Excellent Article

[TheAnvil 0]

Posted in full here.

National Review Online

Victor Davis Hanson

June 25, 2004, 8:53 a.m.
Year Three
Where do we stand in this disorienting war?

As we neared three years of fighting in World War II, Patton was stalled near Germany for want of gas, V-2 rockets began raining down on England, and we were fighting to take the Marianas in preparation for future B-29 bases. In comparison, what exactly is our current status in this, our confusing third year of war against Islamic fascists and their autocratic sponsors?

THE STRATEGIC PICTURE

Despite all the near paralysis over the 9/11 Commission, Abu Ghraib, denials about the obvious prior "ties" between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda, various "letters of conscience" posted by hypercritical legal grandees, former diplomats, generals, and D.C. apparatchiks, things in the strategic sense are ever so slowly looking up for the United States.

Unlike the Cold War, when our tactical options were circumscribed by nuclear enemies, today the world's true powers are decidedly unfriendly to radical Islam - and growing more so daily.

Two-thirds of al Qaeda's leadership are either dead or in jail. Their sanctuaries, sponsors, and kindred spirits in Afghanistan and Iraq are long gone. Detention is increasingly common for Islamicists in Europe and America. The Hamas intifada has failed. Its implosion serves as a warning for al Qaeda that Western democracies can still fight back. There is also a lesson for America that even in our postmodern world most people still admire principled success: No one is lamenting the recent targeted killings of Hamas bullies or the preemptive assassination of suicide bombers.

Russia looks at al Qaeda through the prism of Chechnya. For all its triangulation it wants America to succeed - as President Putin's amazing but mostly unheralded (buried on page 8 of the New York Times ) revelation about Saddam's terrorist plans suggests.

The problem with China's stance toward radical Islam within its borders arises not from appeasement but rather a desire for outright liquidation. India ensures the world that the old chauvinism about Pakistan's heralded "Islamic bomb" has grown mute.

Europe, led by France and Germany, saw a chance for both profit and psychological satisfaction by opposing the United States. But recently it has realized the short-sightedness of such a policy, and belatedly grasped that al Qaeda terrorists despise Euros as much if not more than they do Americans. European ingratitude has just about ensured an end to American subsidized defense of the continent. All this does not mean the world's other powers will aid us - far from it - only that they will continue opportunistically and in public to chide us while privately praying for our success.

So, the world of the radical Islamist shrinks. Moderate Arabs understand that they increasingly suffer from guilt-by-association by about everyone around the world - thanks to bin Laden and his epigones. The parlor game of anti-Americanism has turned deadly. Terrorists kill hundreds in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, ignoring calls from once-appeasing imams to stop dismembering Muslims. Being anti-American in the Middle East does not necessarily win you exemption from al Qaeda. The fascists do not want to put a fashionable Islamic-nationalist veneer on upscale Arabs, but rather to transport them lock, stock, and barrel back to the Dark Ages.

Even countries like South Korea, Indonesia, and Japan are beginning to realize that the United States alone protects their sea-lanes to the Middle East, and that opportunistic posturing serves no purpose in a global war against beheaders and their world of barbarism other than to throw away 60 years of American military commitment. It is fashionable to say that the United States is isolated; few other than a socialist prime minister in Spain or a Howard Dean really believe that.

The key now is to be found with past neutrals like Pakistan, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, whose former coddling and subsidies to killers are bringing them only mayhem. If they wake up to look at the world lining up against them, close down madrassas, "charities," and borderland sanctuaries, and expel the terrorists, then the tide will turn. These nations will never overtly join the hostile Syria-Iran-Lebanon block, but they can stay neutral and therein facilitate our enemies even as they profess allegiance to our cause. Time will tell - but we cannot win this war until bin Laden's cohorts feel they are in danger in Pakistan, or until those who would behead Americans know it is suicidal to do so in Saudi Arabia.

America must ensure that there is no place where terrorists can eat, sleep, or organize. But that goal is presently impossible, given the hostility of Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and the infiltration of Islamic sympathizers into the governments of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.

HEARTS AND MINDS

For the first two years of this war, critics whined that we were "not getting the message out." But after Afghanistan and Iraq, the beheadings, and the bombings, most on the planet know that the choice is between civilization and barbarism. The key is not preferring the good cause in the abstract, but risking pain for the right choice in the here-and-now.

A radical strain of Islam is trying to capitalize on the failure of Arab autocracies in order to galvanize the Muslim Street under the reactionary promise of a return to a mythical caliphate. We know that; they know that; and all that remains is for those in the gallery in the Middle East to choose sides - that is, to determine who in the end is going to win and thus end up either as that winner's powerful friends or as its weak enemies.

