About this time 60 years ago, six weeks after the Normandy beach
landings, Americans were dying in droves in France. We think of the
76-day Normandy campaign of summer and autumn 1944 as an astounding
American success ? and indeed it was, as Anglo-American forces cleared
much of France of its Nazi occupiers in less than three months. But
the outcome was not at all preordained, and more often was the stuff
of great tragedy. Blunders were daily occurrences ? resulting in 2,500
Allied casualties a day. In any average three-day period, more were
killed, wounded, or missing than there have been in over a year in
Iraq.

Pre-invasion intelligence ? despite ULTRA and a variety of brilliant
analysts who had done so well to facilitate our amphibious landings ?
had no idea of what war in the hedgerows would be like. How can you
spend months spying out everything from beach sand to tidal currents
and not invest a second into investigating the nature of the tank
terrain a few miles from the beach? The horrific result was that the
Allies were utterly unprepared for the disaster to come ? and died by
the thousands in the bocage of June and July.

Everything went wrong in the days after June 6, and 60 years later the
carnage should still make us weep. The army soon learned that their
light Sherman tanks were no match for Nazi Panthers and Tigers.
Hundreds of their "Ronson-lighters" ? crews and all ? went up in
smoke. Indeed, 60 percent of all lost Shermans were torched by single
shots from enemy Panzers. In contrast, only one in three of the
Americans' salvos even penetrated German armor.

Prewar America had the know-how to build big, well-armored tanks, with
diesel engines, wide tracks, and low silhouettes. Yet General George
Marshall had deliberately chosen lighter, cheaper designs ? the idea
being that thousands of mass-produced, easily maintained 32-ton
Shermans could run over enemy infantry before encountering a rarer,
superior 43-ton Panther or 56-ton Tiger. Should he have been removed
for such naiveté, which led to thousands of American dead? Whom to
blame?

Similar blunders ensured that Americans had inferior anti-tank
weapons, machine guns, and mortars when they met the seasoned
Wehrmacht. On the Normandy battlefield itself, on at least three
occasions, faulty communications, tactical breakdowns, bad
intelligence, and simple operational laxity resulted in Americans
blown apart by their own heavy bombers as they were trying to
facilitate breakouts. Almost as many Allied soldiers were casualties
in a collective few hours of misplaced bombing than all those killed
so far in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Generals Eisenhower and Bradley probably miscalculated German
intentions at Argentan, and thus allowed thousands of veteran Germans
to escape the Falaise Gap in August. Tens of thousands of these
reprieved Panzers would regroup to kill thousands more Americans later
that year. Whom to blame?

The subsequent Battle of the Bulge was a result of a colossal American
intelligence failure. Somehow 250,000 Nazis, right under the noses of
the Americans, were able to mount a counteroffensive with absolute
surprise. For all of our own failure to account for the missing WMD,
so far an enemy army of 250,000 has not, as it once did in December
1945, assembled unnoticed a few miles from our theater base camps.
Whom to blame?

We know about the horrific German massacres of American prisoners, but
little about instances of Americans' shooting German captives well
before the Battle of the Bulge. Such murdering was neither sanctioned
by American generals nor routine ? but nevertheless it was not
uncommon in the heat of battle and the stress of war. No inquiry cited
Generals Hodges, Patton, or Bradley as responsible for rogue soldiers
shooting unarmed prisoners. Whom to blame?

The catastrophes did not end after the Normandy campaign. More
Americans were killed between December 1944 and January 1945 ? when we
wrongly pushed back the bulge by confronting it head-on rather than
slicing it off far to its rear ? than all those lost previously in the
months since the D-Day landings. Germans had heavy overcoats and white
camouflage; GIs froze and were easy targets in the snow with their
dark uniforms. Whom to blame?

I could go on, but the point is clear. War is a horrendous experience
in which the side that wins commits the fewest mistakes, rather than
no errors at all.

In the short period between June and August 1944, military historians
can adduce hundreds of examples of American amateurism, failed
intelligence, incompetent logistics, and strategic blundering ? but
not enough of such errors to nullify the central truth of the Normandy
invasion. A free people and its amazing citizen army liberated France
and went on in less than a year to destroy veteran Nazi forces in the
West, and to occupy Germany to end the war. Good historians, then,
keep such larger issues in mind, even as they second-guess and quibble
with the tactical and strategic pulse of the battlefield.

We should do the same. Errors were committed in the Iraqi campaign as
they always are in war and its aftermath. Saddam didn't use WMDs as we
had expected ? neither did Hitler, and as a result thousands of GIs
carried bothersome and superfluous gas masks across France and Germany
for nearly a year.

We should probably have shot the looters who wrecked Iraq and smashed
thugs like those in Fallujah last spring, when they were still in
their vulnerable chrysalis stages. Iraqis should have been far more
prominent in governance and on television almost immediately. Aid was
tied up and delayed ? as postwar goodwill ebbed away in the heat. All
this and more we now know from hindsight, even as we suspect that had
we sent 400,000 troops, shot looters, blasted the killers in Fallujah,
properly patrolled the borders, and kept the Baathist army intact, the
New York Times would now be railing even more vehemently against U.S.
overkill, brutality, puppet governments, and security at the expense
of social justice.

