Why I don’t think the war is a failure

  • This was from an e-mail dis­cus­sion with a friend, and Greg-the-husband thought it mer­ited its own blog entry. Hey, who am I to argue? If the poll num­bers are to be believed, just about every­one thinks that it’s time to leave Iraq, admit the whole thing was a fail­ure and blame Bush. I’m not say­ing those peo­ple aren’t enti­tled to their opin­ion, but here are the rea­sons that I don’t agree:

    • I’m not as sure as every­one else that the war is some com­plete fail­ure. I don’t know why it is that the image of peo­ple (men and women) actu­ally vot­ing and draft­ing a con­sti­tu­tion stays in everyone’s con­scious­ness for about 12 sec­onds. Our country’s foun­da­tion took us decades, if not cen­turies, to hash out and we still had to go through a civil war (and we come close to it from time to time still). We’re tak­ing these guys who have been under the thick blan­ket of medieval fuedal­ism and total­i­tar­i­an­ism for a mil­len­nium and try­ing to put them on the fast track in a cou­ple years. But then that‘s not good enough and we need to see that they “get it” con­stantly, and in ways that we can all under­stand by read­ing head­lines half a world away. Of course they’ll respond to the new-found free­dom by thrash­ing out their own civil dis­cord (Sun­nis vs. Shi­ites or what­ever). We could all think that meant we were com­pletely evil if it wasn’t the rule every­where that oppressed peo­ple have been freed up. (Soviet Union breakup, end to Indian colo­nial­ism, end of apartheid, and so on).
    • Things may be screwed up, but I think that it’s nearly impos­si­ble to know what the sit­u­a­tion really is over there in the cul­ture we’ve got right now. The war has been politi­cized, and no mat­ter whose fault that is, it means that you can count on the old right/left lines being drawn. The MSM, who never like wars of any sort and don’t iden­tify much with the mil­i­tary, sud­denly have the cul­ture war thrown in as well. When they see the mil­i­tary strike a great blow for the war effort and destroy an entire insur­gent encamp­ment (thus sav­ing untold lives and reliev­ing the ten­sion of the sur­round­ing towns) are they ever going to joy­fully report that? On the other hand, good­ness knows the mil­i­tary is bound to report glow­ingly of what­ever is going on.
    • Since I don’t trust any reports that can be spun, I tend to go with the hard num­bers we all agree on — 2,000+ casu­al­ties on our side. Good grief! Does any­body get what an amaz­ingly low num­ber that is??? Of course nobody ever wants for any­body to die in a war, but since that’s not a rea­son­able expec­ta­tion, shouldn’t it be judged by the stan­dard of other wars? Here are a cou­ple num­bers from a quick Google search: Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War — lasted 80 months, 4,435 com­bat deaths; Civil War — lasted 48 months, 184,594 com­bat deaths; WW II — 44 months, 292,131 com­bat deaths (6,639 per month); Viet­nam War — lasted 90 months, 47,369 com­bat deaths. Is it just because the only one most of us remem­ber is the Gulf War (1 month, 148 com­bat deaths) that we’ve lost all track of what you can expect from a war?
    • The other indis­putable item is that ter­ror­ism skir­mishes are break­ing out in dif­fer­ent places, like this recent hor­ror in Jor­dan. But don’t we get that if the insur­gents have taken to Mus­lim on Mus­lim vio­lence (like today’s attacks on Mus­lims pray­ing in mosques), it’s a sure sign that (a) they can no longer effec­tively take us out in large num­bers, or even take hostages; and (b) they’re show­ing their hand — they can no longer hide behind the Koran. They’re oppor­tunists as all guer­rilla war­riors are (as we were dur­ing the Rev­o­lu­tion), and they will always do all they can. Not­ing that there’s been a major shift in what they can do ought to remind us that the war has been a huge suc­cess in pre­vent­ing them from oper­at­ing unfet­tered and in grow­ing at the pace they did dur­ing the Clin­ton years.
    • I don’t blame Bush for the Iraq war in any case. Don’t have any­thing more than a gut response on that, but that’s the way I feel. As for low num­bers, … what­ever. We’ve become obsessed with polls, but it doesn’t make them accu­rate, just handy. If it rained apple pie tomor­row, Bush’s approval num­bers would go up. And con­ser­v­a­tives — myself included — are cranky with Bush over a lot of things.
    • If I thought the war was a fail­ure and I thought it was Bush’s fault, I still wouldn’t think we need to come up with a date to pull out. For good­ness’ sake, if we’re going to start with that, why don’t we just strap a tar­get on every­one that’s still over there and let al Qaida know when we’re plan­ning big gath­er­ings? Part of the rea­son they launched the 9/11 attack is because they really believed that we were too spine­less to ever go to war, and part of the rea­son they’ve scaled up the action now is because they really believe that we’ll never stick it out long enough to give a free Iraq a fight­ing chance. If I thought we’d done every­thing wrong up till now, I would still think this is the thing we should get right.

    Related posts:

    1. Heck­uva speech going on
    2. Blog round-up
    3. The Bat­tle of Lex­ing­ton and so on
    4. When no one was look­ing, Cindy Shee­han went com­pletely mad
    5. The canoe-headed one strikes back

    November 18th, 2005 | Grace | 1 Comment |

One Response and Counting...

  • Keb 11.18.2005

    Very good points in which I agree with them all.

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