The Arab League hates us not because we are going to lose or install strongmen if we prevail, but because they are terrified we will win and sponsor consensual governments of the type that would put such ossified functionaries with blood on their hands out to pasture. Despite Abu Ghraib and whining over the West Bank, most Arabs know privately that the United States gives billions to Egypt and Jordan, does nothing while the Gulf autocracies cut production to jack up oil prices, saves Muslims in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait, and Somalia, and is providing billions to Iraq at a level not seen since the Marshall Plan.

What they are not yet convinced of, however, is whether the United States intends to stay and fight to the finish, or - as was true after the murdering in Lebanon, after the expulsion of the Soviets in Afghanistan, after the 1991 failure to take Baghdad, after Mogadishu, after mostly silence in the face of 25 years of terrorist attacks from Teheran to Yemen, and after the pull-back from Fallujah and Najaf - it will tire, find an exit strategy, and head home. That "honorable departure," of course, would leave friends and supporters to deal with local fascists, as was true in the past in the case of the Taliban, the irregulars in Sudan, the mullahs in Iran, the Hezbollah killers in the Bekka Valley, and Mr. Sadr's Mahdists.

TACTICS

On the ground, we are in a seesaw race with the terrorists - a back-and-forth of challenge and response as we refine tactics to counter and anticipate everything from Improvised Explosive Devices, suicide bombing, televised head chopping, and the next ghoulish twist still on the horizon. Yet each time the Americans engage in a real firefight, we win - and almost always without a groundswell of popular resistance. As we harp about the fighting, a battle-hardened cadre of American veterans has emerged that is liquidating its opponents every day and thus gradually changing politics on the ground. The media has completely missed the story of just how good our combat battalions have become.

So the problem is not armed insurrection per se, but local apathy; not thousands shooting us in the street, but millions more quiet about the hundreds in their midst who are. We must continue to get Iraqi faces on television, put them to work on the reconstruction, back their forces with precision air strikes - all the while rarely showing Americans even as they kill terrorists.

Iraqis may cry crocodile tears when Bechtel workers are blown up trying to finish a new sewer system for them, but they will surely wince when their own are vaporized trying to ensure that their raw sewage is no longer in the streets. Again, our tactical lapses throughout the past year center on our inability to grasp the human desire for honor, prestige, and public attention - nowhere so evident as in the male-dominated and tribal Middle East.

HOME FRONT

But if the pulse of the strategic, tactical, and ideological theaters suggests we can win this war, the home front is not so bright. The few hundred American lunatics who tried to explain away 9/11 (or apologize for it) turned into thousands a few weeks later who swore we either would or should lose in Afghanistan. Now they are millions who see our ongoing struggle in Iraq as either immoral or inept. George Bush did not create this cascading antiwar movement. It was rather fueled by the blood and treasure spent to eliminate the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, together with a has-been '60s generation that felt there was still one more creaky return to the barricades left in them.

Right after 9/11, some of us thought it was impossible for leftist critics to undermine a war against fascists who were sexist, fundamentalist, homophobic, racist, ethnocentric, intolerant of diversity, mass murderers of Kurds and Arabs, and who had the blood of 3,000 Americans on their hands. We were dead wrong. In fact, they did just that. Abu Ghraib is on the front pages daily. Stories of thousands of American soldiers in combat against terrorist killers from the Hindu Kush to Fallujah do not merit the D section. Senator Kennedy's two years of insane outbursts should have earned him formal censure rather than a commemoration from the Democratic establishment.

What a litany of distractions! Words - preemption," "unilateralism," "hegemony," - whiz by and lose all meaning. Names - "Halliburton," "Chalabi," "INC" - become little more than red meat. Vocabulary is turned upside down: "Contractors," who at great risk restore power and water to the poor, are now little more than "profiteers" and "opportunists"; killers are not even "terrorists" but mere "militants." "Neo-cons" are wild-eyed extremists; "realists" are no longer cynics - inclined to let thousands die abroad unless the chaos interrupts transit of oil or food - but rather "sober" and "circumspect," and more likely Kerry supporters.

