Anatomy of Iraq
NCfan
Posts: 945
March 3, 2007
Anatomy of Iraq
How did we get to this baffling scenario?
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
It’s make it or break it in Iraq in 2007. Or so we are told, as America nears four years of costly efforts in Iraq. But how did we get to this situation, to this fury over a war once supported by 70 percent of the public and a majority of Congress, but now orphaned by both?
How did a serious country, one that endured Antietam, sent a million doughboys to Europe in a mere year, survived Pearl Harbor, Monte Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge, Tarawa, Iwo and Okinawa, the Yalu, Choisun, Hue and Tet, come to the conclusion — between the news alerts about Britney Spears’ shaved head and fights over Anna Nicole Smith’s remains — that Iraq, in the words of historically minded Democratic senators, was the “worst” and the “greatest” “blunder,” “disaster,” and “catastrophe” in our “entire” history?
Even with all the tragic suffering, our losses, by the standard of past American wars, have not been unprecedented, especially given the magnitude of the undertaking — namely, traveling 7,000 miles to remove a dictator and foster democracy in the heart of the ancient caliphate. This was not a 1953 overthrow of an Iranian parliamentarian. Nor was it a calculated 1991 decision to let the Shiite and Kurdish revolts be crushed by Saddam. And it was most certainly not a cynical ploy to pit Baathist Iraq against theocratic Iran. Instead, it was an effort to allow an electorate to replace a madman.
There were always potential landmines that could go off, here and abroad, if the news from the battlefield proved to be dispiriting.
First, George Bush ran for president as a realist, who turned Wilsonian only after 9/11, in the belief that removing Saddam and leaving democracy in his wake could break up the nexus between Middle Eastern terrorism and autocracy.
But his conservative base was always skeptical of anything even approaching internationalist activism. And his Democratic opponents were not about to concede his idealism. So when times got tough, the president’s chief reservoir of diehard supporters proved to be principled Lieberman Democrats and McCain Republicans — neither group a natural majority nor, after 2000, with any natural affinity for the president.
Second, after the relatively easy victories in Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, Serbia, and Afghanistan, the American public became accustomed to removing thugs in weeks and mostly by air and light ground-support. All during the 1990s, the more we made use of the military the more we cut it, until things came to a head in Iraq in a postwar effort that has been both long and confined largely to the ground.
Since the most recent conflicts had been a far cry from the mess of Vietnam, Democrats saw that the upside of regaining lost stature on national security outweighed the dangers of being charged with war-mongering from hard-core leftists. And so they outdid themselves and the president in loudly voting for Iraq — but apparently only as long as casualties were to be minimal and public and media support steadfast and overwhelming.
There were numerous reasons to remove Saddam — 23, according to the Congress that authorized the war — but the administration privileged just one, the sensible fear of weapons of mass destruction. That was legitimate and understandable, and would prove effective so long as either a postwar weapons-trove turned up or the war and its aftermath finished without a hitch.
Unfortunately neither proved to be the case. So with that prime rationale discredited, the partisan Congress suddenly reinvented itself in protesting that it had really voted for war on only one cause, not 23. And when the news and evidence both went bad, that lone reason was now pronounced null and void and hardly a basis for war.
Third, Afghanistan also loomed large. Right after 9/11, Afghanistan, rather than secular and once-defeated Iraq, was seen as the tougher nut to crack, that warlords’ mountainous graveyard of British and Russian imperial troops. But when the Taliban fell in eight weeks, and a consensual government was in place within a year, then by that optimistic arithmetic, the three weeks it took to remove Saddam might mean less than six months before new elections could be held there. Suddenly the old prewar warnings of thousands of Americans dead were forgotten, as the public apparently assumed the peace in Iraq would ensue in half the time it took in Afghanistan. This analogy has proven inapt.
Fourth, this war was debated through one election and fought through two. Given the prewar furor over Iraq, the miraculous three-week victory over Saddam lent itself to a natural tendency afterwards to be conservative, hoarding hard-won — but easily lost — political capital.
