by Victor Davis Hanson
Commentary Magazine ^ |
January 2004
On
This peculiar juxtaposition of 8th- and 21st-century technology was
taken as emblematic of the entire American experience in
In an extensive, on-the-ground account of the post-bellum chaos,
George Packer in a recent issue of the New Yorker lists an array of missteps that brought
us to this sorry pass. We put too much trust in exiled Iraqis; we allowed looters and
fundamentalists to seize the initiative right after the war; we underestimated both the
damage done to the infrastructure by Saddam Hussein and the pernicious and still insidious
effects of his murderous, Soviet-style government hierarchy. Mark Danner, in the New York
Review of Books, relates much the same story, emphasizing our tolerance of looting and our
disbanding of the Iraqi army as factors contributing in tandem to the creation of the
Iraqi resistance, now thriving on a combination of plentiful cash (from looting and prewar
caches) and a surplus of weaponry and manpower (from the defunct army).
Both authors make good points, including about American naivetE9 and
unpreparedness. But lacking in these bleak analyses of failures and setbacks are crucial
and complicating elements, with the result that the overall picture they draw is both
distorted as to the present and seriously misleading with regard to the future.
II
It is a genuine cause of lament that many American lives have been
lost in what should have been an uncontested peace since the war ended in April. But let
us begin by putting the matter in perspective. The reconstruction of
We are an impatient people. In part, no doubt, our restlessness is a
byproduct of our own unprecedented ease and affluence. Barbarians over the hills do not
descend to kill us; no diseases wipe out our children by the millions; not starvation but
obesity is more likely to do us in. Since we are so rich and so powerful, why is it, we
naturally wonder, that we cannot simply and quickly call into being a secure, orderly,
prosperous Iraq, a benign Islamic version of a New England township? What incompetence, or
worse, lies behind our failure even to seize Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein?
But
Nor did Saddam Hussein and his sons kill without help. After traveling
7,000 miles to dispose of him, we were confronted by his legacy — a society
containing tens of thousands of Baathists with blood on their hands, 100,000 felons
recently released from Saddam’s prisons, and millions more who for decades took
solace in a species of national pride founded on butchery and plunder. After a mere seven
months, are we to be blamed for having failed magically to rehabilitate such people?
Should we instead have imprisoned them en masse, tried them, shot them, exiled them?
Going into the heart of Mesopotamia, American troops passed Iraqi
palaces with historic and often ominous names: Cunaxa, whence Xenophon’s 10,000 began
their arduous journey home; Gau gamela, where Alexander devastated the Persian imperial
army; and, not far away in southeastern Turkey, Carrhae, where the Roman triumvir Crassus
lost his 45,000-man army and his own head.
Now, however, after one of the most miraculous victories in military
history, we demand an almost instantaneous peace followed by the emergence of a sort of
Iraqi Continental Congress. We demand the head of Saddam Hussein, forgetting that Adolf
Eichmann disappeared for years in the post-Nazi archipelago abroad, and that neither Ratko
Mladic nor Radovan Karadzic has yet been scooped from the swamp of the Balkans. Our
journalists describe the chaos besetting a society allegedly traumatized by American war
that in reality is struggling with the legacy of its own destructive past. In
III
MOST OF the Baathists among our current enemies in
Such are a few of the ironies entailed in our stunning military success, even if
overlooked in analyses of the recent turmoil. And there are still more. Hard as it may be
to accept, a rocky peace may well be the result of a spectacularly rapid victory. Imagine
our war instead as a year-and-a-half continuum of active combat, stretching from the
late-March 2003 invasion until the scheduled assumption of power of the Iraqi provisional
government this coming July. Now suppose that over the course of this time frame, about
5,000 of Saddam's hardcore killers had either to be killed, captured, or routed from the
country if there were ever to be any chance for real peace to emerge. Somehow, under
conditions of full-scale combat, one suspects the job would have been much easier.
Of course, we must not wish the war would have lasted that long in order to allow us
freely to destroy Saddam's remnants, but we must at least appreciate that short wars by
their very nature often require messy clean-ups. After the shooting stops, the aid workers
arrive; the hard-core, hypercritical journalists remain; and soldiers must build rather
than shoot.
Here, too, a little historical perspective helps. The
There are other, cultural aspects to our dilemma as well. Many Americans have come to
believe that war is the worst thing that can happen to humans. It would probably not have
been easy in 1991 to convince them of the need to prolong our "highway of death"
in southern Iraq, even if doing so would have prevented Baathist troops from escaping to
Basra and killing innocents; or of the need to bomb Serbians in Sbrenica in order to
prevent them from killing women and children; or of the need to annihilate fleeing Taliban
fighters to prevent them from drifting back into Kabul months later to shoot young
Frenchwomen trying to feed the poor and hungry.
