QandO

June 01, 2004

Then and Now
Posted by Dale Franks

E.J. Dionne writes that the War in Iraq is undermining George W. Bush's presidency, because things aren't going swimmingly.

The beginnings of a conservative crackup under this President Bush flow directly from the perceived failures of his policies in Iraq. Whatever one's view of the war, things are not going as promised, or as hoped for. Bush dominated politics in the months after Sept. 11. Almost everything he said or did then was seen as a sign of strength and fortitude. Now when he does the same things, they are seen as signs of stubbornness and a lack of reflection. The line between the virtues and the flaws is slim, and decisive.

Yesterday evening I watched the excellent A&E movie, IKE: Countdown to D-Day, and it's prompted a lot of reflection about the differences between the world of 1944 and 2004.

Part of the problem is the management of expectations. In 1944, we had pretty low expectations. We knew invading Europe would be a hard, dirty, deadly business, and had no illusions about the difficulties or the death toll. Of course, by then, we'd been fighting for two years, and any expectations about an easy victory had been washed away.

Air Marshal Trevor Leigh-Mallory told Eisenhower that the airborne troops assigned to the D-Day invasion would face 70% casualties. And yet, Eisenhower ordered the drop anyway, because Omar Bradley argued that, without airborne drops to divert German attention from the beaches, his men lives would be harvested like wheat when they hit the beaches.

By contrast, in Iraq, too many people were, I think, too prone to easy assumptions about our military superiority. Yes, we have an extraordinarily powerful military force. Yes, we can destroy any opposition that is foolish enough to rear its head, even fighting with one hand tied behind our back in order to alleviate humanitarian concerns.

But, as I've mentioned before, Clausewitz wrote that, while prosecuting a war is a succession of simple tasks, the simplest of tasks on the battlefield is extraordinarily hard. There is a reason why no battle plan survives contact with the enemy: The enemy is composed of rational, thinking humans who are doing everything in their power to derail your plans.

In point of fact, much of the pre-war and mid-war nay-saying was pure foolishness. We did, in fact, completely overrun the country in a few weeks. There were no chemical attacks. No death-or-glory suicide charges. The enemy fought minimally, and slipped away as quickly as they could. Many Iraqis welcomed us a liberators, especially in the north, but in the south as well.

Most of our trouble since has come from either Sunnis who fear the loss of political control they've exercised over the majority of the population for decades, al-Qaidist terrorists from various countries in the region, or religious extremists among the Shia, often propped up by Iranian agents. Quelling that kind of insurgency was never going to be easy, and I don't know of anyone, from George W. Bush on down, who didn't say that publicly and often after the initial military operations were successfully concluded. Indeed, W's "Mission Accomplished" speech on the deck of the aircraft carrier made it explicitly clear that the post-war situation in Iraq would be even more difficult in many ways, than the invasion itself. It is pure revisionism to suggest otherwise.

But we seem to have an aversion to casualties that the America of 1944 had largely gotten over. Now, many of us seem to want a president who grieves over each casualty individually, attends his funeral and says the requisite, I-feel-your-pain-isms. We want our victories to be quick, bloodless, and uncontested, and if they aren't we are aflame with criticisms for the president who's bought this disaster down on all of our heads.

"He should've known," we lament, "that this would be all hard and stuff!" But, he did know. He stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and said,

We have difficult work to do in Iraq. We're bringing order to parts of that country that remain dangerous. We're pursuing and finding leaders of the old regime who will be held to account for their crimes. We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated.

We are helping to rebuild Iraq where the dictator built palaces for himself instead of hospitals and schools.

And we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by and for the Iraqi people.

The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done and then we will leave and we will leave behind a free Iraq.

Evidently, what we heard was, "It's all over but the shouting."

This is not to say that the Administration hasn't made errors in Iraq, or even to argue that those errors haven't cost precious lives and treasure. And, it hasn't stopped me from being pretty vocal about them, either. Unfortunately, in the world in which we live, mistakes are inevitable, and so are the casualties that flow from them. Wishing it otherwise is utopian and, ultimately, foolish. The key is not to avoid mistakes, but to learn from them, and avoid repeating them.

A great part of the expectations problem is the nature of the modern press, as well as the 24-hour news cycle.

First, the press seems to find it difficult to present issues with all the nuance they deserve. It's punchier, and easier to understand, when every story can be presented as a type of morality play, with each side's positions simplified, with clear good guys and bad guys. "President Bush Declares Victory" is opposed with "Howard Dean Declares Vietnam Quagmire". It's much easier to present that way, but it's lazy, especially when the actual truth sits somewhere in between the two headlines. Ted Koppel wants a debate about religion and society, so the two guests are the wacky Rev. Jerry Falwell--who believes that the Constitution encourages the government to build public altars for use in prayer and fasting--as the representative of religion, and über-crank Rev. Barry Lynn—who believes that any mention of the word "God" by any public official, even as an expletive, heralds the return of the bastinado and the rack—as the representative of secularism. Let the debate begin.

Meanwhile, a good 50% of us sit somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, and wish emerods on both their houses. But conflict makes for good TV. As to whether it makes for good news, well, that's another question.

And the news cycle, itself, now expanded to 24/7 coverage of everything, has it's own pernicious influence.

One of the great services that General George C. Marshall did for the United States in the late 1930's was to purge the Army's officer corps of its old-school deadweight. Marshal ruthlessly forced long-serving officers into retirement, and showered their juniors with stars, all in preparation for the coming war with Germany and Japan. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in many ways, by the end of 1940, George C. Marshall had won World War II, by giving us the commanders we would need to crush Japanese and German militarism for generations.

But, if there had been a 24-hour news cycle back then, with the insatiable need to fill every minute of everyday with something—anything!—one wonders how many of these retired generals would have found themselves on a 1940s version of CNN as "respected military analysts"?

And, oh the criticisms they could've made!

1942: FDR's administration was criminally negligent for allowing the attack on Pearl Harbor. The loss of the Philippines would spell doom for any attempt to project American power into the Western Pacific. Guadalcanal, a pointless waste of fine young marines.

1943: Kasserine Pass: a complete disaster; tough, hard, sharp German boys kicking our butts, mainly because our training was indifferent and soft. Too much reliance on our weak British allies, who were fooled by the public image of their hero, Montgomery, who was, in fact, barely competent. Why, his lack of dash and vigor in Sicily was proof! Anzio, a complete disaster, traceable directly to Eisenhower's lack of experience as a field commander. Island-hopping was just an invitation to the Japanese to exploit weakness in our rear areas with all the highly trained combat troops we were leaving there.

1944: Putting Sherman tanks on the beach to face the awesome might of the German Tiger was sheer madness; easier just to shoot the men before they got aboard their landing craft. A broad front strategy would work to slowly, and give the Germans too many chances to regroup, refit, and respond.

It would have been unending. It would have been the considered opinion of life-long military professionals. And it would have been sheer sound and fury, signifying nothing. But it's a sure bet that it would've had a pretty noticeable effect on civilian morale, and not a good one, either.

The trouble with all the above is that there's nothing we can really do to change the nature of things. The world is the way it is, and we have to accept that. The people in the 24-hour news business, and media in general, have to respond to their peculiar pressures, or face bankruptcy.

What that means, though, is that all of us have to gain an appropriate sense of perspective, and do are best to see things as they are, not as we would wish them to be, or as the simple morality plays that they are presented as by the press.

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