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May 21, 2004
Not as bad as it seems
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Victor Davis Hanson urges us to keep a sense of perspective in Iraq, and not to forget that there's good news, along with the bad the media keeps constantly hammering on.  Yet there are historical forces still in play that bode well for Iraq — aid pouring in, oil revenues increasing, Iraqi autonomy nearing, and radical terrorists failing to win public support — all of which we are ignoring amid the successive 24-hour media barrages. The combat deaths of 700 soldiers are tragic. We in our postwar confusion have also made a number of mistakes: not storming into the Sunni Triangle at war's end, not shooting the first 500 looters that started the mass rampage of theft, not keeping some of the Iraqi army units intact, not bulldozing down Saddam Hussein's notorious prisons, not immediately putting at war's end Iraqi officials into the public arena, not storming Fallujah, and not destroying al Sadr and his militias last spring.
Still, in just a year the worst mass murderer in recent history is gone and a consensual government is scheduled to assume power in his place in just a few weeks. Postwar Iraq is not a cratered Dresden or the rubble of Stalingrad — it is seeing power, water, and fuel production at or above prewar levels. For all the recent mishaps, two truths still remain about Iraq — each time the American military forcibly takes on the insurrectionists, it wins; and each time local elections are held, moderate Iraqis, not Islamic radicals, have won.
So let us calm down and let events play out. If it were not an election year, Mr. Kennedy would dare not say such reprehensible things. In two or three months when there is a legitimate Iraqi government in power, Mr. Friedman may not wish to level such absurd charges. And when the truth comes out about the U.N.'s past role in Iraq, both Iraqis and Americans may not be so ready to entrust the new democracy's future to an agency that has not only done little to save Bosnians or Rwandans, but over the past decade may well have done much to harm Iraqis.
We've had a tough April and May over there. That doesn't mean we're losing, any more than Kasserine Pass meant the Germans were winning in '42.
As Hanson points out, Mistakes Have Been Made. But, they always are in wartime. As Clausewitz pointed out, in war, all you have to do is a series of simple tasks, but doing the simplest task is extraordinarily hard. And, you always have an enemy whose trying to frustrate your intentions, and impose his own intentions upon you.
As a result, bad things happen, and they can be disheartening. It's OK to point out mistakes, and try to find things you can do better. That's helpful. But, going all Andrew Sullivan when the road gets a little bumpy isn't.
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