The Redhunter

To those caught up in the headline of the day, it is easy to see every setback as evidence that we are going to lose and that we better pull back now. Successes seem minimal, and losses are magnified. It is the nature, and indeed the duty, of the press to tell us of what is going wrong. But by concentrating on this we lose our perspective. For if one goes back in history and looks at any war that we have fought from the Revolution on, they are far from glorious stories of victory where we all linked arms and marched off to defeat the enemy. In reality, they are stories of how we engaged in almost endless internal squabbling and bickering, and how our own military made mistake after mistake, often to the very end of the war. Somehow, however, we won.

More importantly, the naysayers of the time are usually forgotten. How many remember that Lincoln was considered certain to lose the election of 1864 due to how poorly the war was going, and only at the end staged a comeback? How many know of the terrible losses at the Chosin Reservoir? Democrats and other naysayers would do well to ponder this aspect of history.

On with Hanson. He reminds us of how the Old Left (their term) blamed the Cold War on the United States, and that their version was taken seriously at the time:

By the late 1940s things on the ground had changed somewhat, and the blame-America-first ideology adjusted accordingly. Now it was the turn of the old Left, which castigated "fascists" for ruining the hallowed American-Soviet wartime alliance by "isolating" and "surrounding" the Russians with hostile bases and allies. The same was supposedly true of Red China: We were told ad nauseam by idealists and "China hands" that Mao really wanted to cultivate American friendship but was spurned by our right-wing ideologues — as if there were nothing of the absolutism and innate thuggery in him that would soon account for 50 million or more of his own people murdered and starved.

Ditto the reactions to the animosity from such dictators as Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro. The Left assured us that both were actually neo-Jeffersonians, whose olive branches were crushed by unimaginative Cold Warriors and who only then went on to plan their gulags. Few seemed to think it natural that a free and powerful America would be hated by fascists and Communists — much less that it should be praised rather than castigated for earning such hatred.

How quickly some forget. More on Hanson's Right Analysis here, in a post where he concentrates on World War II.

Not all, of course, is "ancient history":

We also forget now how the Left warned us of terrible casualties and millions of refugees before the Iraq war, and then went dormant until the insurgents emerged. Then the opposition resurfaced to assure us that Iraq was lost, only to grow quiet again after the Iraqi election and its regional aftershocks — a cycle that followed about the same 20-month timetable of military victory to voting in Afghanistan.

It reminds me of the Gulf War. Recall the predictions of "tens of thousands" of American casualties? We were told how the "hardened Iraqi army" would surely fight us tooth-and-nail over every square inch of land? Peace groups like the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace solemnly assured us that we shouldn't invade because if we did surely Saddam would use his WMD against us. Even after weeks of bombing, Bob Woodward assured us that air attacks were not going as well as the Pentagon had claimed.

We saw the same thing during the 2003 invasion of Iraq: The "Battle of Baghdad" that was supposed to be Stalingrad II. We were all assured that this time there would be fierce resistance. On and on it went. But being a peace activist means never having to say you're sorry.

Finally, misguided pessimists claim that the United States is alone in the world. When George W. Bush orchestrated the fall of Saddam Hussein he was said to have alienated everyone, as if our friends in Eastern Europe, Britain, Australia, and India did not matter. Yet the same was said in 1941 when Latin America, Asia, and Africa were in thrall to the Axis. Neutrals wanted little to do with a disarmed United States that had unwisely found itself in a two-front war with the world�s most formidable military powers. Indeed, the June 1941 invasion of Russia was about as multilateral as could be, with Eastern Europeans, Spaniards, Italians, and Finns all joining the invading armies of the Third Reich.

By the 1950s we seemed to have defeated Germany and Japan only to have subsequently lost Eastern Europe, as former defeated fascists became friends once-allied neutrals and Communists turned hostile. Much of Asia and Latin America deified the mass-murdering Stalin and Mao, while deriding elected American presidents. The Richard Clarkes and Joe Wilsons of that age lectured about a paranoid Eisenhower administration, clumsy CIA work, and the general hopelessness of ever defeating global Communism, whose spores sprouted almost everywhere in the form of Nasserism, Pan-Arabism, Baathism, Castroism, and various "national liberation" movements.

"You made Saddam"

Then there's the "the United States created Saddam" line. I see this one with leftie bloggers all of the time. Besides overstating matters to a ridiculous degree, it is both forgetful of history and simple America-bashing. I dealt with the history of America and Saddam in an earlier post called "History Backwards" An excerpt from what I wrote:

In order to understand U.S. policy in the 1980's we need to understand what happened in the late 1970s.

I was in my early college years when the Iranian Hostage Crisis occurred, and this is when I first really started to pay attention to politics. It was not a pretty introduction.

The sense of helplessness that most Americans felt was maddening. Here we were, a superpower, and yet we were unable to get our people back. We had just been through Vietnam and Watergate, with those humiliations fresh on our minds, and now this. Worse yet, our president was telling us that we would have to get used to a lower standard of living here at home.

I remember that my father was working in Washington DC at the time, and he'd tell us stories of the protests in the city: Protests, mind you, by Iranian "students" in support of the hostage takers. The protestors were protected by the police, whose protection they needed full well. The office workers would go out during their lunch break to observe these protests. My dad would tell us of normally calm, unsuitable men who would go ballistic at what they saw.

My point is that the anger towards Iran was intense and deep. We would have supported just about anyone who was willing to oppose the Ayatollah Khomeini and his regime.

More importantly, in the late '70s and early '80s it really did seem like the Iranians would be able to export their revolution to the rest of the area. The idea of the gulf states and Saudi Arabia falling to radical Islam was frightening indeed.

Contrary to what the left would have you believe, no one was under any illusions as to who Saddam was. We knew full well that he was a thoroughly rotten dictator.

The Lesson

We were right to support Iraq when we did, just as we were right to side with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. The threat of the Iranian revolution spreading throughout the region was quite real, and the consequences of it doing so could be devastating to the region and to our economy.

The journalist Christopher Hitchens had a response to those who use the "we created Saddam" line. He said, and I go on memory because I can't find the link: "Assuming for argument's sake that you're right, and we are responsible for Saddam, then isn't it our responsibility to correct the situation and take him out?"

The response he said he gets is "can't we talk about global warming now?"

So let's call it what it is; most of those who use the "the United States created Saddam" line are only out to bash the United States. They hate this country and are engaged in anti-Americanism pure and simple. Don't put up with this line because it's a load of bunk.

The naysayers will always be with us. Some are honest, and some are not. Either way, we must not get caught up in the "headline of the day", but must keep our perspective.