One wants to admire Victor Davis Hanson. And then he says something like this:
They’re talking about a country that once fought Italy, Japan and Germany all at once, defeated them, and then turned around and started the Cold War … I mean, the Cold War resistance of the Soviet Union, and they’re saying that this same country, now twice the size, with much more material and military wealth, can’t fight in Afghanistan and Iraq at once. That’s sort of the poverty of their imagination, that we’ve taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan, got bogged down in Iraq, and now we’re helpless. We need Jim Baker to come in, we need Syria to come in, we need Iran to come in to help us. It’s absurd, but it seems to be the prevailing opinion now.
An obvious point: all those wars cited by VDH were classic armed combat, not intractable insurgencies. The most recent such insurgency dealt with by American military – Vietnam – was also a failure. Another obvious point: the Cold War was won in part by containment, not pre-emption. But the larger issue is this: Does VDH seriously believe that the problem in Iraq is insufficient support from the American public? This president got all he wanted and more – for a longer period than World War II. He assumed total power and control, by-passed even the Republican Congress when he felt like it, ripped up the Geneva Conventions, got to decide everything in Iraq for three and a half years … and it’s now the public’s fault and the press’s fault that almost every sane analysis concludes it has been botched beyond belief?
I might add that continuing bromides by VDH in which no serious criticism of the Bush administration was entertained did indeed contribute to the failure. He enabled failure rather than confronting it. If there are any members of the American public who bear responsibility for the debacle in Iraq it is those of us who passionately supported the war in the first place – and above all, those who refused to criticize its conduct once the failures became manifest. About a month after the invasion.
The Dish 