On Hanson’s 10/08/04 National Review Online column, Sizing Up Iraq

On Victor Davis Hanson’s October 08, 2004 column in National Review Online, Sizing Up Iraq
by Philip F. Rose
[This was submitted to National Review as a letter to the editor, but I haven't noticed they ever publish letters from non-conservatives, only praise and minor squabbling, so I'm more than doubtful they will publish it.]
Hanson’s analysis, based he says on “constants across 2,500 years of time and space that presage victory or defeat” leaves out one rather significant area: Is it right for us to be there? Is it moral? Ethical? Worthy and obtaining of respect in the world? I realize it was not his task to answer this question, but I find it immoral in itself to ask only whether we can win without asking whether we have a moral leg to stand on as we shoot up a foreign country.
To the question of whether we can win, Hanson is not very reassuring. The analysis is laden with seems to bes and so fars? He says, “There is as yet no mass movement analogous to the Vietcong.” As yet?
He says, “Unlike the case of South Vietnam, the provisional democratic government is not flanked by a hostile nuclear China or Soviet Union.” This is true; neither China nor the now-nonexistent Soviet Union border Iraq. A hostile nuclear Iran does.
Hanson’s dismissals of Kerry’s chance to do better are without merit. He says Kerry’s attempts to map another course have been met with “polite chuckles”. Who’s chuckling? Hanson? His fellow neoconservative armchair generals? I haven’t heard any. Hanson suggests Kerry’s assertion we’re overextended with Iraq and Afghanistan is naive, considering we once battled Japan, Germany and Italy at the same time. This is either partisan spin or a nonsensical linking of history to present. In WWII, we had near-unanimous public support for doing whatever was necessary — people accepted rations, a draft, losing friends and family; we stopped whole industries and devoted them to the war effort for years. Oh, and we had more than one significant ally. Iraq is clearly more like our Vietnam or Russia’s Afghanistan. It doesn’t have to end as badly, but to tie it to glorious world wars that united the nation is silly.
Hanson says Bush’s errors derive from being too timid, for fear of public disapproval. Perhaps launching a full-on assault when inspectors said they needed just a few more months was too timid? Perhaps lying to the American public about WMDs — the label itself a deliberate deception to equate in the public’s minds crude chemical weapons with nuclear missiles — wasn’t bold enough? And now? I’m sure we could do better if we killed more civilians. Is that what Hanson is proposing? Most unequivocally: “that means suffering the 48-hour hysteria of the global media about collateral damage in exchange for killing the terrorists.” So, if the world is upset over America killing hundreds or thousands of civilians, then they’re being hysterical? Those pesky Europeans with their values and stuff.
He suggests we can discourage an Islamist government from kicking us out and taking the country backwards by a) pulling the relief aid, and b) threatening future military force if they step out of line. Gee, that sounds constructive. If they didn’t think we were playing at empire before, what would they think if we didn’t recognize their democratically elected government because it didn’t show us respect?
There’s an old saying that if an ideologue finds he’s dug himself into a hole, his answer is to get a bigger shovel. We need to climb out of the hole, and get help filling it back in. Bush will never do this because, for one thing, he refused to admit he could be wrong about anything, as he proved stunningly in the last debate.
One more point. Hanson goes out of his way to align this conflict with WWII and the Cold War, not Vietnam, so it might be surprising to learn that in his other writings, Hanson has made not dissimilar arguments about Vietnam. Hanson contends Vietnam was lost by timidity also, and that “many of the dissidents were ignorant, their tools of communication instantaneous and enormously powerful, and their sympathies more with the enemy than with their own soldiers.” And he says the media fueled the fire with “hysteria” back then too. Apparently, when America launches an unpopular war and the media doesn’t do its job as propagandists, whether in the 60s or today, then they’re being hysterical.