The War: Then & Now

A year ago, National Review columnist Victor Davis Hanson was pretty optimistic. His column on April 25, 2003, "Time is on our side: The easier part still may be to come," wagged a finger at a mainstream media that he said was "bored and a little chagrined with the rapidity of the American victory."

Like skunks at a garden party, the big media anchors of this world "hyped" anything that might paint the American triumph in Iraq as less than dazzling, wrote Hanson, looking first "to find a salacious story in the looting" of the Iraqi museums and then playing up "the temporary absence of weapons of mass destruction."

The real story, explained Hanson, was much more terrific: "Billions of dollars in world aid will soon pour into Baghdad, as oil revenues now freed from Saddam's clutches are used to finance reconstruction projects. Kuwait and other Gulf states have experience in building businesses and will be eager to invest in Iraq; they themselves are more likely to liberalize than to return to reactionary fundamentalism."

Inside Iraq, Hanson saw the clash between Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis as evidence that good things were happening: "The sheer number of factions emerging in Iraq is proof of the birth-pangs of democracy, the principled reluctance of the United States to impose its own rule, and the near-impossibility of fundamentalists controlling the wide political landscape."

Clearly, declared Hanson, the regional dominos were falling our way. In Damascus: "Syria is now a dictatorial atoll in a growing sea of democracy, surrounded by Israel, Turkey, and a soon-to-be-consensual Iraq." And in Ankara: "Turkey not so much missed the train, as never got to the station, and thus next time will be more likely to seek rather than spurn American friendship." And in Tehran: "The omnipresence of the United States, 20 years of failure inside Iran, and the attractions of American popular culture will insidiously undermine the medieval reign of the mullahs faster than it can do harm to the foundations of democracy in Baghdad."

And even bigger than that, explained Hanson, what we were seeing when the statue of Saddam came crashing down in Baghdad was the end of Islamic fascism, just as the tearing down of the Berlin Wall had symbolized the end of communism: "Marxism and Khomeinism are both spent forces that have no resonance outside (and little even within) a bankrupt Cuba, North Korea, or Iran. These tired ideologies are more like the dreary bureaucracy of the 1980s Soviet Union than the Communist juggernaut of the post-colonial late '40s. If a few agents and saboteurs inside Iraq are dealt with promptly and firmly in the next few weeks, there will be little chance of mass uprisings."

Measured in costs and benefits, Hanson saw a good deal in Iraq, an effort that would change the world and not bust the budget: "Despite the frenzied charges, we probably so far have spent no more than $30 billion on the military operations of Operation Iraqi Freedom – not the 'hundreds of billions' forecast by alarmists who sometimes slipped into 'trillions.' More importantly, after the shooting has stopped, military expenses will inevitably decline."

Today, Hanson sounds a bit less cheerful. The 9/11 hearings are looking at how the intelligence dots weren't connected. The killing of American troops in Iraq is up. The economic cost is up. The taking of hostages is up. The price of gas is up. The Iraqi army won't fight. Neither will Spain. The medieval enemies haven't decided to give up terrorism for Pepsi. And, increasingly, the American public doesn't like what it's seeing.

"Who, after all," asks Hanson, "wishes to relax on the sofa to watch 'The Apprentice' or 'Extreme Makeover' – and then channel surf to images of barbarians promising to roast and eat Japanese aid workers or scenes of charred bodies being dissected by Attila's modern-day spiritual successors?"

As he did last year, Hanson points a finger of blame at the media. There's too much questioning, and we're buying the wrong books: "The president of the United States gives a press conference to steel our will and endures mostly inane cross examination – at the very time The New York Times best-seller list has five of its Top 10 books alleging that he is a near criminal."

For Hanson, in short, the problem isn't that he got it wrong last year. The problem is that too many people are asking too many questions.

April 28, 2004

Ralph R. Reiland is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist and the B. Kenneth Simon Professor of Free Enterprise at Robert Morris University.

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