Friday, January 30, 2004
Victor Davis Hanson on War
Victor Davis Hanson on War on National Review Online
"In addition, the Baathists and Islamicists — a fraction of the Iraq population — sense that Americans despise ingratitude. They trust that at some point we will shrug and say, "If these people won't fight to protect the freedom we gave them, then screw them, bring everyone home, and let these tribal folk slaughter each other the way they have always done."
For the Islamicists' muddled vision of some theocratic caliphate run on Dark-Age principles to succeed, they must count on killing Americans and frightening Iraqis into inaction while the general quality of life erodes. Given the reputation of American largesse and know-how, our task is not simply to make Iraq no worse than it was under Saddam Hussein, but to greatly improve it, and to do so immediately. This makes things easier for the terrorists: They don't have to ruin the country, just make it chaotic enough to tarnish the image of an otherwise perfectionistic United States falling through on its promises of a better Iraq.
To this end, they ask impoverished fathers to sacrifice their children to blow up Americans. After all, for a mere life and a cheap RPG, he can do much more than take out a half-million-dollar vehicle with its degreed driver: He can send a message to the U.S., saying that killer-terrorists can be far more evil than America can be good. And while the terrorists snipe, mine, and murder, they seek an international pass as the "invaded," who merely wish to remove the "occupier" from their "home soil" — a corny rallying cry to be sure, but hackneyed enough for the cynical Europeans to accept it as a good reason to stay out of Iraq and let the Americans be smeared as imperialists for bringing democracy to the oppressed.
This is classic asymmetrical warfare, and we can handle it with the current strategies employed in such conflict. First, by training Iraqi police and militias and putting them into harm's way, Iraqis sooner or later are going to turn on those — often non-Iraqis — who kill their own. To that end, the more we can change our forces from highly observable armored divisions into lighter counterinsurgency teams, the less visible and vulnerable our own troops will be. These transformations are, at last, underway.
...
"We are winning a difficult peace. It is not surprising that we have made scores of mistakes, since nation rebuilding in the Middle East has no recent pedigree — not targeting and storming into the Sunni Triangle from the very beginning, distrusting and defaming competent and patriotic Iraqi exiles, allowing thousands to stream in from Iran, dismantling the Iraqi army and police, restraining Americans in war from harming vital infrastructure only to allow Iraqis to ruin it in peace, lax security on captured weapons caches, keeping Iraqis in the shadows while we spoke about their reform, and trying to create a political utopia when the avoidance of tyranny was our real chore. Surely someone in the administration should have been explaining to the American people daily the historical nature of our victory, the critical issues now in play worldwide, and the humane nature of our sacrifice — if only to offer some counterweight to the monotonous negativism of National Public Radio, Nightline, the New York Times, and the Democratic contenders. Instead we have had mostly silence — reticence seen not as Olympian magnanimity, but rather as a sign of weakness that only emboldened critics and fueled the hysteria.
Yet throughout this tumultuous year, what amazes is not that we made errors, or major blunders even — but how quickly we reacted, adjusted, and learned from our mistakes. So we press on, learning as we go, combining power with justice, determined to leave behind something better than we found. We are comforted by knowing that for all the current yelling from Democratic candidates, our own intelligentsia, and the European mainstream, this has not been a war of conquest or exploitation, but something altogether different — a needed effort that, if we see it through, will end up doing a great deal of good for everyone involved.
Our efforts in Iraq to remove a genocidal murderer and inaugurate democracy are not a "quagmire," but one of the brightest moments in recent American history — and we need not be ashamed to say that, again and again and again."
This is a great article. America is doing the right thing, despite the fact that doing what is good is not always easy. I can't put it better than VDH, so read the whole article, and realize that this is a great time for America, and an improving one for many in the world.
"In addition, the Baathists and Islamicists — a fraction of the Iraq population — sense that Americans despise ingratitude. They trust that at some point we will shrug and say, "If these people won't fight to protect the freedom we gave them, then screw them, bring everyone home, and let these tribal folk slaughter each other the way they have always done."
For the Islamicists' muddled vision of some theocratic caliphate run on Dark-Age principles to succeed, they must count on killing Americans and frightening Iraqis into inaction while the general quality of life erodes. Given the reputation of American largesse and know-how, our task is not simply to make Iraq no worse than it was under Saddam Hussein, but to greatly improve it, and to do so immediately. This makes things easier for the terrorists: They don't have to ruin the country, just make it chaotic enough to tarnish the image of an otherwise perfectionistic United States falling through on its promises of a better Iraq.
To this end, they ask impoverished fathers to sacrifice their children to blow up Americans. After all, for a mere life and a cheap RPG, he can do much more than take out a half-million-dollar vehicle with its degreed driver: He can send a message to the U.S., saying that killer-terrorists can be far more evil than America can be good. And while the terrorists snipe, mine, and murder, they seek an international pass as the "invaded," who merely wish to remove the "occupier" from their "home soil" — a corny rallying cry to be sure, but hackneyed enough for the cynical Europeans to accept it as a good reason to stay out of Iraq and let the Americans be smeared as imperialists for bringing democracy to the oppressed.
This is classic asymmetrical warfare, and we can handle it with the current strategies employed in such conflict. First, by training Iraqi police and militias and putting them into harm's way, Iraqis sooner or later are going to turn on those — often non-Iraqis — who kill their own. To that end, the more we can change our forces from highly observable armored divisions into lighter counterinsurgency teams, the less visible and vulnerable our own troops will be. These transformations are, at last, underway.
...
"We are winning a difficult peace. It is not surprising that we have made scores of mistakes, since nation rebuilding in the Middle East has no recent pedigree — not targeting and storming into the Sunni Triangle from the very beginning, distrusting and defaming competent and patriotic Iraqi exiles, allowing thousands to stream in from Iran, dismantling the Iraqi army and police, restraining Americans in war from harming vital infrastructure only to allow Iraqis to ruin it in peace, lax security on captured weapons caches, keeping Iraqis in the shadows while we spoke about their reform, and trying to create a political utopia when the avoidance of tyranny was our real chore. Surely someone in the administration should have been explaining to the American people daily the historical nature of our victory, the critical issues now in play worldwide, and the humane nature of our sacrifice — if only to offer some counterweight to the monotonous negativism of National Public Radio, Nightline, the New York Times, and the Democratic contenders. Instead we have had mostly silence — reticence seen not as Olympian magnanimity, but rather as a sign of weakness that only emboldened critics and fueled the hysteria.
Yet throughout this tumultuous year, what amazes is not that we made errors, or major blunders even — but how quickly we reacted, adjusted, and learned from our mistakes. So we press on, learning as we go, combining power with justice, determined to leave behind something better than we found. We are comforted by knowing that for all the current yelling from Democratic candidates, our own intelligentsia, and the European mainstream, this has not been a war of conquest or exploitation, but something altogether different — a needed effort that, if we see it through, will end up doing a great deal of good for everyone involved.
Our efforts in Iraq to remove a genocidal murderer and inaugurate democracy are not a "quagmire," but one of the brightest moments in recent American history — and we need not be ashamed to say that, again and again and again."
This is a great article. America is doing the right thing, despite the fact that doing what is good is not always easy. I can't put it better than VDH, so read the whole article, and realize that this is a great time for America, and an improving one for many in the world.
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