A depressing array of transitory personalities parades before our screen, entering stage left to grab 15 minutes of notoriety for their scripted invective, only to exit on the right into oblivion. Who can remember all these one-tell-all-book, one-weekend-on-the-Sunday-news-programs personalities - a Hans Blix, Scott Ritter, Howard Dean, Paul O'Neil, Joe Wilson, Richard Clark, or Richard ben Veniste? In between their appearances on Sunday morning television or 60 Minutes, a few D.C. functionaries are carted out for periodic shouting - an unhinged Al Gore, a puffed-up Ted Kennedy, a faux-serious Bob Kerry, and occasionally a Senator Byrd or Hollings. And since the very day after 9/11 we've gotten the Vietnam-era retreads - a Peter Arnett, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, Robert Scheer, John Dean, or Seymour Hersh - tottering out with the latest conspiracies about the old bogeymen and "higher-ups."

We are winning the military war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorists are on the run. And slowly, even ineptly, we are achieving our political goals of democratic reform in once-awful places. Thirty years of genocide, vast forced transfers of whole peoples, the desecration of entire landscapes, a ruined infrastructure, and a brutalized and demoralized civilian psyche are being remedied, often under fire. All this and more has been achieved at the price of political turmoil, deep divisions in the West - here and abroad - and the emergence of a strong minority, led by mostly elites, who simply wish it all to fail.

Whether this influential, snarling minority - so prominent in the media, on campuses, in government, and in the arts - succeeds in turning victory into defeat is open to question. Right now the matter rests on the nerve of a half-dozen in Washington who are daily slandered (Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz), and with brilliant and courageous soldiers in the field. They are fighting desperately against the always-ticking clock of American impatience, and are forced to confront an Orwellian world in which their battle sacrifice is ignored or deprecated while killing a vicious enemy is tantamount to murder.

No, we - along with those brave Iraqis who have opted for freedom - could very easily still lose this war that our brave troops are somehow now winning.

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[78RATS 0]

Quote

America must ensure that there is no place where terrorists can eat, sleep, or organize

The threat from within our borders needs as much attention as the threat overseas.

Rat for Life - Fly till I die
When them stupid ass bitches ask why

[billvon 3,120]

Victor's a little loony.

> George Bush did not create this cascading antiwar movement. It was
> rather fueled by the blood and treasure spent to eliminate the Taliban
> and Saddam Hussein . . .

So the anti-war movement has been paid for and encouraged by by the money spent on the war? There is a group somewhere desperate to end their own funding? Right.

>Right after 9/11, some of us thought it was impossible for leftist critics to
>undermine a war against fascists who were sexist, fundamentalist,
>homophobic, racist, ethnocentric, intolerant of diversity . . .

We're fighting Pat Robertson?

>mass murderers of Kurds and Arabs, and who had the blood of 3,000
> Americans on their hands.

Ah, he's talking about the 9/11 terrorists. Nice try, but that would be Saudi Arabia. You could stretch it to the war in Afghanistan, but Pat Robertson has as much to do with 9/11 as Iraq does.

>Stories of thousands of American soldiers in combat against terrorist
>killers from the Hindu Kush to Fallujah do not merit the D section.

As with most right wingers, he wants to see glorious successes on page 1 (Fallujah suburb gets shipment of air conditioners!) but stories of US soldiers dying during the course of their duties on page D13.

This is really funny:
>Vocabulary is turned upside down: "Contractors," who at great risk
>restore power and water to the poor, are now little more than
>"profiteers" and "opportunists"

Contractors, in our language, means independents paid to do small jobs on commission. Private soldiers who are paid to do a job are mercenaries. There is absolutely no problem with using mercenaries, in my opinion - if they give you better bang for the buck, go ahead. (Of course, they are subject to summary execution if caught in a war zone per the Geneva Convention, but presumably that's a risk they are willing to take.)

So he's absolutely right, in a way. Mercenaries have become contractors because it sounds better to the pro-war factions.

>We are winning the military war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorists
>are on the run.

Taking his lines from Brazil, I see.

>They are fighting desperately against the always-ticking clock of
> American impatience, and are forced to confront an Orwellian world in
>which their battle sacrifice is ignored or deprecated while killing a vicious
>enemy is tantamount to murder.

The world is indeed turning very Orwellian. Constant war is peace. Lots of terrorist attacks in Iraq mean less terrorism. Some quotes of his that are particulalry apropos:

"All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome."

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." I notice this one a lot when conservatives can, with a straight face, say that there is no evidence that Saddam helped with 9/11 and that there is clearly a link.

"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. "

[kallend 2,150]

It's not excellent at all, it's high sounding claptrap. I'm suprised you can't tell the difference.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[PhillyKev 0]

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I'm suprised you can't tell the difference.

Where the hell have you been?

