Boot and Hanson, Final Round: Fixing Our Mistakes
- 02.02.2007 - 10:17 AMDear Max,
I wouldn’t necessarily conflate being more aggressive with being more brutal. We can patrol more, embed more advisors, shoot and arrest more insurgents, all without being gratuitously cruel or needlessly overbearing to civilian sensibilities.
Here is what I think happened in Iraq after April 2003. Bolstered by a 70-percent approval rating, and still smarting from all the prewar hysteria from the Left, the Bush administration felt that it could run out the clock, so to speak.
Thus, each time a challenge arose—looting, the Fallujah outbreak, the Sadr uprising—their idea was to finesse the crisis as much as possible. They were afraid to squander the capital of hard-won public support through (unneeded?) escalation, escalation that would increase casualties and only encourage further domestic and international condemnation of the war.
As a result of this policy, public support vanished anyway, in dribs and drabs, each time we did not react strongly and decisively enough to a provocation. The administration thought, apparently, that using more aggressive tactics would only further incite the growing anti-war movement and that the good news of progress in reconstruction would only continue to be ignored by a biased media.
And so with a whimper rather than a bang, our complacency and over-sensitive attention to perceived public opinion made us ever less aggressive and ever more attuned to “force protection”—at precisely the time more and more offensive operations were needed to break the insurgency and win back public opinion.
Now we must shatter that complacency and do in nine months what textbooks warn takes years. It is still not too late; history might still record as a considerable military achievement the removal of Saddam and the creation of a constitutional government in Iraq. The President and the military believe they can pull it off, while the opposition (whose proposals to withdraw are not matched by votes to reduce budget appropriations) remains, to say the least, doubtful. But the American public’s patience will, apparently, tolerate this final effort.
I am tired of reading the latest declarations of moral outrage from politicians and pundits blaming Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Franks, Sanchez, Casey, Abizaid, etc., for “their” three-year-long occupation that ruined “our” perfect three-week war. What happened in Iraq pales when compared to the horrifying mistakes our government and military made in the Civil War, in World War I and World War II, in Korea and Vietnam. What would this generation of politicians and journalists have said after Cold Harbor and the Battle of the Wilderness, after the two-year-long nightmare of the fall of France, after our World War II losses in the Atlantic, after the debacle in Greece, after the surrenders at Singapore and Tobruk? One can only imagine.
All that matters now is correcting our mistakes, countering the defeatists, and defeating the insurgents. We have to keep firmly in mind the correct notion that a functional democracy in Iraq would be the worst nightmare of jihadists the world over, of Iran, Syria, and the royal Gulf “moderates.” Allowing Iraq to devolve into the Lebanon of the 1980’s or the Afghanistan of the 1990’s, on the other hand, would restore al Qaeda’s lost sanctuary and provide a new base of operations for Iranian-backed terrorists. To paraphrase one commentator, such a failure would inflict “1,000 Mogadishus”-worth of damage on the reputation of the U.S. military and on a nascent and necessary U.S. Middle East policy, a policy seeking to transcend the dangerous (and cynical) “realism” of the past.
Best,
Victor
Boot I • Hanson I • Boot II • Hanson II • Boot III • Hanson III • Boot IV
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February 2nd, 2007 at 10:48 AM
Should any war be total war ? This engagement is being executed like a silly golf bet where you try to play the round with as few clubs as possible. Take out the driver when necessary and hit the damned ball as hard as you can if you need distance. Being subtle is fine for seduction, but woefully inadequate for much else. Diplomacy failed years ago, intelligence followed soon after. We have an array of weapons, yet we apply rules for different games as we choose them. It’s a bit like the quarterback having to tee up a ball as the defense rushes him, not much time for a practice swing !
February 5th, 2007 at 12:07 AM
When there’s a leak in the roof, patch it. Don’t get more buckets.
February 5th, 2007 at 2:28 PM
Mr. Hanson, Mr. Boot,
Many thanks for letting us all listen in on your fascinating discussion. I would add my own opinion but that would be like a go-cart entering the Indy 500.
February 5th, 2007 at 4:35 PM
I am as indebted as Steve in AZ.
February 5th, 2007 at 7:14 PM
Bush’s mistake was beleieving what he was told.
It’s true that he kept expecting the war to end at any moment.
The primary wrong assumption was assuming taht resistance however long it lasted, could only diminish with time.
This was a failure of intelligence. They didn’t understand what enemy they had.
What the Iraq war emphasizes more than anything else is how crucial is the role of intelligence.
February 18th, 2007 at 8:14 PM
A key word left out is sanctuary; Syrian sanctuary. It has been playing the role Laos and later Cambodia played in Vietnam. We have left Syria alone despite its using its soil to protect and send the insurgents across the border. We act as if they couldn’t stop it. But the Turks stopped them with the PKK. What Victor and Max is the reason why Syria gets a pass? Yes, it withdraw troops from Lebanon but it has so far managed to use its KGB to kill off key Lebanese opponents who support democracy. Re: Sammy-yes intelligence is crucial but it is peculiar too that the two key pieces of correct intell have been discredited; the Saddam al qaeda links (plus links to other terrorists) and WMD. See Laurie Mylroie for details on the terror links; see Caroline Glick on Primakov’s role in moving WMD to …you guessed it…Syria!
February 22nd, 2007 at 10:03 PM
Dear Mssrs. Boot and Hanson,
Thank you for your illuminating correspondence. I hope, somehow, the administration is reading and taking note. As a veteran, I am appalled that we are just now waking up to the fact that the post-modern dictum of a “polite war” is a recipe for wasted men, time and material. Destroy your enemy completely and without mercy! Then go about the task of rebuilding a nation. War as practiced by the West, and particularly America, can be a blessing to millions. War as theorized by post-moderns is a complete waste and only serves to paralyze and prolong death and suffering.
Best regards,
Sam Haldi
Atlanta, GA
March 8th, 2007 at 9:40 PM
>What would this generation of politicians and journalists have said after Cold Harbor ..?
Probably what the generation of 1865 did. They denounced Grant as ‘the fumbling butcher.’ They demanded an immediate end to the war and ran a war hero – McClellan – on a ‘Peace’ platform against Lincoln. They’d might well have won, too, if Sherman hadn’t taken Atlanta.
December 1st, 2007 at 5:56 PM
I was under the impression that our soft glove approach in Iraq, and the immediate neighborhood, was driven by our over appreciation of Muslim sensibilities about infidels rather than U.S. domestic political considerations–in short, that we were waiting for Mohammed Gidot and moderates to show up and build democracy, out of political correctness. In the meantime, Gidot did show up in a blast from the past for a rerun of the sixties, in the wrong hemisphere however. I even got my turntable going and put on Sergeant Pepper and then Brewer and Shipley’s Oh Mommy (I ain’t no commie). I’m still waiting for someone to top Bertan Russel’s “Better red than dead” but in the jihad context. I know: better alive and Muslim then gay and dead?
May 11th, 2008 at 4:01 AM
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