I didn't see the original post to which you responded, so I kind of know
where it came from.  I am enclosing VDH's latest bit of prose as an
alternative view to contemplate.

Denys

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Brice Yokem
Sent: Tuesday, January 03, 2006 1:33 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [HP3000-L] OT: Iraqi elections (A LIFE WASTED)

Though it hurts, I believe that his death -- and that of the other 
Americans who have died in Iraq -- was a waste. They were wasted in a 
belief that democracy would grow simply by removing a dictator -- a 
careless misunderstanding of what democracy requires. They were wasted by 
not sending enough troops to do the job needed in the resulting 
occupation -
- a careless disregard for professional military counsel.

----------------

This clearly speaks to the utter grief of the person writing.
The fact that 80% of the Iraqis turned out to vote in a place 
where one can get killed for doing it speaks volumes about
where democracy can grow.

I know most of the Bush opponents avoid taking official notice
of that fact and instead want to focus on sabotaging the effort
over there and making it look like a failure.

------------------------------------------


December 29, 2005, 8:21 a.m.
The Plague of Success
The paradox of ever-increasing expectations.


After September 11 national-security-minded Democratic politicians fell over
each other, voting for all sorts of tough measures. They passed the Patriot
Act, approved the war in Afghanistan, voted to authorize the removal of
Saddam Hussein, and nodded when they were briefed about Guantanamo or
wiretap intercepts of suspect phone calls to and from the Middle East. 

After the anthrax scare, the arrests of dozens of terrorist cells, and a
flurry of al Qaeda fatwas, most Americans thought another attack was
imminent - and wanted their politicians to think the same. Today's sourpuss,
Senator Harry Reid, once was smiling at a photo-op at the signing of the
Patriot Act to record to his constituents that he was darn serious about
terrorism. So we have forgotten that most of us after 9/11 would never have
imagined that the United States would remain untouched for over four years
after that awful cloud of ash settled over the crater at the World Trade
Center.

Now the horror of 9/11 and the sight of the doomed diving into the street
fade. Gone mostly are the flags on the cars, and the orange and red alerts.
The Democrats and the Left, in their amnesia, and as beneficiaries of the
very policies they suddenly abhor, now mention al Qaeda very little and
Islamic fascism hardly at all. 

Apparently due to the success of George Bush at keeping the United States
secure, he, not Osama bin Laden, can now more often be the target of a
relieved Left - deserving of assassination in an Alfred Knopf novel, an
overseer of Nazi policies according to a U.S. senator, a buffoon, and rogue
in the award-winning film of Michael Moore. Yes, because we did so well
against the real enemies, we soon had the leisure to invent new imaginary
ones in Bush/Cheney, Halliburton, the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, and
Scooter Libby.

Afghanistan in October, 2001, conjured up almost immediately warnings of
quagmire, expanding Holy War at Ramadan, unreliable allies, a trigger-happy
nuclear Pakistan on the border, American corpses to join British and Russian
bones in the high desert - not a seven-week victory and a subsequent
democracy in Kabul of all places. 

Nothing in our era would have seemed more unlikely than democrats dethroning
the Taliban and al Qaeda - hitherto missile-proof in their much ballyhooed
cave complexes that maps in Newsweek assured us rivaled Norad's subterranean
fortress. The prior, now-sanctified Clinton doctrine of standoff bombing
ensured that there would be no American fatalities and almost nothing ever
accomplished - the perfect strategy for the focus-group/straw-poll era of
the 1990s.

Are we then basking in the unbelievable notion that the most diabolical
government of the late 20th century is gone from Afghanistan, and in its
place are schools, roads, and voting machines? Hardly, since the bar has
been astronomically raised since Tora Bora. After all, the Afghan parliament
is still squabbling and a long way from the city councils of Cambridge, La
Jolla, or Nantucket - or maybe not.

The same paradox of success is true of Iraq. Before we went in, analysts and
opponents forecasted burning oil wells, millions of refugees streaming into
Jordan and the Gulf kingdoms, with thousands of Americans killed just taking
Baghdad alone. Middle Eastern potentates warned us of chemical rockets that
would shower our troops in Kuwait. On the eve of the war, had anyone
predicted that Saddam would be toppled in three weeks, and
two-and-a-half-years later, 11 million Iraqis would turn out to vote in
their third election - at a cost of some 2100 war dead - he would have been
dismissed as unhinged. 

