I heard Victor Davis Hanson on C-Span recently. His heart is in the right place and he has a great deal to offer but he seems to miss the point a lot. He keeps reminding us of the mistakes that were made in World War II and the numbers of deaths and so on, and saying that in comparison, Iraq has been comparatively far better on both counts.
But most Americans know that WWII was a vastly larger enterprise, with several theaters, and millions of soldiers, and an actively aggressive and blatantly brutal enemy, while Iraq is a much smaller operation. So why keep comparing them? The harping on the number of American deaths in WWII also has the downside of adding to the negativity about our history that we often hear from the Left. It’s the same when Hanson says that the Founders would not be disturbed at anything Bush has done regarding our civil liberties, but they would have been disturbed at the Japanese internment. So to promote Iraq and Bush, our past has once again to be presented negatively, canceling out to some extent whatever bit of reconciliation we have achieved and keeping the wounds open. This is not great.
Also, WWII was well defined in the minds of most Americans. The chief grievance that I think Americans have against Bush is not “mistakes” but the naive, shall we say almost unforgivably naive idea of freedom being the natural entitlement of all mankind, for which all men have the capacity right now. As a result of that belief, we had absolutely no preparation for what would happen after the fall of Saddam, because we thought that the Iraqis would immediately create a functioning democracy. Has there ever been a president in American history this naive about “freedom”? Oh, sure, many have made inspiring speeches about freedom, but I don’t think any expected that “freedom” itself would create a functioning liberal self-government in a part of the world that had no preparation and no cultural disposition for it.
So it’s not any “mistake,” like not up-armoring the humvees, that has mainly alienated people from Bush, but the whole utopian approach of democracy as being the panacea for all the ills of mankind. On top of this, when things didn’t go well with democracy in Iraq, we heard arrogant pronouncements from Rice and others, such as “Who are we to judge, our democracy was not perfect, women couldn’t vote, we had slavery,” and so on. So again, our country was denigrated in order to make Iraq look good. And once again, I don’t think the American people felt the two things, our country at its Founding, and Iraq after Saddam, were really comparable. So there was a feeling that the Administration was using a kind of PC to stifle our responses and put one over on us. Also, they would sometimes criticize people who doubted the enterprise for their lack of faith in the power of freedom.
Also, when we hear the supporters of the war say how successful things are now, we cringe to think of the persecution of the Christians and other groups who were actually protected under Saddam. It is painful to think that this kind of persecution goes on while American boots are actually on the ground.
The irony is that Hanson on C-Span was attacking “utopian” leftism, which, he said, leaps to criticize any mistake, doesn’t see that human endeavors are always beset by troubles, stands apart on an Archimedean point off the planet and judges, while, reality, many Americans feel that it was Bush who was utopian in his approach to Iraq and his belief in the power of freedom to solve all ills, that Bush didn’t show the shrewd pragmatism and common sense understanding of human nature that we want to see in leaders, especially leaders who send troops into danger.