So, with each new challenge — the looting, the first pullback from Fallujah, the reprieve given Sadr — the administration hesitated. Understandably, it was afraid to lose broad public support for the conflict, or to restart a war already won, since that would only incite an inherently hostile media that had been temporarily muzzled, but not defanged, by an astounding victory.
Apparently, after the announcement of “Mission Accomplished,” and leading up to the 2004 elections, no one wanted CNN broadcasting live footage from a new siege of Hue in Fallujah. In the process, public support for the war was insidiously and slowly lost, by an Abu Ghraib or a grotesque televised beheading unanswered by a tough American retaliation against the militias. The terrorists learned from our own domestic calculus that each month of televised IEDs was worth one or two U.S. senators suddenly dropping their support for the war.
Fifth, the Sunni border-nations wanted Saddam defanged, but never removed entirely. Muslim lamentations for Saddam’s slaughter of his own were always trumped by his usefulness in keeping down the Shiite fanatics, both in Iran and at home. But the enemy of my enemy in the Middle East is not always my friend, so the Shiites did not instinctively thank the Americans who removed Saddam, or who gave them the franchise.
The result was Orwellian: We allowed the downtrodden Shiite majority one person/one vote, and in exchange Sadr and his epigones were freed to kill us; we championed Sunni minority-rights and got in exchange Sunni tolerance for Baathist and al Qaeda killers.
Through it all, competent and professional American diplomats and soldiers who sought peace for both were libeled by both. Islamists, taking their talking points from the American and European Left, complained about conspiracies and expropriations on the part of those who had in fact ensured that Iraqi petroleum would, for the first time, be subject to public transparency and autonomy.
Sixth, Europeans who profited from Saddam probably wanted Saddam gone, but wanted the U.S. to do it. In the same manner they profit from Iran, yet want Iran quieted and the U.S. to do it. In the same manner they want terrorists rounded up, jailed, and renditioned, but the U.S. to do it.
All the while a Chirac abroad was whipping up the Arab Street, or a Schroeder was awarding financial credits to Germans doing business with the Iranian theocracy, or a Spain or an Italy or a Germany was indicting the very American military and intelligence officers who protected them.
The European philosophy on the Iraq war was to play the anti-American card to envious European crowds all the way up to that delicate point of irrevocably offending the United States. Then, but only then, pull back abruptly with whimpers about NATO, the Atlantic relationship, and Western solidarity, just before a riled America gets wise and itself pulls away from these ingrates for good.
Somehow a war to remove a mass-murdering psychopath — a psychopath with his hands on a trillion-dollars worth of petroleum reserves, with a long record of attacking four of his neighbors and of harboring and subsidizing terrorists — who, once removed, would be replaced with the first truly consensual government in the history of the Arab Middle East, ended up being perceived, for all the reasons cited above, as something it was not.
But if we have an orphaned war that is dubbed lost, it nevertheless can still be won. None of our mistakes has been fatal; none is of a magnitude unprecedented in past wars; all have been cataloged; and few are now being repeated. We now understand the politics of our Iraqi odyssey, with all its triangulations, and the ruthlessness of our enemies.
Not arguments, rhetoric, pleading, or money right now can save the democracy in Iraq. The U.S. military alone, in the very little remaining time of this spring and summer, can give Iraqis the necessary window of security and confidence to govern and protect themselves, and thereby to allow the donors, peacekeepers, compromises, and conferences to follow.
If General Petraeus can bring a quiet to Baghdad, then all the contradictions, mistakes, cheap rhetoric, and politicking of the bleak past will mean nothing in a brighter future.
Anatomy of Iraq
How did we get to this baffling scenario?
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
It’s make it or break it in Iraq in 2007. Or so we are told, as America nears four years of costly efforts in Iraq. But how did we get to this situation, to this fury over a war once supported by 70 percent of the public and a majority of Congress, but now orphaned by both?
