April 1, 2003
WELCOME TO THE STRAW MAN CONVENTION.
The War and the Peace; The Pentagon's dubious plans (Robert Wright, Slate).[A]s the war drags on, any stifled sympathy for the American invasion will tend to evaporate. As more civilians die and more Iraqis see their "resistance" hailed across the Arab world as a watershed in the struggle against Western imperialism, the traditionally despised Saddam could gain appreciable support among his people. So, the Pentagon's failure to send enough troops to take Baghdad fairly quickly could complicate the postwar occupation, to say nothing of the war itself. The Bush administration's prewar expectation of broad Iraqi support for the invasion may turn out to be a self-defeating prophecy.Robert Wright has written a lot of junk for Slate -- all of it, by some strange coincidence, belittling the Bush administration -- but this is easily one of the most disingenous pieces I have ever read. In a portion I haven't quoted, he rips a Don Rumsfeld quote supporting Tommy Franks out of context and uses it to suggest that Rumsfeld is hanging Gen. Franks out to dry. As near as I can tell, Wright's only point in this piece is how much smarter he is than anyone currently working for the government, which is a recurring theme in his writing.
There's a deeper sense in which the early difficulty of the war bodes ill for the ensuing peace—by casting massive doubt on the credibility of some architects of that peace. It seems clearer and clearer that a key driving force behind this war is a neoconservative plan to transform the entire Middle East—a reverse domino theory in which regime change in Iraq triggers regime change, and ultimately democratization, across the region. As Joshua Marshall recently noted in the Washington Monthly, this plan is mega-ambitious and very risky. Its success depends on lots of variables falling the right way. We can only hope that the people who hatched this idea and sold it to President Bush have due respect for contingency and aren't prone to wishful thinking. . . .
In retrospect, there were good reasons to doubt that this war would go as smoothly as other American wars of the past 13 years. For example: Unlike them, this is a war in which we both a) are fighting people in their homeland, not just kicking them out of someone else's; and b) have no major, organized indigenous ground force to help us do the dirty work. But, once the geopolitics of the situation had convinced me that any essentially unilateral war would be a mistake, I didn't reflect long and hard on exactly how messy (and thus exactly how bad an idea) such a war would be.
Also, I made the mistake of putting some trust in talking heads—all those can-do TV military analysts, and even people like Wolfowitz and Perle. I had always assumed that the administration's hawks do understand war, even if they don't understand geopolitics. Turns out I was only half right.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about.
This piece is an almost perfect example of how the bitter left has decided to deal with the war. Scared to death that a successful war will cement W's second term in place, they have decided to reverse the old trope about Vietnam: they have decided to declare defeat and go home. The left is in the process of gathering together an entire slate of strawmen so that no matter what happens in the war, they can argue that it is a failure.
So, the war, now in its twelfth day, is "dragging on." It is not as successful as, well, Gulf War I, Panama, Kosovo and Afghanistan, although none of those were over in anything like twelve days. The administration promised that it would be over before it began with our soldiers ambling to Baghdad on flowers strewn in the road by happy Iraqi peasants. The refusal of the regime to collapse at once and completely demonstrates our utter failure. It is not ambitious to try to overthrow a brutal tyranny in a country the size of California; it is unexpectedly difficult because we didn't realize what we were doing. The administration is scrambling for cover, unable to manage either war or peace and deserting the ship like the rats they are. The professional military, for which the left now has a newborn respect, has known all along how foolhardy this is, but has been ignored by the mad, incompetent, bloodthirsty, likudnik neocon hawks.
This trope has been seen in Senator Daschle's remarks. It owns Slate. The Washington Post's recent article on divisions amongst the President's advisers is a good example (although reading carefully, one set of "advisers" isn't actually advising the President, but thinks they should be). NPR can't play its funereal "war theme" without boosting this idea of a glorious little war in disarray. Coverage of international opinion, the anti-war protests, the tax-cut and the economy always includes this idea. Peter Arnett sacrificed his television career to make this argument on Iraqi tv. Wright even suggests that the power of this criticism is making the administration rush the attack on Baghdad, at the projected cost of many innocent lives.
This is, of course, pure nonsense. They know as little as I know about what's happening in Iraq and what's about to happen in Iraq. They know as little as I do about what the war plan is. It certainly seems likely to me that the Army and Marines always intended to set up camp 50 miles outside of Baghdad, allowing the Air Force and Navy to concentrate their bombing on a relatively small area, but no one outside of the planners knows for sure.
