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February 18, 2005
Right Analysis
Victor Davis Hanson has it all right in his analysis on the War on Terror in general and Iraq in particular. He provides the historical context and background that is so lacking in much that passes for informed writing. We know the symptoms;
Reading the pages of foreign-policy journals, between the long tracts on Bush’s “failures” and those on neoconservative “arrogance,” one encounters mostly predictions of defeat in Iraq, laced with calls for phased withdrawal and — throughout — resounding criticism of the “botched” U.S. occupation and innuendos of petroleum imperialism.He calls them "The Impatient Caucus," and asks "Have we forgotten that winning a war takes time?" Apparently some have.Platitudes follow: “We can’t just leave now,” followed by no real advice on how a fascist society can be jump-started into a modern liberal republic. After all, there is no government handbook titled, “Operation 1A: How to remove a Middle East fascist regime, reconstruct the countryside, and hold the first elections in the nation’s history — all within two years.” The idea of perfection is always the enemy of improvement, as if American-sponsored reform were no better than what preceded it under a Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban — or Saddam.
(Note: to view the article in its entirety you must be a paid subscriber to National Review)
This used to exasperate Alexander Haig, too. I recall watching some TV show where he'd be a guest, and eventually he'd start almost shouting at his opponent "You don't know any history!"
Hanson writes about how the critics try to have it both ways. A few of his examples will suffice;
From the oscillating analyses of Iraq, the following impossible picture emerges from our intelligentsia: It was a fatal error to disband the Iraqi army. That reckless act led to lawlessness and a loss of confidence in the Americans’ ability to restore immediate order after Saddam’s fall. Yet it was also a fatal error to keep some Baathists in the newly constituted army. They were corrupt and wished reform to fail — witness the Fallujah Brigade that either betrayed us or aided the enemy. So we turned off the Sunnis by disbanding the army — and yet somehow turned off the Shiites by keeping some parts of it.On and on it goes. It would be funny if it weren't so serious.Elections should have been held earlier; no, they must be now delayed since they come too soon when the country is still unsecured. No, this is the proper time after all. If 100 percent participate, then it is a sham and reminiscent of Saddam’s forced turnout; if 55 percent vote, sectarian violence is inevitable, as if such similarly dismal participation rates in the United States prompt violence or reveal illegitimacy. The Sunnis will spoil the democratic experiment — as if 20 percent of the population who cannot or will not stop the violence have the right to impair the hard work of the other 80 percent who are eager for reform, ready to brave fire to vote, and in possession of most of the country’s petroleum, ports, and pipelines.
We were after cheap oil, but gas prices somehow climbed almost immediately after we went in. We snubbed the U.N., but the U.N. — hand-in-glove with others — helped to loot Iraq. Democracy won’t work with these people, but somehow we are seeing three successive elections in the wake of the Taliban, Arafat, and Saddam.
We have a tendency, I think, to view wars in which we have been successful as glorious crusades in which we all linked arms and marched off to defeat the enemy. Were that it was the truth. While this attitude is symptomatic of the Revolution and Civil Wars, never is it as pervasive as it is with the granddaddy of all wars, World War II.
We're all familiar with Pearl Harbor. Many of us know about the Bataan Death March and Wake Island. But didn't we turn things around at Midway? Yes, but our mistakes were not limited to the first six months of the war.