It becomes clear that our lapses could have been much greater if one
studies the blunders of Eisenhower, Bradley, and Montgomery in 1944,
not to mention the hare-brained ideas of great men like Churchill and
Roosevelt ? from being surprised at Pearl Harbor, Singapore, and the
Philippines, to losing 50,000 casualties at Okinawa 90 days before the
Japanese surrender, to allowing all of Eastern Europe to fall to the
Communists. Yalta's terrible miscalculations make the present
administration's foreign-policy slips seem minor in comparison.

But if in our war we look at the larger picture, we likewise come away
with a different verdict from the one those details might lead us to.
For all our Normandy-like mistakes, we are left with one truth that
won't go away: A fascist, terrorist government is gone and something
better is in its place, with a chance that it just might help alter
the landscape of the region. Iraq was not Sicily, 415 B.C., when a
democracy attacked an even larger democracy; this was not a
19th-century colonial march to steal resources; and this was not a
Cold War coup to put in an anti-Communist thug.

Like Hitler, Saddam Hussein was a mass-murdering fascist, whom we had
also appeased for years. For all his bluster, Hitler had not been in a
prior shooting war with the United States, but after Pearl Harbor he
had to be destroyed. In the same manner, after 9/11 there was no
longer any margin of error in "boxing in" a rogue dictator that had
struck four nations, violated most of the 1991 armistice agreements,
ignored over a dozen U.N. resolutions, butchered tens of thousands,
ruined the environment of Mesopotamia, constantly tried to recycle
petrodollars to terrorists, attempted to assassinate a sitting U.S.
president, and was in a stand-off with the U.S. Air Force involving 12
years, 350,000 sorties, and the control of two-thirds of Iraqi air
space. Indeed, on September 11, 2001, American military forces were
being fired on and firing back at the forces of just one nation in the
world: Baathist Iraq.

Given that there were many valid reasons to remove Saddam in a post
9/11 climate, we can lament that the administration privileged the
casus belli of worries over WMDs, which proved to be based on flawed
intelligence ? a shortcoming that the United States in wartime has
often experienced. As far as the war itself, we removed Saddam from
power in three weeks under impossible conditions of driving nearly 400
miles from a single small front without tactical surprise. We have
paid a steep price for the reconstruction ? perhaps 900 combat dead,
tragically. Yet due to our soldiers' courage and sacrifice, after
little more than a year there is the beginning of the first consensual
government in the Arab Middle East, and elections are slated on a
schedule far ahead of our efforts after World War II. Just as the
liberation of France and the final defeat in Germany overshadowed the
horror and stupidity of the war on the ground in 1944, so too, when
all is said and done, the fact of a free Iraq ? not the hysteria about
Abu Ghraib, Joe Wilson, or Richard Clarke ? will remain.

In contrast to all this, John Edwards says that Americans have died
"needlessly" in Iraq, although he does not tell us why he voted for
the war, or whether he would now change his vote had he known
beforehand that CIA estimates of Iraqi WMD seem to have been in error.
Yet this same John Edwards once thundered: "The path of confronting
Saddam is full of hazards. But the path of inaction is far more
dangerous."

For all their triangulation, deep down inside both he and John Kerry
are not foolish. They don't want a post-9/11 world with Saddam's
petro-tyranny intact, more wounded al Qaedists seeking refuge in
Baghdad, an unimpressed Qaddafi back to his terrorist machinations,
Dr. Kahn franchising his nuke-mart, or the Saudi royal family fueling
fundamentalist killers even as 10,000 Americans are on its soil.

In other words, Kerry and Edwards sense that Iraq has had some strange
? but as yet not fully understood ? positive effects that are just
beginning to ripple out. Are Middle Eastern autocracies and monarchies
such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia talking more or less about
democratic reform after Saddam's removal? Are rogue regimes such as
Iran and Syria now more or less worried about scrutiny of their
terrorist subsidies?

With extremists like Michael Moore and ANSWER breathing down their
necks, Kerry and Edwards cannot accept history's tragic verdict that
there are terrible costs to pay in any necessary war. Yet they also
don't know what else could or should have been done to get us where we
are now.

And so otherwise savvy politicos talk mindlessly of allies, the U.N.,
and multilateralism ? nice, fuzzy ideas that did nothing to stop the
horror in the Balkans or Rwanda, and will do nothing either to prevent
it in the Sudan ? but never of getting out of Iraq now or lamenting
their votes that helped get us in.

So, yes, they talk around the edges ? nuancing this, quibbling with
that ? as they search for an edge in an election year. So does Bill
Clinton as he attempts to rewrite history and airbrush his past
appeasement of terrorists. And so do we all as we pretend that the
real danger is the Patriot Act, not cold-blooded killers from the
Middle East, or that our rudeness needlessly offended true friends
like France.

We talk the easy talk, but history, I think, is not listening.

-- VICTOR DAVID HANSON --

http://tinyurl.com/5yhjm