How did a serious country, one that endured Antietam, sent a million doughboys to Europe in a mere year, survived Pearl Harbor, Monte Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge, Tarawa, Iwo and Okinawa, the Yalu, Choisun, Hue and Tet, come to the conclusion — between the news alerts about Britney Spears’ shaved head and fights over Anna Nicole Smith’s remains — that Iraq, in the words of historically minded Democratic senators, was the “worst” and the “greatest” “blunder,” “disaster,” and “catastrophe” in our “entire” history?
Even with all the tragic suffering, our losses, by the standard of past American wars, have not been unprecedented, especially given the magnitude of the undertaking — namely, traveling 7,000 miles to remove a dictator and foster democracy in the heart of the ancient caliphate. This was not a 1953 overthrow of an Iranian parliamentarian. Nor was it a calculated 1991 decision to let the Shiite and Kurdish revolts be crushed by Saddam. And it was most certainly not a cynical ploy to pit Baathist Iraq against theocratic Iran. Instead, it was an effort to allow an electorate to replace a madman.
There were always potential landmines that could go off, here and abroad, if the news from the battlefield proved to be dispiriting.
First, George Bush ran for president as a realist, who turned Wilsonian only after 9/11, in the belief that removing Saddam and leaving democracy in his wake could break up the nexus between Middle Eastern terrorism and autocracy.
But his conservative base was always skeptical of anything even approaching internationalist activism. And his Democratic opponents were not about to concede his idealism. So when times got tough, the president’s chief reservoir of diehard supporters proved to be principled Lieberman Democrats and McCain Republicans — neither group a natural majority nor, after 2000, with any natural affinity for the president.
Second, after the relatively easy victories in Grenada, Panama, the Gulf War, Serbia, and Afghanistan, the American public became accustomed to removing thugs in weeks and mostly by air and light ground-support. All during the 1990s, the more we made use of the military the more we cut it, until things came to a head in Iraq in a postwar effort that has been both long and confined largely to the ground.
Since the most recent conflicts had been a far cry from the mess of Vietnam, Democrats saw that the upside of regaining lost stature on national security outweighed the dangers of being charged with war-mongering from hard-core leftists. And so they outdid themselves and the president in loudly voting for Iraq — but apparently only as long as casualties were to be minimal and public and media support steadfast and overwhelming.
There were numerous reasons to remove Saddam — 23, according to the Congress that authorized the war — but the administration privileged just one, the sensible fear of weapons of mass destruction. That was legitimate and understandable, and would prove effective so long as either a postwar weapons-trove turned up or the war and its aftermath finished without a hitch.
Unfortunately neither proved to be the case. So with that prime rationale discredited, the partisan Congress suddenly reinvented itself in protesting that it had really voted for war on only one cause, not 23. And when the news and evidence both went bad, that lone reason was now pronounced null and void and hardly a basis for war.
Third, Afghanistan also loomed large. Right after 9/11, Afghanistan, rather than secular and once-defeated Iraq, was seen as the tougher nut to crack, that warlords’ mountainous graveyard of British and Russian imperial troops. But when the Taliban fell in eight weeks, and a consensual government was in place within a year, then by that optimistic arithmetic, the three weeks it took to remove Saddam might mean less than six months before new elections could be held there. Suddenly the old prewar warnings of thousands of Americans dead were forgotten, as the public apparently assumed the peace in Iraq would ensue in half the time it took in Afghanistan. This analogy has proven inapt.
Fourth, this war was debated through one election and fought through two. Given the prewar furor over Iraq, the miraculous three-week victory over Saddam lent itself to a natural tendency afterwards to be conservative, hoarding hard-won — but easily lost — political capital.
So, with each new challenge — the looting, the first pullback from Fallujah, the reprieve given Sadr — the administration hesitated. Understandably, it was afraid to lose broad public support for the conflict, or to restart a war already won, since that would only incite an inherently hostile media that had been temporarily muzzled, but not defanged, by an astounding victory.
