Triangulating the War

I am releasing two postings on the eve of the Presidential Inauguration
to our Touched by Grace email subscriber list. One is by a war
historian; the other is by me and is from a spiritual viewpoint about
this season for the church. Both have insight for American Christians
who pray for our nation and who pray for the gospel of Christ �f the
ultimate source of liberty, justice, peace, and prosperity �f to be
successful around the globe.

This first article is an expert�fs historical perspective on war as it
relates to Iraq. Most people observe current history like passengers on
a fast moving train, looking out the window at the rapidly changing
scenery, getting fleeting glimpses of images flying by. But, if you go
to the rear of the train and look back down the tracks where you�fve
been, you can gain some accurate perspective as to what you have really
passed through.

The electronic media, especially television, is good at catching images
from the window. Thoughtful observers, especially writers of books
reviewing past generations, can better paint a picture for us of the
view from the back of the train. Truly, if you don�ft know where you�fve
been, it is hard to tell where you�fre headed.

My brother, Don (www.fatherpower.com), sent this email to me and said:
�gGood article Chad found. Good perspective on current war based on
history.�h Chad, one of Don�fs fine sons, wrote: �gWorth reading in
totality, for a variety of reasons. VDH is a hero of mine. He spent
most of his life as a yeoman farmer in rural California and only later
in life entered the public scene and rose quickly in stature into one
of modern America's greatest thinkers. He teaches at several colleges
now and is a military historian.�h

-----------

Triangulating the War - by Victor Davis Hanson
Yesterday�fs genius, today�fs fool, tomorrow�fs what?

Reading the pages of foreign-policy journals, between the long tracts
on Bush's "failures" and neoconservative "arrogance," one encounters
mostly predictions of defeat and calls for phased withdrawal �\ always
with resounding criticism of the American "botched" occupation.

Platitudes follow: "We can't just leave now," followed by no real
advice on how a fascist society can be jumpstarted into a modern
liberal republic. After all, there is no government handbook entitled,
"Operation 1A: How to remove a Middle East fascist regime in three
weeks, reconstruct the countryside, and hold the first elections in the
nation's history �\ all within two years." Almost all who supported the
war now are bailing on the pretext that their version of the
reconstruction was not followed: While a three-week war was their idea,
a 20-month messy reconstruction was surely someone else's. Yesterday
genius is today's fool �\ and who knows next month if the elections
work? Witness Afghanistan where all those who recently said the victory
was "lost" to warlords are now suddenly quiet.

Heads You Lose, Tails We Win
Indeed, from the oscillating analyses of Iraq, the following impossible
picture often emerges from our intelligentsia. It was a fatal error to
disband the Iraqi army. That led to lawlessness and a loss of
confidence in the American ability to restore immediate order after
Saddam's fall. Yet it was also a fatal error to keep some Baathists in
the newly constituted army. They were corrupt and wished reform to fail
�\ witness the Fallujah Brigade that either betrayed us or aided the
enemy. So we turned off the Sunnis by disbanding the army �\ and yet
somehow turned off the Shiites by keeping some parts of it.

Massive construction projects were hogged by gargantuan American firms,
ensconced in the Green Zone that did not engage either local Iraqi
workers or small companies and thus squandered precious good will. Or,
indigenous contractors proved irresponsible and unreliable, evidence
for why Iraq was in such bad shape to begin with. And when we did put
exclusive reliance on them, it ensured only lackadaisical and
half-hearted reconstruction.

We also lost hearts and minds by using GPS bombs to obliterate houses
full of killers and take out blocks of insurgents. And yet we lost
hearts and minds by failing to act decisively and de facto turning over
large enclaves to terrorists and Saddamites whom we were afraid to root
out. Elections should have been held earlier; no, they must be delayed
since they come too soon when the country is still unsecured.

