March 28, 2003
WHAT'S THE BAD NEWS?:
And Now, the Good News: The administration should have prepared the country better for the cost of war, but at least this war will be won, and won decisively. (Michael O'Hanlon, 3/28/03, NY Times)Last week's euphoria over a quick start to the invasion of Iraq has now been almost entirely overtaken by gloom. Pentagon officials are on the defensive when discussing their war plan; images of sandstorms and black-masked Iraqi irregulars and American prisoners of war fill TV screens here and abroad; the looming battle for Baghdad has made many feel a deep sense of foreboding.Perhaps the Bush administration deserves it. It did not begin to emphasize the potential for a difficult war until hostilities began. Pentagon advisers like Richard Perle and Kenneth Adelman have been promising a cakewalk to Baghdad for 18 months; in the late 1990's, Paul Wolfowitz, now the deputy defense secretary, argued that a small American force fighting in conjunction with the Iraqi opposition could quickly overthrow Saddam Hussein.
But despite this week's proof that war is not always easy, the invasion is not going badly.
Maybe cakewalk means something different to different people, but it seems fair to judge the current campaign against a couple of prior "cakewalks": the First Iraq War and the Afghan War. The first lasted only about thirty days and the second lasted about two months, if you consider it to have begun on 9-11. Here in the Second Iraq War we're in the second week. Certainly many of us thought that Saddam and his regime were so despised that, particularly after the decapitation strike, the Ba'athists would have trouble maintaining the regime. we underestimated how much more the benighted people of Iraq fear Saddam than just hate him. In some sense, we failed to believe our own rhetoric, failed to reckon with the willingness, even eagerness, of Saddam loyalists to kill the Iraqi people themselves if they wouldn't fight. The Ba'athists are as bad as we said, so we were wrong about how likely it was that people would or could defy them. This has indeed slowed a conflict that seemed like it could end in a week. Still, if it ends within the next two weeks or so it will surely qualify for cakewalk status, won't it? Posted by Orrin Judd at March 28, 2003 2:36 PM
This attitude, spouted by the media and accepted by people aren't paying attention, that the US is losing the war after 9 days is ridiculous. Notice that when pressed to say who in the administration said this would be a cakewalk the only qoute pointed to is Cheney's "weeks not months" qoute.
My personal expectation was about a month for Saddam to be dead or completely surrounded in Bagdad with the rest of the country liberated. So they aren't behind in my book
Let's just drop the term cakewalk, huh? It was idiotic when uttered and it is idiotic today. The war has been a rout tactically and a success strategically, but war is ultimately a political enterprise, and this kind of irresponsible complacency does no good. None.
Posted by: Paul Cella at March 28, 2003 10:53 PMPaul:
War is just another human activity, even if a brutal one, and a not uncommon state of human affairs. To speak of it only in tones of reverence is to create the environment in which it is so "significant" that we're afraid to wage it.
Let's not forget that other "cakewalks" like Grenada and Panama took several weeks, too. And Bosnia and Kosovo interventions were several months long.
This whole business may be an example of the press and pundits once again reliving the good ol' days back in the 1960s, specifically, June 1967.