Apparently, after the announcement of “Mission Accomplished,” and leading up to the 2004 elections, no one wanted CNN broadcasting live footage from a new siege of Hue in Fallujah. In the process, public support for the war was insidiously and slowly lost, by an Abu Ghraib or a grotesque televised beheading unanswered by a tough American retaliation against the militias. The terrorists learned from our own domestic calculus that each month of televised IEDs was worth one or two U.S. senators suddenly dropping their support for the war.
Fifth, the Sunni border-nations wanted Saddam defanged, but never removed entirely. Muslim lamentations for Saddam’s slaughter of his own were always trumped by his usefulness in keeping down the Shiite fanatics, both in Iran and at home. But the enemy of my enemy in the Middle East is not always my friend, so the Shiites did not instinctively thank the Americans who removed Saddam, or who gave them the franchise.
The result was Orwellian: We allowed the downtrodden Shiite majority one person/one vote, and in exchange Sadr and his epigones were freed to kill us; we championed Sunni minority-rights and got in exchange Sunni tolerance for Baathist and al Qaeda killers.
Through it all, competent and professional American diplomats and soldiers who sought peace for both were libeled by both. Islamists, taking their talking points from the American and European Left, complained about conspiracies and expropriations on the part of those who had in fact ensured that Iraqi petroleum would, for the first time, be subject to public transparency and autonomy.
Sixth, Europeans who profited from Saddam probably wanted Saddam gone, but wanted the U.S. to do it. In the same manner they profit from Iran, yet want Iran quieted and the U.S. to do it. In the same manner they want terrorists rounded up, jailed, and renditioned, but the U.S. to do it.
All the while a Chirac abroad was whipping up the Arab Street, or a Schroeder was awarding financial credits to Germans doing business with the Iranian theocracy, or a Spain or an Italy or a Germany was indicting the very American military and intelligence officers who protected them.
The European philosophy on the Iraq war was to play the anti-American card to envious European crowds all the way up to that delicate point of irrevocably offending the United States. Then, but only then, pull back abruptly with whimpers about NATO, the Atlantic relationship, and Western solidarity, just before a riled America gets wise and itself pulls away from these ingrates for good.
Somehow a war to remove a mass-murdering psychopath — a psychopath with his hands on a trillion-dollars worth of petroleum reserves, with a long record of attacking four of his neighbors and of harboring and subsidizing terrorists — who, once removed, would be replaced with the first truly consensual government in the history of the Arab Middle East, ended up being perceived, for all the reasons cited above, as something it was not.
But if we have an orphaned war that is dubbed lost, it nevertheless can still be won. None of our mistakes has been fatal; none is of a magnitude unprecedented in past wars; all have been cataloged; and few are now being repeated. We now understand the politics of our Iraqi odyssey, with all its triangulations, and the ruthlessness of our enemies.
Not arguments, rhetoric, pleading, or money right now can save the democracy in Iraq. The U.S. military alone, in the very little remaining time of this spring and summer, can give Iraqis the necessary window of security and confidence to govern and protect themselves, and thereby to allow the donors, peacekeepers, compromises, and conferences to follow.
If General Petraeus can bring a quiet to Baghdad, then all the contradictions, mistakes, cheap rhetoric, and politicking of the bleak past will mean nothing in a brighter future.
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
Care to elaborate?
Hail, Hail!!!
No. Your cat is right. Everybody else is wrong.
And that guy on Fairfax is scary. :rolleyes:
If we want to "foster democracy in the heart of the ancient caliphate" as a hedge against terrorism... why not Afghanistan? I mean, Afghanistan was an oppressive, Fundamentalist Islamic Theological cesspool that openly advertised terror trainning as if it were a Bally's Fitness Center. How about getting THAT mess turned into a fostering Democracy with open trade and freedom?
Iraq was a diversion from our 'Just Cause' to go after the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001 attacks against our cities from the start. We had apathy and overwhelming support from the united American people and the world community. but, because we played that hand so poorly, we lost it... along with our credability as a nation and the integrity of our intelligence. The worse loss, in my opinion, was the unity that almost ALL Americans felt after that Tuesday in September. We are now deeply divided along the worst of all dividing lines... political lines.
....
