Sunday, March 14, 2004
Victor Davis Hanson on Iraq
Victor Davis Hanson on Iraq
VDH in all his glory as usual; read the whole thing.
"The danger of promulgating the old mistruths about sacrificing blood for oil, reviving colonialism, and suggesting the operation in Iraq has led to disaster are manifold. First, ever-so-steadily, such invective wears away support for an action that, by any historical yardstick, was as successful as it was noble. The only peril to the United States in Iraq would be a unilateral withdrawal before stability and constitutional government are achieved. And the only chance of that disaster happening would arise from our own continual harping that wears down the will of the American people — and those asked to fight for us in the field.
The other worry is that there were, in fact, real concerns about the entire campaign that have scarcely been addressed. While the media hold conferences on university campuses about the morality of using embedded reporters, they have simply refused to discuss the real ethical crisis of the reporting of the war: that dozens of Western journalists sent censored news accounts from Baghdad in the months preceding the conflict and in fact during the actual fighting. Unbeknownst to us, their dispatches always were monitored carefully by "minders" and transmitted only through pay-offs and blackmail. None of this was known at the time — leading to the absurdity that on the day Baghdad fell journalists suddenly came clean over uncensored mikes, as if to say, "Oh, by the way, everything I sent out to you the last two months was sort of censored by the Iraqi Ministry of Information."
So here we are a year later. We fuss about the WMD "myth"; enemies scramble over its reality. We talk of our theft of third-world resources — and pay more for gas than ever before while the price of Iraq's national treasure soars. We worry that we are too involved abroad; those in Europe, Afghanistan, and Iraq claim there are not enough of us over there. And we scream at each other that we are not liked, even as those overseas express new respect for us.
No wonder, when asked for specific follow-ups about his general criticisms of the Iraqi war in a recent Time magazine interview, a resolute Kerry variously prevaricated, "I didn't say that," "I can't tell you," "It's possible," "It's not a certainty," "If I had known," "No, I think you can still — wait, no. You can't — that's not a fair question and I'll tell you why," — employing the entire idiom and vocabulary of those who are angry about Bush's removal of Saddam, but neither know quite why nor what they would do differently."
VDH in all his glory as usual; read the whole thing.
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