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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sig who wrote (107987)	7/25/2003 10:38:24 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 281500

That pretty well sums it up. One can cover certain contingencies, but events dictate a lot of what one does, and cannot be predicted with perfect accuracy. Leadership is mainly about setting goals and getting the right people in place to fullfill them, and Bush is very good at that, including at reacting to changing needs. As Wolfowitz and Cheney have pointed out, most hospitals are open, most towns have electricity at pre- war levels, tens of thousands of native police have been hired, and they are in the midst of hiring a military force. I read an op- ed in the Post on Sunday comparing reconstruction efforts with other historical examples, and we are doing very well. There is a lot of "a priorism" here. Instead of comparing to empirical standards, people are making up standards. Someone who didn't know better would think that a batting average of .350 was bad, when in fact it is extremely good. You cannot just make up standards ("I think that human beings ought to be capable of running the mile in a minute"), you have to discover performance parameters with the help of historical comparison and statistics. Just so, things are still going remarkably well in Iraq......

To: Sig who wrote (107987)	7/25/2003 10:55:23 AM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 281500

History Proves We're Doing Fine By Ralph Peters Sunday, July 20, 2003; Page B01 In the summer of 1945, occupied Germany's cities lay in rubble. Hunger and disease prevailed, and tens of millions of displaced persons foraged to survive. Criminals thrived on the black market. De-Nazification had barely begun. That July, three months after the war's end, no one could have foreseen Germany's political future, its economic miracle and astonishing reconstruction. During the federal occupation of the South after the Civil War, a hostile, impoverished population lived amid ruins and cholera. Deadly riots and murders were common. The terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed far greater support among the population than do today's Baath Party dead-enders in Iraq. Attempts to achieve inclusive democracy were frustrated for a century. By historical standards, our progress in Iraq is extraordinary. While we cannot predict the character of the future Iraq with precision -- and we must have realistic expectations -- we already may claim with confidence that we will leave the various peoples of Iraq a more humane, equitable political environment than they ever have experienced. It will then be their own to improve upon or ruin. With unprecedented speed, we overthrew a tyrannical regime that ruled 25 million people. A few million of Iraq's citizens had personal stakes in that regime as the source of their livelihoods and privileges. Should anyone be surprised if hundreds of thousands passively resist the occupation forces and some tens of thousands are willing to engage in or support violence against the force that robbed them of their power? Theirs is the violence of desperation, not of confidence. We face criminals, not a quagmire. Yet the breathless media reporting of each American casualty in Iraq implies that the occupation has failed. Yes, every soldier's life matters. But we also need to keep the numbers in perspective. In one recent week, as many Americans died in a workplace shooting in Mississippi as were killed by hostile action in Iraq. The total casualties for the war and its aftermath hardly rise to the number of deaths on America's highways over a long holiday weekend. Considering the dimensions of our victory, the low level of our losses is something entirely new in the history of warfare. But the quest for daily headlines is not synonymous with a search for deeper truths. Most of Iraq is recovering -- not only from the recent war, but from a generation of oppression. The Kurdish region is prospering, a model of cooperation, and the Shiites have behaved far better than initial worries suggested. The violence is isolated in the Sunni-Arab-minority region, a sliver of the country just west and north of Baghdad, which benefited most from Saddam's rule and has the most to lose under a democratic government. The absence of broad support for anti-coalition attacks is heartening. There is no general insurrection and there are no violent, massive demonstrations. Individual soldiers are assassinated, but our overall presence is not endangered. The resistance of die-hard elements should surprise no one but the most naïve neoconservatives in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Meanwhile, our focus on micro issues such as individual casualties or a disgruntled shopkeeper's complaints obscures our macro success, both within Iraq and beyond its borders. Change has come to the Middle East with remarkable force and velocity. The notorious "Arab street," far from exploding, is the quietest it has been in decades. Syria has sharply reduced its support for terrorism as it weighs its future. In Iran, the young are encouraged by the atmosphere of change, while the bitter old men in power glance nervously at the U.S. military forces positioned to their east and west. There is genuine if imperfect progress on the Palestinian dilemma. The necessity for American bases in benighted Saudi Arabia has faded. Arab intellectuals and journalists speak more frankly of the need for change than they have in four decades. And, depending on how the situation in Iraq develops, the United States may have the opportunity to right one of history's most enduring wrongs by fostering the establishment of an independent Kurdistan. Instant judgments that the U.S. occupation is somehow failing, though politically gratifying to a few, are inaccurate, destructive and ill-judged. It will be at least a decade before we can read the deep results of our actions in Iraq, but the initial indications are that they will be overwhelmingly positive. By choice, we may retain a military presence there 10 years hence -- or we may be long gone. It is simply too early to say. Ralph Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World" (Stackpole Books). washingtonpost.com