Fantasyland
By Victor Davis Hanson
<font size=4>
We live in an upside-down civilization of hit Michael Moore conspiracy films, of novels about how to kill a sitting President of the United States, of elite American newsmen ridiculing brave Iraq democrats, and of allied peoples abroad who tell pollsters that they prefer beheaders and fascists to win in Iraq. Perhaps we should take a hard look at this current mythic world.
.
The “Iraq Was a Mistake” Canard
Richard Clarke now lectures his newfound paying audiences—including the revered nonpartisan American Library Association— that Iraq was an enormous mistake. Was it really?
Our problems are tactical and manageable, not strategic and fatal. After 9-11, ridding the world of a mass killer who wished to recycle petrodollars to remake his arsenal to replay prior invasions was no error. Nor was it an “enormous mistake” to put democratic reformers in his place rather than a Mubarak-like “moderate” or Royal Family.
Iraq now is what the Left all throughout the 1960s and
1970s said America should be doing—and nothing is more
saddening than to see earnest and courageous reformers of
the new Iraqi government being grilled and pilloried on TV
by smug American pundits and reporters.
So what is the problem? We were initially victims of our
own military success. The war lasted not the envisioned
150-250 days, but three weeks. That unparalleled victory
spawned a host of postbellum misconceptions, leading to
disappointments by the standard of a 21-day stunning
victory. We demanded similar quick fixes, not the slow
progress characteristic of a postwar Germany, Japan, and
Korea.
Assuming that the enemy was defeated, terrified, and humiliated, rather than merely temporarily discredited, we let down our guard. At least five errors followed from ignoring the old laws of war that one must first defeat, before reforming, an enemy.
The human lapses share one theme: the half-measure
designed to placate shrill critics at home, in Europe, and
in the Arab world that only emboldened the killers who
knew our minds better than we theirs.
(1) We sought perfection in reconstruction planning and thus quibbled and tarried about contracts, constitutions, and political power while our enemies regrouped during the critical 3-month lull right after the victory. While we railed about Halliburton and Mr. Bush’s flight-suit, the jihadists noticed you could kill an American in Tikrit or Falluja without much worry of dying—as had not been true in the three-week war.
(2) So to keep the notion of a 3-week victory intact, we did everything to keep a semblance of peace except the one thing that could really keep it: shooting looters, rounding up militia leaders, and crushing pockets of Baathist resistance like a Tikrit or Fallujah.
(3) Disbanding the Iraqi army was smart in the long-term, but near disastrous in the here and now. The break-up ensured the growth of a large pool of idle, publicly ridiculed, and angry young men—in addition to the absence of an existing police force to control such a mob.
(4) We did not get Iraqis involved fast enough. A good man like Paul Bremer and the generals were on television too much, Iraqis for a year hardly at all. We thought reason and long-term self-interest were stronger emotions than honor, status, envy, and shame—they aren’t.
(5) Finally, we underestimated homegrown opposition to
the war. Thus we saw little reason to confront it
intellectually or morally. Assuming few here could
identify with fascism, gender apartheid, terrorism, and
intolerance, we forgot that forty years of postcolonial
studies, multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and
aristocratic pacifism in our schools and public discourse
had imbued a real mistrust of the United States that was
far stronger than any ideological revulsion to Islamic
fascism. Shrill Deanism morphed into conspiratorial
Moorism and finally ended up as the canonical outrage of
the Democratic Party.
Yet because the strategy—eliminate fascism and implant democracy—was sound, the tactical lapses can be reversed and the situation remedied. Remember, as historians we must do more than cite mistakes—otherwise we would have given up after Iwo or Okinawa—but rather adjudicate to what degree they are fatal to our larger purposes. And so far none are.
So let us speed up the reconstruction money. Help more Iraqis to get back to work and especially to appear on television. With the new government, insist on zero tolerance of killers in places like Fallujah.
Accept that the antiwar left has never supported free
elections in a post-Cold-War Hanoi, Havana, or Ramallah,
and won’t in Baghdad. It will grow silent only when the
violence stops, the terrorists are killed or routed, and
the Iraqis are boasting about their own elections.
.
The Oppressed Arab Street Myth
Another crazy idea is back—food, not guns, will save us yet. Of course, millions in the Muslim world are impoverished. Of course, they live under autocratic rule. Of course, our war is not against “Islam,” but rather seeks to eradicate poverty, ignorance, and injustice. But then why are so many Arab youth blowing up and beheading Westerners when others far worse off elsewhere are not?
There is a dangerous canard resurfacing around Washington
that somehow a Marshall Plan of cash infusions will win
over the Arab Street. Purportedly since “we can’t win” in
Iraq, the solution is economic and not military.
But first we need to ask why Bolivians and Rwandans are
not murdering Americans—folk poorer than whom we see in
Pakistan or Iraq. Chinese and Indians thirty years ago
were as indigent as those in the contemporary Cairo
Street; why are they not now flooding into Japan as
terrorists?