But that is exactly what has happened. And the reaction? Democratic
firebrands are now talking of impeachment.

What explains this paradox of public disappointment over things that turn
out better than anticipated? Why are we like children who damn their parents
for not providing yet another new toy when the present one is neither paid
for nor yet out of the wrapper?

One cause is the demise of history. The past is either not taught enough, or
presented wrongly as a therapeutic exercise to excise our purported sins. 

Either way the result is the same: a historically ignorant populace who
knows nothing about past American wars and their disappointments - and has
absolutely no frame of reference to make sense of the present other than its
own mercurial emotional state in any given news cycle. 

Few Americans remember that nearly 750 Americans were killed in a single day
in a training exercise for D-Day, or that during the bloody American retreat
back from the Yalu River in late 1950 thousands of our frozen dead were sent
back stacked in trucks like firewood. Our grandparents in the recent past
endured things that would make the present ordeal in Iraq seem almost
pedestrian - and did all that with the result that a free Germany could now
release terrorists or prosperous South Korean youth could damn the United
States between their video games.

Instead, we of the present think that we have reinvented the rules of war
and peace anew. After Grenada, Panama, Gulf War I, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia,
Afghanistan, and the three-week war to remove Saddam, we decreed from on
high that there simply were to be no fatalities in the American way of war.
If there were, someone was to be blamed, censured, or impeached - right now!

Second, there is a sort of arrogant smugness that has taken hold in the West
at large. Read the papers about an average day in Washington D.C., Los
Angeles, Detroit, or even in smaller places like Fresno. The headlines are
mostly the story of mayhem - murder, rape, arson, and theft. Yet, we think
Afghanistan is failing or Iraq hopeless when we watch similar violence on
television, as if they do such things and we surely do not. We denigrate the
Iraqis' trial of Saddam Hussein - as if the Milosevic legal circus or our
own O.J. trial were models of jurisprudence. Still, who would have thought
that poor Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, a mass-murdering half-brother of Saddam
Hussein, would complain that Iraqi television delayed lived feeds of his
daily outbursts by whimpering, "If the sound is cut off once again, then I
don't know about my comrades but I personally won't attend again. This is
unjust and undemocratic."

A greater percentage of Iraqis participated in their elections after two
years of consensual government than did Americans after nearly 230 years of
practice. It is chic now to deprecate the Iraqi security forces, but they
are doing a lot more to kill jihadists than the French or Germans who often
either wire terrorists money, sell them weapons, or let them go. For what
it's worth, I'd prefer to have one Jalal Talabani or Iyad Allawi on our side
than ten Jacques Chiracs or Gerhard Schroeders.

Third, our affluent society is at a complete disconnect with hard physical
work and appreciation of how tenuous life was for 2,500 years of
civilization. Those in our media circus who deliver our truth can't weld,
fix a car, shoot a gun, or do much of anything other than run around looking
for scoops about how incompetent things are done daily in Iraq under the
most trying of circumstances. Somehow we have convinced ourselves that our
technologies and wealth give us a pass on the old obstacles of time and
space - as if Iraq 7,000 miles away is no more distant than Washington is
from New York. Perhaps soldiers on patrol who go for 20 hours without sleep
with 70 pounds on their back are merely like journalists pulling an
all-nighter to file a story. Perhaps the next scandal will be the absence of
high-definition television in Iraq - and who plotted to keep flat screens
out of Baghdad.

The result of this juvenile boredom with good news and success? Few stop to
reflect how different a Pakistan is as a neutral rather than as the embryo
of the Taliban, or a Libya without a nuclear-weapons program, or a Lebanon
with Syrians in it, or an Iraq without Saddam and Afghanistan without Mullah
Omar. That someone - mostly soldiers in the field and diplomats under the
most trying of circumstances - accomplished all that is either unknown or
forgotten as we ready ourselves for the next scandal. 

Precisely because we are winning this war and have changed the contour of
the Middle East, we expect even more - and ever more quickly, without cost
in lives or treasure. So rather than stopping to praise and commemorate
those who gave us our success, we can only rush ahead to destroy those who
do not give us even more.

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the
author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and
Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

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