roads, and voting machines? Hardly, since the bar has been astronomically raised since Tora Bora. After all, the Afghan parliament is still squabbling and a long way from the city councils of Cambridge, La Jolla, or Nantucket — or maybe not.
The same paradox of success is true of Iraq. Before we went in, analysts and opponents forecasted burning oil wells, millions of refugees streaming into Jordan and the Gulf kingdoms, with thousands of Americans killed just taking Baghdad alone. Middle Eastern potentates warned us of chemical rockets that would shower our troops in Kuwait. On the eve of the war, had anyone predicted that Saddam would be toppled in three weeks, and two-and-a-half-years later, 11 million Iraqis would turn out to vote in their third election — at a cost of some 2100 war dead — he would have been dismissed as unhinged.
But that is exactly what has happened. And the reaction? Democratic firebrands are now talking of impeachment.
What explains this paradox of public disappointment over things that turn out better than anticipated? Why are we like children who damn their parents for not providing yet another new toy when the present one is neither paid for nor yet out of the wrapper?
One cause is the demise of history. The past is either not taught enough, or presented wrongly as a therapeutic exercise to excise our purported sins.
Either way the result is the same: a historically ignorant populace who knows nothing about past American wars and their disappointments — and has absolutely no frame of reference to make sense of the present other than its own mercurial emotional state in any given news cycle.
Few Americans remember that nearly 750 Americans were killed in a single day in a training exercise for D-Day, or that during the bloody American retreat back from the Yalu River in late 1950 thousands of our frozen dead were sent back stacked in trucks like firewood. Our grandparents in the recent past endured things that would make the present ordeal in Iraq seem almost pedestrian — and did all that with the result that a free Germany could now release terrorists or prosperous South Korean youth could damn the United States between their video games.
Instead, we of the present think that we have reinvented the rules of war and peace anew. After Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the three-week war to remove Saddam, we decreed from on high that there simply were to be no fatalities in the American way of war. If there were, someone was to be blamed, censured, or impeached — right now!
Second, there is a sort of arrogant smugness that has taken hold in the West at large. Read the papers about an average day in Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Detroit, or even in smaller places like Fresno. The headlines are mostly the story of mayhem — murder, rape, arson, and theft. Yet, we think Afghanistan is failing or Iraq hopeless when we watch similar violence on television, as if they do such things and we surely do not. We denigrate the Iraqis' trial of Saddam Hussein — as if the Milosevic legal circus or our own O.J. trial were models of jurisprudence. Still, who would have thought that poor Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a mass-murdering half-brother of Saddam Hussein, would complain that Iraqi television delayed lived feeds of his daily outbursts by whimpering, "If the sound is cut off once again, then I don't know about my comrades but I personally won't attend again. This is unjust and undemocratic."
A greater percentage of Iraqis participated in their elections after two years of consensual government than did Americans after nearly 230 years of practice. It is chic now to deprecate the Iraqi security forces, but they are doing a lot more to kill jihadists than the French or Germans who often either wire terrorists money, sell them weapons, or let them go. For what it's worth, I'd prefer to have one Jalal Talabani or Iyad Allawi on our side than ten Jacques Chiracs or Gerhard Schroeders.
Third, our affluent society is at a complete disconnect with hard physical work and appreciation of how tenuous life was for 2,500 years of civilization. Those in our media circus who deliver our truth can't weld, fix a car, shoot a gun, or do much of anything other than run around looking for scoops about how incompetent things are done daily in Iraq under the most trying of circumstances.
Somehow we have convinced ourselves that our technologies and wealth give us a pass on the old obstacles of time and space — as if Iraq 7,000 miles away is no more distant than Washington is from New York. Perhaps soldiers on patrol who go for 20 hours without sleep with 70 pounds on their back are merely like journalists pulling an all-nighter to file a story. Perhaps the next scandal will be the absence of high-definition television in Iraq — and who plotted to keep flat screens out of Baghdad.
The result of this juvenile boredom with good news and success? Few stop to reflect how different a Pakistan is as a neutral rather than as the embryo of the Taliban, or a Libya without a nuclear-weapons program, or a Lebanon with Syrians in it, or an Iraq without Saddam and Afghanistan without Mullah Omar. That someone — mostly soldiers in the field and diplomats under the most trying of circumstances — accomplished all that is either unknown or forgotten as we ready ourselves for the next scandal.
Precisely because we are winning this war and have changed the contour of the Middle East, we expect even more — and ever more quickly, without cost in lives or treasure. So rather than stopping to praise and commemorate those who gave us our success, we can only rush ahead to destroy those who do not give us even more.
..............................................
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
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200512290821.asp
The weak Democrats are using the WOT for political gain, period. They're not concerned with civil liberties and constitutional rights. They're not overly concerned about our troops, either. They want their political power back and will do anything to get it.
Imagine what would (will) happen the next time we are attacked? The MSM and the Democrat party will attack the Bush administration for not being "vigilant." Bush will get the blame for "not protecting Americans."
They have complained about our intelligence prior to 9/11. Now, when efforts are made in foreign intelligence, they criticize them.
Worst of all, the government bureaucrats (who are almost all Democrats) look for every opportunity to subvert Bush's and the military efforts in the WOT, with leaks and sabotage from within.
Folks, this is beyond political hardball. It is Treason.