Our helmeted soldiers with sunglasses are holed up in enclaves, don't
mingle, and perpetuated the heavy-handed image of snooty occupiers. But
leaving the Green Zone is an open invitation to kidnapping and worse.
So we are both too well hidden and yet not hidden enough. Embedded
media gave us a real-time picture of the fighting. But (if one is
conservative) it left open the opportunity for sensationalism on the
part of wannabe crusaders, and (if one is liberal) it created too close
a psychological bond with the soldiers that impaired objectivity.

It was a mistake to postpone Iraqi sovereignty for so long; but it is
an equal mistake to rush into elections while the country is so
insecure. The CIA is impotent, out-of-touch, and clownish; somehow it
mind-controlled Allawi, Chalabi, and a host of other Iraqi "puppets."

The litany from the mercurial Beltway always goes on: There were enough
troops to take out Saddam in three weeks, but not enough to restore
order to the countryside �\ but still too many that resulted in too high
an American profile on the streets of Baghdad. The transformations of
Donald Rumsfeld (this week's genius, last week's fool) have left us
stripped down and bereft of the muscle needed. Yet new, more mobile
brigades in strikers and special-forces with laptops are preferable to
old armored divisions on the streets of Iraqi.

We cannot flee, but must not stay. Iraqis publicly say we should leave,
but privately beg us to remain. We were after cheap oil, but gas prices
somehow climbed almost immediately after we went in. Democracy won't
work with these people, but somehow we are seeing three elections in
the wake of the Taliban, Arafat, and Saddam.

There are many constants in all this pessimistic confusion �\ beside the
fact that we are becoming a near hysterical society. First, our
miraculous efforts in toppling the Taliban and Saddam have apparently
made us forget war is always a litany of mistakes. No conflict is
conducted according to either antebellum planning or can proceed with
the benefit of hindsight. Iraq was not Yemen or Qatar, but rather the
most wicked regime in the world, in the heart of the Arab world, full
of oil, terrorists, and mass graves.

There were no helpful neighbors to keep a lid on their own infiltrating
jihadists. Instead we had to go into the heart of the caliphate, take
out a mass murderer, restore civil society after 30 years of brutality,
and ward off Sunni and Baathist fomenters in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and
Syria �\ all the while keeping out Iranian-Shiite agents bent on
stopping democracy. The wonder is not that there is violence and gloom
in Iraq, but that less than two years after Saddam was removed,
elections are still on track.

The Follies of World War II
Second, our very success creates ever increasing expectations of
perfection for a postmodern America used to instant gratification. We
now look back in awe at World War II, the model of military success, in
which within four years an unprepared United States won two global
wars, at sea, on the ground, and in the air, in three continents
against Japan, Italy, and Germany, and supplied both England and the
Soviet Union. But our forefathers experienced disaster after disaster
in a tale of heartbreak, almost as inglorious as the Korean mess or
Vietnam tragedy. And they did things to win we perhaps claim we would
now not: Shoot German prisoners in the Bulge, firebomb Axis cities,
drop the bomb �\ almost anything to stop fascists from slaughtering even
more millions of innocents.

Our armored vehicles were deathtraps and only improved days before the
surrender. American torpedoes were often duds. Unescorted daylight
bombing proved a disaster, but continued. Amphibious assaults like
Anzio and Tarawa were bloodbaths and emblematic of terrible planning
and command. The recapture of Manila was clumsy and far too costly.
Okinawa was the worst of all operations, and yet was begun just over
fourth months before the surrender �\ without any planning for Kamikazes
who were shortly to kill 5,000 American sailors. Patton, the one
general that could have ended the western war in 1944, was relieved and
then subordinated to an auxiliary position with near fatal results for
the drive from Normandy; mediocrities like Mark Clark flourished and
were promoted. Admiral King resisted the life-saving convoy system and
unnecessarily sacrificed merchant ships; while Bull Halsey almost lost
his unprepared fleet to a storm.

