Victor Davis Hanson: The Prison of the Present
[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.]
Listen to the present televised hysteria. Too few troops! No, too many still there! The CIA is out of control! No, it is weak and irrelevant! The Iraq mess only empowered Iran! No, its democratic experiment is the best way to undermine that neighboring theocracy.
Such frenzy of the 24-hour news cycle is now everywhere, as we are lectured that our victories over the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have caused as many problems as they solved.
But in war aren't choices usually between the bad and the far worse? So often victory leads not to utopia, but only something better.
Take our past ambiguous successes. Recall that the outcome of America's horrific, but successful, Civil War that ended slavery led not to racial harmony. Instead followed over a decade of failed Reconstruction and another century of Jim Crow apartheid in the South.
We saved a reeling Britain and France in World War I. But an isolationist United States did not occupy a defeated Germany. So we fought a resurgent Hitler little more than twenty years later, who talked of the 'stab in the back,' while he bragged that imperial Germany had withdrawn unbeaten from foreign soil.
The outcome of World War II (note the sudden need for the Roman numerals) was not perpetual peace or even the freedom of Eastern Europe, but rather its enslavement and a Cold War of a half-century.
The United States prevailed in saving South Korea. Yet it still bequeathed a lunatic nuclear communist state to our grandchildren.
Gulf War I was a smashing success. But it was followed by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds, twelve years of no-fly zones, and yet another war against Saddam.
Almost every controversy in this present war also proves to be a rehash of the past. Poorly armored Humvees? Thousands, not hundreds, of Americans perished, in thin-skinned Sherman tanks ("Ronson lighters") that never were up-armored even at the end of World War II.
Too few troops? In late July 1944 as Gen. George Patton raced eastward through France, the topic never came up. But by autumn as several under-strength American armies suddenly stalled on the distant Rhine, national recrimination replaced the earlier euphoria. What fool planner had advocated a broad-front advance into Germany with far too few soldiers?
Did removing Saddam empower Iran? No more so than ending Nazism gave more opportunity for our "ally" Stalin to enslave Eastern Europe.
Why was our Iraqi intelligence so poor in assessing the potential for postwar insurgency? The same was asked how some surprised American divisions near the end of World War II were nearly annihilated by Germans in the Bulge and by the Japanese on Okinawa?...
Read entire article at RealClearPolitics.com
Listen to the present televised hysteria. Too few troops! No, too many still there! The CIA is out of control! No, it is weak and irrelevant! The Iraq mess only empowered Iran! No, its democratic experiment is the best way to undermine that neighboring theocracy.
Such frenzy of the 24-hour news cycle is now everywhere, as we are lectured that our victories over the Taliban and Saddam Hussein have caused as many problems as they solved.
But in war aren't choices usually between the bad and the far worse? So often victory leads not to utopia, but only something better.
Take our past ambiguous successes. Recall that the outcome of America's horrific, but successful, Civil War that ended slavery led not to racial harmony. Instead followed over a decade of failed Reconstruction and another century of Jim Crow apartheid in the South.
We saved a reeling Britain and France in World War I. But an isolationist United States did not occupy a defeated Germany. So we fought a resurgent Hitler little more than twenty years later, who talked of the 'stab in the back,' while he bragged that imperial Germany had withdrawn unbeaten from foreign soil.
The outcome of World War II (note the sudden need for the Roman numerals) was not perpetual peace or even the freedom of Eastern Europe, but rather its enslavement and a Cold War of a half-century.
The United States prevailed in saving South Korea. Yet it still bequeathed a lunatic nuclear communist state to our grandchildren.
Gulf War I was a smashing success. But it was followed by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Shiites and Kurds, twelve years of no-fly zones, and yet another war against Saddam.
Almost every controversy in this present war also proves to be a rehash of the past. Poorly armored Humvees? Thousands, not hundreds, of Americans perished, in thin-skinned Sherman tanks ("Ronson lighters") that never were up-armored even at the end of World War II.
Too few troops? In late July 1944 as Gen. George Patton raced eastward through France, the topic never came up. But by autumn as several under-strength American armies suddenly stalled on the distant Rhine, national recrimination replaced the earlier euphoria. What fool planner had advocated a broad-front advance into Germany with far too few soldiers?
Did removing Saddam empower Iran? No more so than ending Nazism gave more opportunity for our "ally" Stalin to enslave Eastern Europe.
Why was our Iraqi intelligence so poor in assessing the potential for postwar insurgency? The same was asked how some surprised American divisions near the end of World War II were nearly annihilated by Germans in the Bulge and by the Japanese on Okinawa?...