(my post from another thread)
Failure would not be condemned more rigorously. On the contrary, it would be welcomed with I told ya sos.
Man, I really hate to say it but...your right.
So many people (mainly on the left) don't seem to understand THIS IS NOT A GAME..this is not a highway bill....etc. This is big time importanr stuff, and until they understand this they cannot be allowed anywhere near the levers of power.
After all, the Afghan parliament is still squabbling and a long way from the city councils of Cambridge, La Jolla, or Nantucket — or maybe not.
True, I bet you can smoke in Kabul!
OH THE HORROR....THE HORROR...THE HORROR
Tks for all the VDH pings.
In this upside down world, it's allways good to read some plain common sense.
Happy New Year
Word.
bttt
They are doing it because they believe anything their opponents do must be existentially wrong, anything they have feared and stated must be fated and true, because they believe the United States is the focus of evil in the modern world, because they believe power itself is evil except when they hold it, and for similar ideological, philosophical (e.g. relativist), and psychological reasons.
These reasons are in fact more important to them than political expediency. They are important to their sense of self, to their mental integrity. Acknowledgement of error on their own part in such matters is deeply upsetting to them, merely as a possibility, and they desperately need to deny any need for it. They assail any messenger bearing such tidings with ferocity, regardless of other merits or objective realities, as a matter of mental self defense.
In which they have more in common with the Islamicists than people might suppose, looking only at the content of the rhetoric of the two groups. The psychological realities are much more closely aligned. When an Islamicist contemplates the idea that the west is just and the actions of his fellows unjust, that the west is not only more powerful than they are but worthy of that power in a way they are not, it is deeply humiliating. And it threatens to overthrow the whole intellectual fabric of their lives.
At bottom they share a relativism which is an evasion of the possibility of being concretely wrong about the world they live in. Their own sense of identity and the artificial stridency of their views are supposed to ensure the equal validty of their opinions to any others, to repeal the suspicion that other ways of thought might be better or their own, inadequate. They fear admission of error as shattering of self, because at bottom their sense of themselves is rooted in a prideful association with supposedly great principles. They are great because they choose to believe things that say, those who believe this are great. If they were instead humble, admission of error would be easy - but that presupposes some other source of integrity, which they do not possess.
To see that it is not mere calculation or seeking political advantage, you have only to look at the actions of the smartest politicians on the American left. Hillary has studiously avoided throwing in with the Deaniac defeatists. She knows it is a political loser. Instead she triangulates between her party's moonbats and the broad American middle which wants success in Iraq and in the WOT.
To see their political calculations, recall the patriotism fest at their last convention, and how important they considered Kerry's supposed military heroism. Notice that they will not vote for Murtha's resolution. They seek to undermine the war and want defeat yes, but they do not try to sell that notion, openly, to the American people. They know they have to fool said people to achieve their own aim of US defeat. Ergo, they do not aim at defeat in order to curry favor with said people, but independently desire it.
Or in the case of the Islamicists, look at what they gain from their stridency, and what they lose. A few years ago they controlled countries. They were well financed. Strong states were actively improving their military and economic power. Now look at them. The hardest line are beseiged, with easy developments of additional power, in the shadows of western indifference, replaced by dangerous pitfalls and threats of both internal revolution and direct US military action. Those who started the recent round are dispossessed, half their fortunes gone, a third of their personnel killed or captured.
But what is any of that practical stuff, frankly only about this world, compared to the inner glow of self assurance, that they are the righteous fighting mighty oppressors, for the highest possible cause, with unstinting devotion and bravery? Islamicists willingly die for a few days of that glow. Democrats willingly lie for rather less of it, but for longer periods.
I appreciate you composing that response just for me :-).
Lando
bttt
Excellent article. Thanks
VDH bump.
Ping to a great article I missed on the first pass...
Thanks for the ping.
What explains this paradox of public disappointment over things that turn out better than anticipated? Why are we like children who damn their parents for not providing yet another new toy when the present one is neither paid for nor yet out of the wrapper?
BTTT
"Are we then basking in the unbelievable notion that the most diabolical government of the late 20th century is gone from Afghanistan, and in its place are schools, roads, and voting machines? Hardly, since the bar has been astronomically raised since Tora Bora. After all, the Afghan parliament is still squabbling and a long way from the city councils of Cambridge, La Jolla, or Nantucket — or maybe not.
The same paradox of success is true of Iraq. Before we went in, analysts and opponents forecasted burning oil wells, millions of refugees streaming into Jordan and the Gulf kingdoms, with thousands of Americans killed just taking Baghdad alone. Middle Eastern potentates warned us of chemical rockets that would shower our troops in Kuwait. On the eve of the war, had anyone predicted that Saddam would be toppled in three weeks, and two-and-a-half-years later, 11 million Iraqis would turn out to vote in their third election — at a cost of some 2100 war dead — he would have been dismissed as unhinged.
But that is exactly what has happened. And the reaction? Democratic firebrands are now talking of impeachment."
Excellent piece!
They already knew how to shoot and plow for food, fix and or improvise because they had no money to buy new. They had respect for parents and duly elected authorities.
And they went to church, read the bible, and loved their God. They and we survived that evil that had brought so much suffering and death. We can honor them today by emulating those qualities that entitles them to the title of the Greatest Generation.
Two front war, thanks for the ping.
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