The war's aftermath seemed worse, to be overseen by an untried
president who was considered an abject lightweight. Not-so-quite
collateral damage had ruined entire cities. Europe nearly starved in
winter 1945-6. Millions were on the road in mass exoduses. After
spending billions to destroy Nazi Germany we had to spend billions more
to rebuild it �\ and repair the devastation it had wrought on its
neighbors. Our so-called partisan friends in Yugoslavia and Greece
turned out to be hard-core Communist killers. Soon enough we learned
that the guerrillas in the mountains of Europe whom we had idolized, in
fact, fought as much for Communism as against fascism �\ but never for
democracy.

But at least there was clear-cut strategic success? Oh? The war started
to keep Eastern Europe free of Nazis and ended up ensuring that it was
enslaved by Stalinists. Poland was neither free in 1940 nor in 1946. By
early 1946 we were already considering putting former Luftwaffe pilots
in American jets �\ improved with ample borrowing from Nazi technology �to protect Europe from the Red Army carried westward on GM trucks. We
put Nazis on trials for war crimes even as we invited their scientists
to our shores to match their counterparts in the Soviet Union who were
building even more lethal weapons to destroy us. Our utopian idea of a
global U.N. immediately deteriorated into a mess �\ decades of vetoes in
the Security Council by Stalinists and Maoists, even as former colonial
states turned thugocracies in the General Assembly ganged up on Israel
and the survivors of the Holocaust.

After Americans had liberated France and restored his country, General
de Gaulle created the myth of the French resistance and immediately
triangulated with our enemies to reforge some pathetic sort of French
grandeur. An exhausted England turned over to us a collapsing empire,
with the warning that it might all turn Communist. Tired of the war and
postbellum costs, Americans suddenly were asked to wage a new Cold War
to keep a shrinking West and its allies free. The Department of War
turned into the Department of Defense, along with weird new things like
the U.S. Air Force, Strategic Air Command, Food for Peace, Alliance for
Progress, Voice of America, and thousands of other costly entities
never dreamed of just a few years earlier.

And yet our greatest generation thought by and large they had done
pretty well. We in contrast would have given up in despair in 1942, New
York Times columnists and NPR pundits pontificating "I told you so" as
if we were better off sitting out the war all along.

Iraqi Options
Finally, the United States has a number of options in Iraq. In fact,
the paradoxes are ever more confronting our enemies. There is a glaring
problem for the terrorists in Iraq: 75 percent of the country wants
elections. The Sunni clerics wish to delay them on the strange logic
that they either cannot or will not stop their brethren who are trying
to derail the voting through which their cause will lose. But such
appeals appear increasingly empty �\ almost like the Secessionists
complaining about Northern voters in 1860 might imperil the Union. And
no one is all that sure that there really is a purist Sunni block of
millions of obstructionists, rather than just ordinary Iraqis who want
to vote and are in fear of extremists who claim their allegiance. Saudi
Arabia unleashed terrorists to stop democracy in Iraq, and is now
worried their young Frankensteins hate their creators just as much.

So we are inching ahead as global television soon will air an elected
and autonomous government fighting fascists for the chance of
democracy. If the Kurds and the Shiite majorities vote for us to leave,
then we must �\ but to do so would be to ensure the return of the
Baathists, the domination of Wahhabi fundamentalism, or the
Lebanonization of the country. And so they probably won't. There is
much talk of an Iranian takeover, but no evidence that an Iraqi Shiite
sees himself as more an Iranian than an Arab.

All this we cannot see at the present as we in our weariness lament the
losses of almost 1,100 combat dead and billions committed to people who
appear from 30-second media streams to be singularly ungracious and not
our sort of folk. We dwell on unmistakable lapses, never on amazing
successes �\ just as we were consumed with Afghanistan in its dark
moments, but now ignore its road to success. But never mind all this:
The long-term prospects are still as bright as things seem gloomy in
the short-term �\ but only if we emulate our grandfathers and press on
with the third Middle East election in the last six months.