More to the point, the left has tried this tactic before and it always fails. Remember the Democrat's attempts to convince us that the 80's were, in fact, a time of terrible suffering and Potemkin prosperity? That didn't get Mondale or Dukakis very far. If the war continues as successfully as it has begun, no amount of carping by Wright, et al., will make the slightest difference. The American people know success when they have it.
More: Democrat Calls for End to War in Speech (AP, April 1, 2003)
Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich took his anti-war campaign to the House floor Tuesday . . . . "This war has been advanced on lie upon lie," he said. "Iraq was not responsible for 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for any role al-Qaida may have had in 9/11. Iraq was not responsible for the anthrax attacks on this country."Passing swiftly over the fact that the President has never made any of those claims, how exactly does Kucinich know that these are "lies." Did his good friend Saddam tell him? Posted by David Cohen at April 1, 2003 4:40 PM
Here's the part I like "the traditionally despised Saddam could gain appreciable support among his people". Sure, he tossed my father in a shredder, but now I'm for him. There's a real contempt for the Iraqi people on display in the Left's assumption that they hate us more than him.
Posted by: oj at April 1, 2003 5:18 PMMy vistas may be limited, but the 'unexpectedly tough resistance' angle seems to have peaked and is now rapidly declining in press accounts....
Posted by: Bruce Cleaver at April 1, 2003 6:02 PMThe dissolution of the northern front, while
it possibly makes sense in a military way,
did make it rather harder for the numbskulls
to keep talking about "fierce resistance."
They have adopted, instead, the notion that
supply lines from Kuwait are insecure,
although the interdiction the Iraqis have
achieved is just about zero.
Someday, Johnny's gonna come marching
home, whole and hearty and truculent.
The war drags on? Tell that to the troops who are moving like hell against Baghdad right now -- not exactly dragging.
Posted by: Melissa at April 2, 2003 1:30 AMOne knows bloody well just what the agenda of that part of the media (and citizenry) that is anti-war and pro-peace.
I realize it's sometimes necessary to vent, but wasting one's breath and feeling self-righteous about their systematic lying and monumental delusions is useless (and quite possibly counter productive).
These people are going to look for all kinds of ways to discredit this campaign. And they're going to find some things that didn't go exact right or "to plan"; and if they don't find anything, they're going to invent it. In spadefuls.
The only possible response is to show (not tell) these people that they're utterly wrong. And even then, many of them will refuse to see it (though one hopes that the more decent will see the light).
Those with eyes to see will, I hope, enjoy a stronger, more patient resolve and a clearer view of how things really are.
It isn't over yet; and there's plenty rooting for utter disaster to overtake the US/UK/Aussie/et al. coalition.
Let's hope that the swamp is drained quickly with maximum, lasting effect and that our men and women come home safe.
I used to like some of what Robert Wright used to write before 9/11. However, his assessment of the terror war has been pretty bad.
He, and many others, consistently overestimate the resolve of the terrorists and those who sympathize with Bin Laden. There are actually very few fanatics out there in the sense of willing to die for a hopeless cause. Near the end of WWII, many feared that fanatical Nazis would hold up in an Alpine "Redoubt" to harass the Allies even after Hitler died and the regular army surrendered.
Didn't happen.
Once people know they have lost, they tend to give up. The reason the Palestinians are willing to kill themselves in homicide bombings is because they think it'll win them the war.
Bush's resolution in Iraq is sending a clear message that we will destroy Saddam no matter what. He is denying them the hope that a prolonged war will mean Saddam's survival. People may be willing to die for a cause that still has a chance to win. Few would do so for a cause already lost.
Bin Laden didn't recruit his network on the basis that his war against America would lead to his followers' death in some nameless cave, but that they'd be great heroes who could defeat a weak-willed power.
I remember the jubilation of the Arab street during the 9/11 attacks. I don't see many victory celebrations now. The most they can hope is that continued sniping on us will lower morale enough so they win by politics what they can't achieve on the battlefield. The one great thing about the President is that he doesn't allow that option to succeed by equivocating. I wish more politicians had that spine.
How much political leverage we get out of Iraq will depend on how well we run the country once the war ends, the success of the Iraqi provisional government to restore order and hope, and the withdraw of obvious signs of US occupation that would be propaganda fodder for Bin Laden. If the President screws it up, the war will not be the critical success it could be, maybe only a draw. If he handles it right, it will be a great victory.