And yeah... "We in in now so quit playing the blame game... blah-blah-blah...". Don't expect me to take a bite of the shit sandwich you ordered up and paid for. Bon apitite, it's your sandwich. Besides, most Americans don't have to take a bite from that shit sandwich... not any of us sitting in the comfort of our living rooms, a half a world away from I.E.D.s and sniper fire. The ones WE have forced to eat that shit are the soldiers and their families. They are the ONLY Americans making a real sacrifice in this war... not us civilians... or our politicians... or the author of this article or anyone else. What sacrifices have been imposed upon any of us? Gas rationing? Any goods? Any services? Any TAXES? None. We are making our soldiers and their families pay the cost with their lives and are passing the bill on to our kids and grandkids.
So, please... no references to WWII where everyone felt the pinch. We are living the life of Rilley stateside... except those of us who fear the uniformed men driving up to our homes, ringing our doorbells to deliver that awful yellow envelope.
Hail, Hail!!!
It'd take me about an hour to fully dismantle all of the above fantastical gibberish. I'll give it a go tomorrow when I'm at work.
First of all. No country survived 'Antietam, sent a million doughboys to Europe in a mere year, survived Pearl Harbor, Monte Cassino, Anzio, the Bulge, Tarawa, Iwo and Okinawa, the Yalu, Choisun, Hue and Tet' because a country didn't fight, suffer and die in these battles. People fought, suffered and died in these battles. And it can be confidently argued that America lost the war in Vietnam during the Tet offensive in 1968, or that it had even already been lost by then, but that tet was the decisive blow.
He then points out that 'Even with all the tragic suffering, our losses, by the standard of past American wars, have not been unprecedented..' He makes this statement as though to suggest that the supposed “blunder,” “disaster,” and “catastrophe" that many believe to be the case in Iraq, can be reduced simply to the amount of U.S casualties. So by this reasoning, as long as the amount of dead and injured U.S personnel is kept at an acceptable level then the wider problems created by the invasion and occupation can be considered to be irrelevant. I.e, as long as only a few hundred U.S troops are killed every month or so, then we can ignore the fact of almost 1million Iraqi dead, the increase of terrorism in the world, the rise of sectarian viloence, and possiblity of a larger conflict with Iran, and possibly Syria.
In an attempt to justify the illegal invasion of a soveireign nation he states that '..it was an effort to allow an electorate to replace a madman', and that Bush believed '...that removing Saddam and leaving democracy in his wake could break up the nexus between Middle Eastern terrorism and autocracy.'
This is bullshit. And can not be taken seriously. Sadaam was the friend of Bush et al throughout the period of his worst atrocities, and Britain and the U.S sold him the weapons with which to carry out these atrocities. At what point did Sadaam go from being our friend to being a madman? Was it when he decided to invade Kuwait? So should Bush Sr be considered a dangerous madman for the illegal invasion of Panama in 1989 which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 5,000 civilians?
He goes on to write that, 'But his [Bush's] conservative base was always skeptical of anything even approaching internationalist activism. And his Democratic opponents were not about to concede his idealism.'
So this is the new euphemism for unilateral state terrorism is it? A pre-emptive act of military aggression - or simply 'an invasion' - is now called 'internationalist activism', and even 'idealism'?
So '..the American public became accustomed to removing thugs in weeks and mostly by air and light ground-support' did it? The American media system has certainly learnt much from the revolutionary propaganda machine of the Nazis. Although whether this is a good thing is debatable.
He states that 'Since the most recent conflicts had been a far cry from the mess of Vietnam, Democrats saw that the upside of regaining lost stature on national security outweighed the dangers of being charged with war-mongering from hard-core leftists.'
