For what seems like several times a week since Sept. 11, I've been heartened and bolstered by the essays of Victor Davis Hanson. I confess that before the 11th I had never heard of him, but in the months that came after I kept running across his work and it always provided both light and insight. Hanson is one of those writers whose "signal to noise" ration is virtually all signal all the time. Hanson comes across once more this week in Victor Davis Hanson on The Surreal World of Iraq in The National Review:
Indeed, intense media scrutiny of Iraqi, not American suffering and discomfort, was the new gospel despite the clear evidence that at some danger to our soldiers we had sought to avoid hurting civilians and their infrastructure. A soldier or terrorist who had shot at Americans, been wounded, and had tossed away either his uniform or weapons was more likely to be tallied by the world's press as an unfortunate civilian casualty than as an injured combatant hurt in the hammer and tongs of battle. Under the new war, using enough force to beat soundly the enemy and convince him in the aftermath to accept defeat - or else - was seen as excessive, while the effort to mitigate the violence of fighting may have suggested to the Baathists that they had not really been beaten after all.Posted by Vanderleun at July 3, 2003 1:09 PMNot to be outdone, domestic critics of our military who had forecast "millions of refugees" and "thousands of casualties" and in week one of the war during a sandstorm had continued on with a chorus of "Stalemate," "Quagmire" and "Vietnam"; now post facto paradoxically reversed course. They suddenly played down our own soldiers' competency by concluding (in their infinite wisdom from the rear) that the Iraqi army was a paper tiger -hardly capable of waging modern war after all! In a blink of an eye their horrific quagmire became a bullying cakewalk.
In the first postbellum 100 days, the Americans lost about 60 additional lives in trying to pacify a Muslim and Arab country of some 26 million, wracked by factions, foreign agents, and plagued by thousands of former Baathist fascists who had transmogrified into drive-by shooters and assassins ; all in a post 9/11 world where it has been often difficult to distinguish "moderates" in the Middle East from complacent onlookers who were not especially sad to see two towers full of 3,000 Americans disintegrate.