[TheAnvil 0]

Read what you like into whatever article you like.

Blow off the OBVIOUS media bias against GWB anyway you like - it won't make it any less obvious to those of us who notice it.

Make fun of vocal Christian Conservatives all you like and malign the whole conservative movement by juxtaposing the many inane views Mr. Robertson holds onto all conservatives if you like. The laughter you hear is mine and I'm laughing solo.

Odd that I haven't heard anyone on the right asking for news of American soldiers dying to be suppressed. I HAVE heard those on the right complaining - rightfully so - about good news being deliberately suppressed by the leftist media.

Think what you like about the article. I rather liked it.

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[MC208B 0]

Good article.The truth hurts liberals badly

[PhillyKev 0]

Quote

Blow off the OBVIOUS media bias against GWB anyway you like - it won't make it any less obvious to those of us who notice it.

Finally, you're admitting that factual news articles make the president look bad.

Quote

Odd that I haven't heard anyone on the right asking for news of American soldiers dying to be suppressed.

That is odd. Considering the Bush administration has ended news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.

[TheAnvil 0]

I've admitted no such thing. Live on in your fantasy world as long as you like.

Soldiers' coffins not being swarmed by the media upon their return suppresses the stories of them getting killed in Iraq? Odd you would say such a thing. Interesting world in which you live. Come visit us sometime. Compare the # of soldiers killed in Iraq say - since January - with the # of homicides in NYC/LA/Detroit/Chicago/Memphis/San Francisco combined during that same period. War zone vs American liberal cities. Show us how bad things really are.

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[PhillyKev 0]

Soldiers dying in Iraq is ok because people die in US cities? I'll leave the irrelevant comparisons to you, thanks.

[TheAnvil 0]

Not what I said. Make the comparison. Show us how we're having soldiers drop like flies.

The death of any soldier is a sad thing. Far more tragic than the death of some drug dealer.

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[PhillyKev 0]

Quote

Make the comparison.

So your own homework. If you want to make some cockeyed claim that the number of domestic homicides has any bearing whatsoever to troops dying in Iraq, then dig up your own figures.

[billvon 3,120]

>Odd that I haven't heard anyone on the right asking for news of American
>soldiers dying to be suppressed.

FOX news has been the only news service that refused to show any pictures of US coffins. And right here on our very own board we have:

"I think not making the pictures public is the only respectful choice."

"I completely agree with kpjumps. Our dead coming back in coffins should not be about politics like you're trying to make it. You need to show some respect for the fallen military in those coffins."

"And its a really dirty tactic to show pictures of dead Americans for political reasons."

>I HAVE heard those on the right complaining - rightfully so - about
>good news being deliberately suppressed by the leftist media.

Yeah. I can't believe they overlooked that air conditioner shipment to Fallujah! I mean, look what's at the top of the MSNBC page - "Saddam to be charged" "3 marines die in blast." What about the AIR CONDITIONERS? Don't people care that previously sweaty Iraqis will now be cool?

[TheAnvil 0]

I wasn't speaking about coffins, which I believe have no business being viewed by anyone other than the family. I was talking about news of soldiers dying in Iraq - you've confused the two.

Humorous about those A/C units. How many D page stories have you seen on those?

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[billvon 3,120]

> I wasn't speaking about coffins, which I believe have no business being
> viewed by anyone other than the family. I was talking about news of
>soldiers dying in Iraq . . .

And I was talking about supressing news of the deaths of soldiers. And yes, supressing pictures of their coffins is supressing news of their deaths (unless you think we're smuggling drugs in those coffins or something.)

[TheAnvil 0]

I beg to differ, o future national director.

Suppressing news of their deaths would mean moving headlines such as '3 Marines Killed in Fallujah' to page D15 from page one and/or not even giving it a bullet on national news.

Not allowing reporters to take pics of coffins containing bodies of folks we already knew to have given the ultimate sacrifice for their country is a decision to show some class and compassion to the family members of the aforementioned on the part of the Bush Administration. Suppressing news of their deaths? I don't think so.

Vinny the Anvil
Post Traumatic Didn't Make The Lakers Syndrome is REAL
JACKASS POWER!!!!!!

[PhreeZone 20]

>Bush Administration

Clinton Administration was the ones that started this policy, Bush just continuted it.

Yesterday is history
And tomorrow is a mystery

Parachutemanuals.com

[PhillyKev 0]

Quote

>Bush Administration

Clinton Administration was the ones that started this policy, Bush just continuted it.

Actually Bush Sr. started the policy, Bush Jr. reinforced it.