The 'upside of regaining lost stature on national security'? What lost stature on National security? Does he mean 9/11? The Bush administrations top security advisors warned that an invasion of Iraq would certainly increase terrorism against U.S targets at home and abroad. Bush invaded anyway. So much for caring about national security. In fact the Administration is fully aware that any attack against U.S interests anywhere in the world could only be beneficial to them, in the way that 9/11 was beneficial to them. It gives the American propaganda machine a chance to go into top gear and drum up war fever. And so the lesson learned by the Politico's and military analysts is that war is acceptable and in the National interest - i.e, the interest of those who will benefit from it (the 5% of rich and powerful) - as long as the targets of U.S aggression are unable to defend themselves and a U.S victory is seen to be inevitable. Although, according to Victor Davis Hanson, it's only democrats and 'hard-core leftists' who count on casualties being minimal and on steadfast and overwhelming public and media support. These factors are apparently irrelevant to the - implicitly - tougher Republicans.
'There were numerous reasons to remove Saddam — 23, according to the Congress that authorized the war..' So the congress is in a position to authorise war is it? I was stupid enough to believe that there existed an 'International community' which abided by 'international law', as opposed to such 'rogue states' and 'madmen' as Sadaam Hussein, Noriega, and - temporarily, until he redeemed himself in the eyes of our wise leaders - Colonel Ghadaffi, e.t.c.
And what did removing Sadaam have to do with getting rid of weapons of mass destruction? Removing Sadaam was never flouted as a reason to invade Iraq for the sole reason that it would have been immediately rejected as illegal at the U.N Security council. The only possibility of pushing through the agenda for war at the U.N was by attempting to convince the world that Iraq posed an immediate and present threat to Britain and the U.S - both completely laughable and ridiculous, even if Iraq did happen to have possessed wmd's.
'So, with each new challenge...it was afraid to lose broad public support for the conflict, or to restart a war already won, since that would only incite an inherently hostile media that had been temporarily muzzled, but not defanged, by an astounding victory.'
An 'inherently hostile media'? What cloud-cuckoo land does this idiot live in?
'Apparently, after the announcement of “Mission Accomplished,” and leading up to the 2004 elections, no one wanted CNN broadcasting live footage from a new siege of Hue in Fallujah. In the process, public support for the war was insidiously and slowly lost, by an Abu Ghraib or a grotesque televised beheading unanswered by a tough American retaliation against the militias. The terrorists learned from our own domestic calculus that each month of televised IEDs was worth one or two U.S. senators suddenly dropping their support for the war.'
So we can blame the 'inherently hostile media' for the current disaster in Iraq? If only the people telling CNN not to film American atrocities - such as that committed in the destruction of Falluja - would back off so that the public could celebrate such things as 'tough American retaliation against the militias'. We can blame those 'hard-core leftists' responsible for allowing images of U.S troops torturing, raping and murdering Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib to be seen by the otherwise pro-war American public.
Mr Victor Davis Hanson then goes on to state the following. It is such utter horseshit that I can't be bothered to contend it. I think it speaks for itself:
'But the enemy of my enemy in the Middle East is not always my friend, so the Shiites did not instinctively thank the Americans who removed Saddam, or who gave them the franchise.
Islamists, taking their talking points from the American and European Left, complained about conspiracies and expropriations on the part of those who had in fact ensured that Iraqi petroleum would, for the first time, be subject to public transparency and autonomy.
Europeans who profited from Saddam probably wanted Saddam gone, but wanted the U.S. to do it. In the same manner they profit from Iran, yet want Iran quieted and the U.S. to do it. In the same manner they want terrorists rounded up, jailed, and renditioned, but the U.S. to do it.
All the while a Chirac abroad was whipping up the Arab Street, or a Schroeder was awarding financial credits to Germans doing business with the Iranian theocracy, or a Spain or an Italy or a Germany was indicting the very American military and intelligence officers who protected them.
The European philosophy on the Iraq war was to play the anti-American card to envious European crowds all the way up to that delicate point of irrevocably offending the United States. Then, but only then, pull back abruptly with whimpers about NATO, the Atlantic relationship, and Western solidarity, just before a riled America gets wise and itself pulls away from these ingrates for good.'
I really would love America to pull away from us European ingrates, as then she'd be completely isolated in the world and would begin learning some very valuable lessons indeed.
Peace
Dan
"Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty." - Frank Herbert, Dune, 1965