Most of our armored vehicles were deathtraps, improved only days before the surrender. American torpedoes in the Pacific were often duds. Unescorted daylight bombing proved a disaster, but continued unabated. Amphibious assaults like Anzio and Tarawa were bloodbaths, plagued by terrible planning and command. The recapture of Manila was clumsy and far too costly. Okinawa was the worst of all operations, and yet was begun just over four months before the surrender — without careful planning for kamikazes, who were shortly to kill nearly 5,000 American sailors. Patton, the one general who could have ended the western war in 1944, was earlier relieved and then subordinated to an auxiliary position with near-fatal results for the drive from Normandy. Mediocrities like Mark Clark flourished and were promoted. Admiral King for far too long resisted the life-saving convoy system and thus unnecessarily sacrificed merchant ships; Admiral Bull Halsey almost lost his unprepared fleet to a storm.If anything, Hanson doesn't go far enough. Our tanks had gasoline engines, our enemy had diesels in theirs (gasoline explodes, diesel burns. Take your pick). Fully 80% percent of the torpedoes were duds, making our submarines and torpedo bombers useless the first year or so. B-17 raids were suicidal until the arrival of the P-38 Lightning and P-51 Mustang fighters, yet we pressed ahead anyway. We never did develop an effective defense against the kamikaze, one reason our planners so feared invading the Japanese homeland. In August of 1945 Japan still had some 5,000 aircraft, and thus 5,000 kamikazes. The "storm" that Halsey drove his fleet through was a full-blown typhoon (the Pacific equivalent of a hurricane). And the action in which he did this left our landing fleet at Leyte unprotected, which would have been totally destroyed by Japanese battleships had not a few U.S. destroyers driven them off (yes you read that right).
And try this on for size: During one of the practice landings for D-Day in Normandy, several German E-Boats (their version of a PT boat) got in among our troop ships and sunk several of them. Almost 750 Americans died. In a training accident.
But weren't things better once war ended?
Don't believe that the occupation of Germany was viewed as a disaster at the time? See here, here, and here. As Hanson says, the war ended with half of Europe under the thumb of a dictator at least as bad as Hitler. That Stalin, or Khrushchev didn't grab the rest of the continent has more to do with American nuclear power and their own post-war exhaustion than anything else.The war’s aftermath seemed even worse — to be overseen by an untried president who was considered an abject lightweight. Not-quite-so-collateral damage had ruined entire European cities. Europe itself nearly starved in the winter of 1945-6. Millions took to the road in mass exoduses. After spending billions to destroy Nazi Germany we had to spend billions more to rebuild it — and repair the devastation it had wrought on its neighbors. Our so-called partisan friends in Yugoslavia and Greece turned out to be hard-core Communist killers. Soon enough we learned that the most of the guerrillas in the mountains of Europe whom we had idolized, in fact, fought as much for Communism as against fascism — but never for our notion of democracy.
But at least there was clear-cut strategic success after all such sacrifice and disappointment. Oh? The Second World War started to keep Eastern Europe free of Nazis and ended up ensuring that it was enslaved by Stalinists. Poland was free neither in 1940 nor in 1946.
How about the atomic bomb? Wasn't the Manhattan Project an example of American know-how? Definately. The bomb, however, was built to counter a perceived threat from Germany. And oops, it turned out that they didn't have an atomic bomb project, much less an actual weapon, after all. Here's my take on how a modern day liberal Senator would have reacted.
But of course, World War II was not a failure:
Yet our greatest generation thought by and large they had done pretty well. We, in contrast, would have given up in despair in 1942, New York Times columnists and NPR pundits pontificating “I told you so” as if we would have been better off sitting out the war all along.And so it takes time. The side that makes the fewest mistakes is the one that wins. Lincoln thought he might lose the election of 1864 because of how poorly the war was going. George Washington and other American generals presided over a series of disasters before finally defeating the British.
If you want to know what we're doing right in Iraq I can think of no better resource than Arthur Chrenkoff's "Good News from Iraq" series. As for Hanson, he explains how "our enemies are facing their own paradoxes"
The terrorists have a glaring problem: Seventy-five percent of Iraqis want elections. The Sunni clerics — who either cannot or will not stop their brethren from trying to derail the voting, through which their own cause will be defeated — wish to nullify the elections. But these Sunni appeals appear increasingly empty — almost like the Secessionists complaining that Northern voters in 1860 might imperil the Union. And no one is all that sure that there really is a purist Sunni block of millions of obstructionists, rather than just ordinary Iraqis who want to vote and are in fear of extremists who claim their allegiance. Saudi Arabia unleashed terrorists to stop democracy in Iraq — and now worries that their young Frankenstein monsters hate their creators just as much.
We're not out of the woods yet. But we are well on the road to success. Analyzing our mistakes and putting corrections into place is good. Dwelling on them to the point of all-is-gloom-and-doom is not.
The other side
Wrong Analysis is on my other blog site.
Posted by Tom at February 18, 2005 4:10 PM
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