Nothing has been quite as depressing as watching Washington and New
York melt down during these past two months. History in D.C. is
apparently measured by hours, not decades — and its lessons are
gleaned from last night's reruns.
Liberal pundits went ballistic over Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. Worse
still, many conservatives bailed or triangulated. Meanwhile, bin
Laden's clique talks endlessly of payback for Jerusalem, Afghanistan,
and Iraq — jettisoning the casus belli of his 1998 fatwa about U.S.
troops in Saudi Arabia and the U.N. blockade — even as our elites,
aping the Spanish, claim that only Iraq stirred up terrorism.
In somber tones newscasters assure us of all sorts of bad things to
come. But our soldiers have continued to fight in Iraq as the plans
for transition have inched forward. So let us review the conventional
ignorance and ponder what exactly is our national affliction.
No Plan? For those who think that we are either incompetent or
disingenuous in Iraq, look at Kurdistan, where seven million people
live under humane government with less than 300 American troops. How
did that happen? The people of Kurdistan are Islamic, often
quarrelsome folks — in the heart of the Middle East — now residing in
relative safety and autonomy, and expressing good will toward the
United States. They accept that we don't want Kurdish oil any more
than we want to take over the sands and slums of the Sunni Triangle.
So the problem in central Iraq is not us, but rather the fact that
unlike Kurdistan — which had a decade of transition toward consensual
society thanks to Anglo-American pilots — the country is reeling from
30 years of autocracy, in which Islamic fascism offered an alternative
of sorts to an ossified Soviet-style dictatorship.
We have always had a "plan" in Iraq — it was to leave the country
something like its northern third in Kurdistan. Precisely because it
was costly, idealistic, and dangerous, we should expect a lot of
killing and bombing in the next few months as an array of opponents
tries to derail the upcoming transition and elections. Anyone who
thinks thousands of Islamic fascists and out-of-work Baathists won't
want to stop the region's first consensual government is unhinged.
But, again, for all our mistakes of omission there was and is a plan —
and it is now slowly coming to messy fruition. Even after the spring
nightmare, we do not hear many Iraqis saying, "Leave right now and
take your stinking $87 billion with you," much less, "Give us back
Saddam" or "Quit stealing our oil for your cheap gas."
Neoconservatives? Let us be frank. This appellation is no longer a
descriptive term of so-called "new conservatives," those members of
the eastern intelligentsia who were rather liberal on some domestic
hot-button issues (tolerant of open borders, quiet about abortion,
indifferent to gay marriage, etc.), but promoted a proactive
neo-Wilsonian idealism in foreign policy (whether in the Balkans in
taking out Milosevic or in trying to replace Saddam Hussein with
democracy rather than a Shah-like proconsul).
Instead, face the ugly fact: "Neocon" is now a slur for "Jew." General
Zinni (who once boasted that 600 to 2,000 Iraqis were eliminated from
the air in his Operation Desert Fox bombing campaign) is now
ubiquitous on television hawking his new book, criticizing the war (on
Memorial Day, no less), and being praised in the Arab news as he talks
about "Perle, Wolfowitz, and Feith" and all those who purportedly got
us into Iraq.
"Cabal" and "Nazi-like" are also used by others and with increasing
frequency to promote the old idea of crafty, sneaky people pulling the
wool over honest naifs (no doubt aw-shucks, unsophisticated folks such
as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice). A shameful Senator Hollings
has no apologies for claiming that our policy was misdirected for
Israel's sake. Even a saucer-eyed Al Gore got into the spirit of
things. Recently he screamed out the names of those who must walk his
plank, and went into an exorcist-like trance when his vein-bulging,
spinning-head got to spitting out the name "Woolfwoootizzzzz."
If there was advice from a "bloc" of so-called neoconservatives, it
has not "failed," but is in fact already working even as we caricature
it: We've taken out Saddam; we are on the eve of a transition to an
autonomous reform government; and we are shooting the enemy 7,000
miles away, rather than being murdered at Ground Zero. And, by any
historical standard, we are fighting in both an economical and humane
fashion.
Israel? Most of us are tired of reading daily that Israel is making
problems for us. It is a liberal democracy and currently in the throes
of a national debate about whether to withdraw from a territory, Gaza,
from which it was attacked in three wars. Its uniformed military
targets terrorists; its main opponent's terrorists seek to kill
civilians. We should have more confidence in its free press, elected
officials, and voting citizenry to craft a humane policy — under
threat of suicide murdering, no less — than in all the corrupt and
fascistic regimes that surround it. It once took out — at great risk
to itself — Iraq's nuclear reactor; it did not sell the reactor at
great profit or take control of that country's oil.
