[Mb-civic] FW: We're winning in Iraq. Let's not lose at home.

Thu Mar 2 11:26:59 PST 2006

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Shon Saleh" <shonsa at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2006 05:03:51 +0000
To: pcohanim at zodax.com, jcohanim at zodax.com, peter at eliades.net,
kenfeige at aol.com, grgolsorkhi at earthlink.net
Subject: FW: We're winning in Iraq. Let's not lose at home.

>Subject: We're winning in Iraq. Let's not lose at home.
>Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 09:06:17 -0800
>
>http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008030
>
>
>
>
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>  <http://www.wsj.com/>  <http://www.wsj.com/> WSJ.com
><http://www.wsj.com/>
><http://www.wsj.com/>  <http://www.opinionjournal.com/>
><http://www.opinionjournal.com/> OpinionJournal
><http://www.opinionjournal.com/>  <http://www.opinionjournal.com/>
>
>
>
>
>DIVIDED NATION
>
>At War With Ourselves
>We're winning in Iraq. Let's not lose at home.
>
>BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
>Wednesday, March 1, 2006 12:01 a.m.
>
>Last week the golden dome of the Askariya shrine in Samarra was blown
>apart.
>Sectarian riots followed, and reprisals and deaths ensued. Thugs and
>criminals came out of the woodwork to foment further violence. But instead
>of the apocalypse of an ensuing civil war, a curfew was enforced. Iraqi
>security forces stepped in with some success. Shaken Sunni and Shiite
>leaders appeared on television to urge restraint, and there appeared at
>least the semblance of reconciliation that may soon presage a viable
>coalition government.
>
>But here at home you would have thought that our own capitol dome had
>exploded. Indeed, Americans more than the Iraqis needed such advice for
>calm
>to quiet our own frenzy. Almost before the golden shards of the mosque hit
>the pavement, pundits wrote off the war as lost--as we heard the tired
>metaphors of "final straw" and "camel's back" mindlessly repeated. The
>long-anticipated civil strife among Shiites and Sunnis, we were assured,
>was
>not merely imminent, but already well upon us. Then the great civil war
>sort
>of fizzled out; our own frenzy subsided; and now exhausted we await next
>week's new prescription of doom--apparently the hyped-up story of Arabs at
>our ports. That the Iraqi security forces are becoming bigger and better,
>that we have witnessed three successful elections, and that hundreds of
>brave American soldiers have died to get us to the brink of seeing an Iraqi
>government emerge was forgotten in a 24-hour news cycle.
>
>Few observers suggested that the Samarra bombing of a holy mosque by
>radical
>Muslims might be a sign of the terrorists' desperation--killers who have
>not, and cannot, defeat the U.S. military. After the furor over Danish
>cartoons, French rioting and Iranian nuclear perfidy, the entire world is
>turning on radical Islam and the terrorists feel keenly this rising tide of
>opposition on the frontline in Iraq.
>
>True, the Sunni Triangle, unlike southern Iraq and Kurdistan, is often
>inhospitable to the forces of reconstruction--but hardly lost to jihadists
>and militias as we are told. There is a disturbing sameness to our acrimony
>at home, as we recall all the links in this chain of America hysteria from
>the brouhaha over George Bush's flight suit to purported flushed Korans at
>Guantanamo Bay. Each time we are lectured that the looting, Abu Ghraib, the
>embalming of Uday and Qusay, the demeaning oral exam of Saddam, unarmored
>Humvees, inadequate body armor or the latest catastrophe has squandered our
>victory, the unimpressed U.S. military simply goes about what it does
>best--defeating the terrorists and training the Iraqi military to serve a
>democratic government. They stay focused in this long war, while our
>pundits
>prepare the next controversy.
>
>The second-guessing of 2003 still daily obsesses us: We should have had
>better intelligence; we could have kept the Iraqi military intact; we would
>have been better off deploying more troops. Had our forefathers embraced
>such a suicidal and reactionary wartime mentality, Americans would have
>still torn each other apart over Valley Forge years later on the eve of
>Yorktown--or refought Pearl Harbor even as they steamed out to Okinawa.
>
>There is a more disturbing element to these self-serving, always evolving
>pronouncements of the "my perfect war, but your disastrous peace" syndrome.
>Conservatives who insisted that we needed more initial troops are often the
>same ones who now decry that too much money has been spent in Iraq.
>Liberals
>who chant "no blood for oil" lament that we unnecessarily ratcheted up the
>global price of petroleum. Progressives who charge that we are imperialists
>also indict us for being naively idealistic in thinking democracy could
>take
>root in post-Baathist Iraq and providing aid of a magnitude not seen since
>the Marshall Plan. For many, Iraq is no longer a war whose prognosis is to
>be judged empirically. It has instead transmogrified into a powerful symbol
>that apparently must serve deeply held, but preconceived, beliefs--the
>deceptions of Mr. Bush, the folly of a neoconservative cabal, the necessary
>comeuppance of the American imperium, or the greed of an oil-hungry U.S.
>
>
>
>If many are determined to see the Iraqi war as lost without a plan, it
>hardly seems so to 130,000 U.S. soldiers still over there. They explain to
>visitors that they have always had a design: defeat the Islamic terrorists;
>train a competent Iraqi military; and provide requisite time for a
>democratic Iraqi government to garner public support away from the
>Islamists.
>
>We point fingers at each other; soldiers under fire point to their
>achievements: Largely because they fight jihadists over there, there has
>not
>been another 9/11 here. Because Saddam is gone, reform is not just confined
>to Iraq, but taking hold in Lebanon, Egypt and the Gulf. We hear the
>military is nearly ruined after conducting two wars and staying on to birth
>two democracies; its soldiers feel that they are more experienced and
>lethal, and on the verge of pulling off the nearly impossible: offering a
>people terrorized from nightmarish oppression something other than the
>false
>choice of dictatorship or theocracy--and making the U.S. safer for the
>effort.
>
>The secretary of defense, like officers in Iraq, did not welcome the war,
>but felt that it needed to be fought and will be won. Soldiers and civilian
>planners express confidence in eventual success, but with awareness of
>often
>having only difficult and more difficult choices after Sept. 11. Put too
>many troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we earn the wages of imperialism,
>or create a costly footprint that is hard to erase, or engender a
>dependency
>among the very ones in whom we wish to ensure self-reliance. Yet deploy too
>few troops, and instability arises in Kabul and Baghdad, as the Islamists
>lose their fear of American power and turn on the vulnerable we seek to
>protect.
>
>In sum, after talking to our soldiers in Iraq and our planners in
>Washington, what seems to me most inexplicable is the war over the war--not
>the purported absence of a plan, but that the more we are winning in the
>field, the more we are losing it at home.
>
>Mr. Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover
>Institution, and the author most recently of "A War Like No Other: How the
>Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War" (Random House, 2005).
>
>Copyright © 2006 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
>
>
>

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