What such Americans have forgotten is that there can be much worse things than war.
Stalin, Hitler, and Mao killed far more off the battlefield than all those lost in World
War I and II; bloodbaths in
What is more, in the immediate aftermath of the war we disbanded the Iraqi army, not out
of oversight or folly but on the idealistic grounds that we wished to build a force
untainted by Baathist officers and ideology. Not only did we thereby lose an opportunity
to corral and systematically audit 400,000 soldiers in their barracks, but to the shame of
wartime flight we added the greater ignominy of peacetime irrelevancy, soon to be
exacerbated by shared unemployment and poverty.
If some of the constraints on our military conduct have been self-imposed, others are
functions of (nonmilitary) reality. These days, our officers have adjusted to the fact
that they operate in a topsy-turvy world, one where human-rights activists are capable of
being largely silent about 80,000 Muslims killed in
IV
NOT ALL of our problems are problems of perception, but at least a few are. What would
have been the reaction of the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books had the coalition
forces shot 500 looters to restore order and save the infrastructure of an entire people,
or had we kept the Iraqi army intact to curb lawlessness, or had a no-nonsense provisional
government of exiles ensured that the trains were to be running on time? Instead of
hearing now about chaos and quagmire, we would be reading about poor families whose
innocent teenage sons had been caught in crossfire, or about Baathists with dark pasts
entrenched in the new military, or about the counterproductive American obsession with
order rather than with pluralist democracy.
The reflexively critical gaze of the press operates all the way down to the tactical
level, submitting every aspect of our military behavior to instantaneous and often hostile
review. Partly in response to the biases of critics—but also in line with widespread
utopian notions of leniency—we seek to mitigate the damage and death we inflict, thus
inadvertently helping once again to render peace more deadly than war. Army interrogators
who push or intimidate prisoners face court-martial or discharge, even though many of
those prisoners have freely killed—and will again kill—hundreds of the weak and
innocent. In the last days of combat, a few of our satellite-guided bombs were ingeniously
laden with cement rather than explosives, in order admirably to curtail collateral damage.
But the more we seek to refine war by curbing the unpredictable and frightening nature of
the violence that is the essence of that amoral enterprise, the more those inured to
ferocity see our restraint not as magnanimity but as weakness or, worse still, a sort of
decadence. (Our unwillingness to shoot looters was probably seen by most Iraqis not as a
necessary indulgence but as fear of bloody confrontation—or as part of some
farfetched conspiracy to induce Iraqis to run amok.) We have not lost confidence in our
ability to conduct asymmetrical or unconventional warfare, but the task we have imposed on
ourselves is no longer one of routing and eliminating terrorists and murderers; it is one
of therapy. Confused by these mixed directives, our military is never quite sure whether
it should be destroying or building; whether it should kill, be killed, or save; whether
it should frown or smile. This can redound to the advantage of an armed and determined
adversary with no such humanitarian obligations.
Post-bellum Iraq reminds us how much we are geared not to taking but rather to preserving
lives—including, quite naturally, our own. Expensive communications, body armor, and
redundancies in operational procedure are designed to protect soldiers from those who
would blow themselves up to kill us. But the more money, time, and spiritual capital we
quite properly invest in each of our soldiers, and the more precious each of them becomes
to us, the more altered is the age-old and terrible calculus of the battlefield. One dead
American causes far greater distress, not just among the American public but in the
military itself, than the satisfaction prompted by the knowledge that dozens of Baathist
murderers were killed in return.
No longer is our success in battle seen in a 10-to-1 kill ratio over the enemy, as at
bloody Okinawa; or a 25-to-1 ratio, as during the 1968 Tet offensive; or the stunning
250-to-1 imbalance of the recent Afghan and Iraqi offensives, when perhaps as many as
10,000 Taliban and Iraqi soldiers in total were killed to our 450 or so combat deaths.
Indeed, our military has rarely talked about the numbers of enemies killed or captured in
Finally, as our government seeks—often successfully—to wage war with as little
upheaval at home as possible, it never troubles to tap the inner reserves of the American
people, who might well rise to the challenge of a long and difficult struggle against
those who seek to kill us all. We are thus caught in yet another paradox: the more lethal
and adroit an ever smaller number of American soldiers become, the more detached an ever
greater number of Americans can be from the wars waged in their names. Our very prowess at
arms has blinded us to what may yet be demanded of us by our current situation, namely,
the need truly to mobilize ourselves as a nation in a deadly war.