If this caring world is worried about the injustice of a fence or
Islamaphobia, then start slurring nuclear India for its $1 billion
fence, which shuts off the entire (impoverished Muslim) country of
Bangladesh — a far harsher blow to far more millions than Israel's
so-called "Wall" aimed at stopping suicide killing.
If we hate the principle of "occupied lands," then let Europe cease
trade with China and hector that dictatorial government about the
cultural obliteration of occupied Tibet.
If we are truly worried about violence, then let the U.N. and the EU
turn their attention to Nigeria, where thousands are murdered yearly.
If the death of tens of thousands of Muslims and the desecration of
mosques bother the Arab League, then let them blast the Arabs of the
Sudan, who are systematically and in the most racist fashion
butchering black Muslims.
But if after all that we have still not gotten our bearings, then let
us rail about Sharon and the "occupation," and thus enable the Arab
world to forget its self-induced misery and find psychic reassurance,
as Europe too often has, by blaming Jews.
No al Qaeda links? Equally bothersome is the old canard, "Saddam was a
secularist and hated al Qaeda" — as though simultaneous enemies of
America have always shared the same ideology. Just ask the Japanese
and Germans, or the Chinese and Russians, who agreed to set aside
their mutual hatred to fight us for being emissaries of freedom. Under
the Clinton administration it was considered standard intelligence
dogma that Osama and Saddam worked together; only the controversy over
Iraq has post-facto questioned that former pillar of American and
European intelligence doctrine — and for entirely political reasons.
There was a reason Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas were in Baghdad. And it was
the same reason why al Qaeda was working in Kurdistan, why al Zarqawi
went to Baghdad to Saddam's doctors, why there is good reason to
believe that before the first World Trade Center bombing the culpable
terrorists had ties with Iraqi intelligence, and why seized documents
now coming to light in Iraq reveal a long history of cooperation
between Islamic terrorists and Saddam's secret police. To think
otherwise would be crazy, given the shared aims of both in attacking
Americans and getting them out of the Middle East. The only puzzle is
whether Saddam contributed to the 9/11 terrorist fund or simply was
apprised of al Qaeda's general efforts.
Our Real Dilemma. We do have a grave problem in this country, but it
is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam.
Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have
made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the
advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the
Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman
tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General
Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis
prisoners.
We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious
moralizing, and in our self-absorption may well lose what we inherited
from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges
itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our
behalf in pretty horrible places.
Judging from our newspapers, we seem to care little about the soldiers
while they are alive and fighting, but we suddenly put their names on
our screens and speak up when a dozen err or die. And, in the latter
case, our concern is not out of respect for their sacrifice but more
likely a protest against what we don't like done in our name. So ABC's
Nightline reads the names of the fallen from Iraq, but not those from
the less controversial Afghanistan, because ideological purity — not
remembering the departed per se — is once again the real aim.
Our very success after September 11 — perhaps because of the Patriot
Act, the vigilance of domestic-security agencies, and the global reach
of our military — has prevented another catastrophe of mass murder,
but also allowed us to become complacent, and thus once more cynical
and near suicidal. We can afford to be hypercritical and so groan at a
Rudolph Giuliani at the 9/11 hearings only because brave men and women
prevented more suicide bombings. We caricature our efforts in Iraq and
demonize a good man like Paul Wolfowitz, even as a courageous and
competent military took out Saddam in three weeks — and, in far less
than the time that the occupations took in Germany and Japan (likewise
both written off as failures of the times) allowed an autonomous and
soon-to-be-elected government to take over.
Partisanship about the war earlier on established the present sad
paradox of election-year politicking: Good news from Iraq is seen as
bad news for John Kerry, and vice versa. If that seems too harsh a
judgment, we should ask whether Terry McAuliffe would prefer, as would
the American people, Osama bin Laden captured in June, more
sarin-laced artillery shells found in July, al-Zarqawi killed in
August, al-Sadr tried and convicted by Iraqi courts in September, an
October sense of security and calm in Baghdad, and Syria pulling a
Libya in November.
These depressing times really are much like the late 1960s, when only
a few dared to plead that Hue and Tet were not abject defeats, but
rare examples of American courage and skill. But now as then, the
louder voice of defeatism smothers all reason, all perspective, all
sense of balance — and so the war is not assessed in terms of five
years but rather by the last five hours of ignorant punditry. Shame on
us all.
Historic forces of the ages are in play. If we can just keep our
sanity a while longer, accept our undeniable mistakes, learn from
them, and press on, Iraq really will emerge as the constitutional
antithesis of Saddam Hussein, and that will be a good and noble thing
— impossible without America and its most amazing military. -- Victor
David HANSON
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