Victor David Hanson on Staying Power
This article by Victor Davis Hanson may have lost some of its relevance as conditions in Iraq continue to improve, but its rhetorical strengths and prescient nature have only been heightened. The following excerpt is particularly well done.
With elections and freedom accorded to the Shia and the Kurds, we must renew, not disavow, our efforts to help democratize the Middle East. Few here or abroad appreciate the implications of making a Kurd or a Shia equal to a Sunni. We are witnessing a monumental U.S. commitment to the perennial underclass of the Middle East, and such idealism should be appreciated for what it is–one of the most radical social and cultural upheavals since the American-sponsored emancipation of women in postwar Japan or our own civil rights movement of the 1960s.
We must cease to envision Iraq as an amazing three-week victory that has a thousand fathers, followed by an orphaned and messy reconstruction, as once-zealous hawks have bailed from the enterprise with the easy excuse that the lapses of Donald Rumsfeld, L. Paul Bremer, or “the Pentagon” mean that Iraqi democracy no longer warrants their principled support–as if victory in war were not always a matter of those who make the fewest errors rather than no errors at all. The truth is–and always was–that the war against Saddam and the ensuing efforts to rid Iraq of Baathists and Islamists exist on a continuum and must be seen in a larger historical context of defeating a fascist government, occupying a country of 26 million in the heart of the ancient caliphate, and then fostering democratic government where it has no history.
The loss so far of more than 1,100 combat dead is tragic, but, by historical standards of comparable operations, the U.S. achievement has been nothing short of miraculous. Our aggregate combat fatalities after 22 months in Iraq were often exceeded in single months during the Vietnam war or a single day at Normandy, in the Bulge–or on September 11. Such reckoning may seem callous, but it is the terrible arithmetic of war–and the United States should not delude itself: This is a real war.
TNR more recently published a compelling article by Lawrence Kaplan exploring why the MSM has been so reticent to note the positive trend in Iraq. His pronosis: The US military has cried “progress” too many times, and now the press has a suspicion of any good news, even when it’s accurate. The bullshit detector has jammed.
Dedication to the mission, career advancement, an impulse to spin–whatever the motive, the public face of the U.S. mission in Iraq has been so disconnected from reality for so long that were its assessments eventually to jibe with the whole truth, it would have no more persuasive power than the boy who cried wolf. For if the Baghdad press corps has a bias, it is a bias against bullshit.
The catch is, in touting Iraq’s post-election successes, U.S. officials have been telling the truth. What worries me is that, unlike in Vietnam, where the press only broke with official policy after the Tet Offensive, the reverse may have happened in Iraq–that is, reporters have become so accustomed to bad news that they won’t accept, and hence convey, good news for what it is.