V
WHAT THEN are the lessons of this peace? We have been making major progress in both
Events in
These Islamic fascists eat, sleep, and use their ATM cards in real nation-states ruled and
inhabited by real people, whose attitudes and activities either enhance or retard the
killers in their midsts. A series of polls confirms that millions of these people,
especially in the
All of this unmistakable enmity lends implicit support to the Baathist diehards who are
now mining and shooting Americans in
Yes, that is our message and our undeniable record. But the extremists and their passive
supporters are already aware that the
If we are to be of service to the thousands of Americans whom we have asked to risk their
lives in the alleys of Tikrit and on the peaks of Af ghanistan, there is another, more
deterrent message we might contemplate sending. It is that we ourselves are a bit
unpredictable and now at last extremely angry, that without apology we can just as easily
withdraw aid as extend it, expel visitors as welcome them, and become even worse enemies
than we are good friends. Until we make clear to our adversaries the real consequences of
their hatred, we will not be serving but subverting the accomplishments of our own
soldiers.
What else might we do? To encourage triangulators like the Saudis and Yemenis to hunt down
terrorists—as they have only recently begun to do, two years after September 11—we
should remind them that
In such a policy, everything would be on the table—all foreign aid, travel, commerce,
immigration. Our ties with a great number of Middle Eastern regimes should be contingent
precisely on their efforts to stop the implicit or explicit help they give to our enemies.
With
Above and beyond this, we must acknowledge the nature of the wider war against terrorism,
and of the dark times we are in. We of the postmodern age will lose many more of our own
in this struggle, and must kill far more of our premodern enemies to achieve victory. The
alternative to that depressing prospect is not a brokered peace but abject defeat,
punctuated by more September 11's.
Even apart from the toll in Israel and Iraq, all of the deadly terrorism since 9/11—against
the synagogue in Tunisia, against French naval personnel in Pakistan, Americans in
Karachi, tourists in Bali, Israelis in Kenya, Russians in both Moscow and Chechnya, and
foreigners in Saudi Arabia, the suicide car bombings in Morocco, the Marriott bombing in
Indonesia, the mass murder in Bombay, the killings in Turkey, and so forth—has been
perpetrated by Islamic fanatics and directed at Westerners, Christians, Hindus, Jews. In
this respect, our efforts are better seen in comparison to World War II than by analogy to
AS FOR the Iraqis, it needs to be made clear to them that the country is theirs, but so is
the responsibility to keep it theirs, and free. If, in years to come, they wish to avoid
the embargos, no-fly zones, and periodic bombings of the past, then they must step forward
now to establish a government that will preclude the emergence of a new Saddam Hussein or
of Iranian-style mullahs.
How best to help them do this? In a perfect world, it might not be desirable, for example,
to arm Shiites and Kurds to pacify the Sunni Triangle, but then many things in war are not
desirable. Such militias might at least remind recalcitrant Baathists that thousands of
Iraqis are angrier at them for what they did to their country than happy about what they
are now trying to do to us.
It is another paradox, but inescapably true, that the more overwhelming our conventional
battlefield superiority, the greater the need in the postwar period for different
strategies to deal with killers and terrorists who recede when we bomb and blast only to
reappear when we stop. Much of the hard military work that must be done in
This is not to deny the vital importance of maintaining daytime compounds from which
American soldiers wearing Ray-Ban glasses, camouflage, and big boots can issue forth to
exhibit strength and provide a bulwark for Iraqi police and militia. It is rather to
recognize that there is necessarily something static and wholly against the American
character in attempting to fight a defensive police action against paramilitary terrorists
from fixed positions. The victory of last April will be largely preserved at night, by
ingenious types who alone know how to win the hearts of local Iraqis as they kill the
killers in their midst.
Contrary to myth, Americans can take casualties—but only if they know they are
exacting a far greater toll on the enemy, and that they are on the offensive and on the
way to overwhelming victory. This utter defeat of the Baathists and their terrorist
supporters inside and outside the country is the task at hand. For good or ill, the peace
in
In an era of the greatest affluence and security in the history of civilization, the real
question before us remains whether the United States—indeed, whether any Western
democracy—still possesses the moral clarity to identify evil as evil, and then the
uncontested will to marshal every available resource to fight and eradicate it. In that
sense, our willingness to use unremitting force to eliminate vast cadres of proven
killers, in
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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON teaches classics at