Second, to suggest democracy and economic liberalization
are the answer is to support the Iraq invasion, which was
all about forcing autocrats who killed their own and
threatened others out, and reformers in to allow the
needed changes.
If in a year from now there is a stable consensual government in Iraq, then the US Marines will have done more to change the oppressive landscape of the Middle East than all the billions given to Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian authority over the last quarter century, all the trillions in oil profiteering from rigged OPEC prices, and all the psychic support given extremists by our own Middle East Studies departments
DC insiders’ recent lectures about hearts and minds remind
me of those in the West circa 1940 who once blamed Hitler
on themselves—citing the Versailles treaty, failure to
help stop Germany’s inflation, Churchillian rigidity, and
anything other than the German people’s own culpability
for taking the cheap way out of their own self-created
dilemma and the prior allied failure to occupy Berlin
after 1918. We could have apologized daily to Germany in
1939. We could have given it billions of dollars and
signed, like Russia did, a treaty of friendship, and it
still would have gone to war with us—drunk as it was on
the misconception that the liberal democracies were weak,
timid, and their era over.
Read jihadist literature, the Arab News, and assorted
fatwas to understand that the hatred is irrational, deep-
seeded, and parasitic on Western apologists.
Thus the proper exegesis for the latter’s violence must
account for exactly why and how it is that Middle Eastern,
mostly Arab Muslim, youths kill Westerners worldwide—and
yet Africans, South Americans, and Asians impoverished
usually do not. It might just be that the stew of American
appeasement, past Cold War support for illicit and corrupt
grandees like the Royal Family, too much oil money too
fast, Soviet-style statist remnants, endemic anti-
Semitism, and Islam itself have all combined to create
something like a strain of Hitlerism, which at this late
hour cannot be reasoned with, but rather only destroyed.
.
The So-Called Loyal Opposition
We are in dangerous times, because beyond the normal
Democratic/Republican, Left/Right natural give-and- take,
there is now a growing and very crazy New, New Left. It
has transcended both the old Marxism of the 1930s and the
counterculture of the 1960s, and transmogrified into a
strange sort of aristocratic, boutique damnation of Main
Street, USA.
These furious critics of America are heiresses, work at
trendy foundations, and include movie stars, upscale
academics like a Chomsky, or global currency gougers such
as George Soros. Al Gore’s recent bouts of insanity are a
metaphor of the scary era we are in.
But who is the real new Democratic guru that best reflects
the new Know-Nothingness? We should judge a Michael Moore
not just by what he says, but what he does every time he
freelances without his publicists and handlers. At a time
of war, he scoffs at 9-11 as if the wrong Americans were
dying <font color=blue>(If someone did this [9/11] to get back at Bush,
then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID
NOT VOTE for him!).<font color=black>
He praises our enemies who are beheading innocents in
Iraq. <font color=blue>(The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation
are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy.” They
are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will
grow -- and they will win. Get it, Mr. Bush?)<font color=black>
He shows contempt for our dead who fought and died for the
right of Iraqis to vote. <font color=blue>(“I'm sorry, but the majority of
Americans supported this war once it began and, sadly,
that majority must now sacrifice their children until
enough blood has been let that maybe - just maybe - God
and the Iraqi people will forgive us in the end.").<font color=black>
He slurs civilian workers like Nick Berg and Paul Johnson
who were trying to help rebuild Iraq. <font color=blue>(“Those are not
contractors in Iraq. They are not there to fix a roof or
to pour concrete in a driveway. They are MERCENARIES and
SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE”).<font color=black>
He has contempt for Americans outside his circle of
sycophants: <font color=blue>"They are possibly the dumbest people on the
planet . . . "We Americans suffer from an enforced
ignorance. We don't know about anything that's happening
outside our country. Our stupidity is embarrassing."<font color=black>
The problem with this war was never the material resources of the United States, the skill and courage of our soldiers, or even the support of the majority of the American people between San Francisco and New York. Indeed, we have the will, military power, and economic resources to crush our enemies—should we choose to. Rather the rub was always the lack of communication by our leaders who have a responsibility each day to counter popular superstition, half-truths, and misconception—and to do so with unapologetic audacity.
They do try. But so far it has simply not been enough. And
the result of this Dukakis-like paralysis is that a half-
educated, vindictive buffoon like Michael Moore and all
the ignorance that he stands for have captivated a foolish
cultural elite. Let us face it: the Left in this country
has gone absolutely crazy. Without worries of rebuke or
censure, the dinosaurs of the 1960s really do wish us to
give one final gift of their wisdom and humanity—and so
does its best to bring us a repeat of American choppers
fleeing the embassy roof, circa 1975, with millions left
behind awaiting death, reeducation camps, and exile.
©2004 Victor Davis Hanson |
