Instapundit responds to a blogger challenge: “If you are a blogger who was active in March 2003, link to that month's archive and write an entry called ‘What I was wrong about in March 2003’.” Preliminary to reviewing his own record from four years ago, Professor Reynolds observes,
Brian’s entry isn't too impressive as mea culpas go – basically, he says he underestimated just how immoral and evil people who disagreed with him were.
After reading that, I guessed that the challenger was a left-wing anti-war blatherer – one of the least daring inferences I’ve made in my life.
My thoughts on events in March 2003 (not precisely a blog, but close enough) can be found here. The March 30, 2003, post recalls an already forgotten snatch of history.
A new left-wing line on the Iraqi campaign has taken shape rapidly: The war plans were formulated by extravagantly optimistic hawks, principally Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, who expected Saddam Hussein’s regime to topple at the first push. Overriding the wise counsel of military professionals, they sent an undermanned, under-armed force that is now stymied by the unanticipated resistance of pro-Ba’athist irregulars and the sullen indifference of the Iraqi people to “liberation”. Even if massive reinforcements eventually result in Saddam’s overthrow, the victory will be Pyrrhic. In the words of Robin Cook, who quit Tony Blair’s government to protest the war: “Nobody should start a war on the assumption that the enemy’s army will co-operate. But that is exactly what President Bush has done. And now his Marines have reached the outskirts of Baghdad, he does not seem to know what to do next.”
At the time, competent observers were forecasting that the coming battle for Baghdad would resemble Stalingrad. I didn’t go so far as to say that it wouldn’t but did venture an optimistic thought:
Mr. Cook’s “He does not seem to know what to do next” is founded on nothing more than the fact that President Bush has not announced to the world a step-by-step program for gaining control of the city. Conceivably there is no plan or a bad one. We will find out over the next few days or weeks. On the other hand, if everybody at CNN knows that urban fighting is difficult, perhaps the Pentagon has figured it out, too, and has thought about how to root out die-hard opposition with the least feasible loss of life. It is a trifle premature to condemn an as-yet-unknown strategy.
Ten days later, Baghdad fell with scarcely any bloodshed. Might there be a moral there for persistent pessimists?
Other highlights of the month:
March 9, 2003:
How strange to read in The New York Times – not The Washington Times, mind you – a news analysis that pretty much comes out and says bluntly that the United Nations has betrayed the hopes that were invested in it 58 years ago. The U.N.’s problem is not just
Iraq. . . .
The article’s sources, almost all of them internationalist liberals, concede that this instance of the organization’s impotence is not an aberration. “The arc of hope for United Nations’ effectiveness in maintaining peace had its one real high moment in Iraq in 1991.” But –
That was before Rwanda, where 800,000 people were massacred as the world watched. It was before Bosnia, where United Nations peacekeepers were helpless to prevent Serbs from killing their Muslim neighbors.
It was also, though the article leaves this one out, before Kosovo, where no one – not Bill Clinton or Jacques Chirac or Gerhart Schröder – bothered invoking the U.N.’s “peace keeping” mechanisms.
In retrospect, too, the “high moment in Iraq in 1991” was an illusion.
Mr. Luck [Professor Edward C. Luck, Columbia University] says the first President Bush’s approach to the United Nations was not really different than his son’s. “George H. W. Bush said he was only going to stay with the Security Council as long as he knew he was going to win.”
In other words, the U.N. looked effective because it got out of the way of the United States. On its own, it could have done no more in 1991 than in 2003.
I concurred with the Times, composing a descriptive jingle for the façade by Turtle Bay:
That great glass palace
Of mendacity and mendicancy and malice
The years since have given no cause to revise that judgment.
March 11, 2003:
John Hawkins, the lively proprietor of Right Wing News, has asked and sought to answer an obvious question that anti-warriors tend to sidestep: What will the future look like if, as the French demand and Democratic bigwigs advise, the United States leaves Saddam Hussein in power, “contained” by Hans Blix?
There’s no empirical check on counterfactual prognostications, but I still see merit in what I wrote then:
By retaining large forces in the Middle East, without the backing of which the Blix Korps will be kicked out of Iraq within hours, the United States will suffer most of the detriments of war without the possibility of victory. We will spend a lot of money, oil prices will remain high, and the economy will slide back into recession.
With a stagnant war and a stagnant economy, George W. Bush will have little chance of re-election. None of his potential successors, with the conceivable but not likely exception of Richard Gephardt, has shown a lively desire to pursue an active war on terrorism. Under the new Administration, America will hunker down in a purely defensive mode.
Successful defense requires preventing every significant terrorist attack. We don’t want to live with two or three 9/11’s – or even Oklahoma Cities – every year. As pressure eases on the states that protect al-Qaeda and its imitators (the latter will doubtless become more important than their battered forerunner), attempted attacks will increase and will be thwarted only by increasingly intrusive and draconian defensive measures. If you enjoy airport check-ins, you'll love going through metal detectors to enter the mall and showing your national identity card to get on a city bus.
If we had not deposed the Ba’athists, the world would not have lapsed into a default condition of peace, prosperity and happiness. We tend to forget that.
March 12, 2003:
The instant “human reaction” of most Americans [to French attempts to block the liberation of Iraq] will be something on the order of, “We’ll show those frogs!” But M. Barrot [a French politician whom I had quoted] is probably right. Banning the name “French fries” from the Congressional dining room menu is likely to be the maximum extent of our retaliation for what future historians will describe as a deed of vile treachery.
That the French elite can be so insouciant about sticking thorns into a lion’s paws exposes the self-contradiction that lies at the heart of their actions. The rationale for restraining the United States is that it is the “hyperpower”, which, left unchained, will arbitrarily dictate to the entire world. Yet the reason why opposition is a safe policy is that the hyperpower doesn’t act like one. Unless physically attacked, it pretty much lets the rest of the world go its own way. America is the opposite of the militarist, mercantilist superpowers of the past. Until 9/11, after all, the Bush Administration’s major foreign policy objective was to reduce barriers to international trade, and every American military action between the end of the Cold War and the intervention in Afghanistan (the first Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo) was carried out more for the benefit of others than for ourselves.
Ironically, the policy now being pursued by France and Germany could create the very menace that it ostensibly seeks to contain. Salus populi suprema lex. If cooperating with other nations and building international coalitions endangers American self-defense, America will cease to pay attention to the opinions of foreigners. From there the transition to a real imperial role will be a short and easy one.
America has, of course, remained resolutely un-imperial, and French fries have returned to the Congressional menu.
March 19, 2003:
There is a further factor [in addition to left-wing media bias] that both lowers [foreign] resistance to anti-American views and, ironically, renders them less dangerous: Very few people in the rest of the world care very much about U.S. foreign policy. Leftist ideologues care, and there are enough of them to turn out superficially impressive numbers of protest marchers. The minority that follows public affairs closely cares, too, but no one else has much reason to believe that he needs to pay close attention to what America does or why. We aren’t going to invade Norway. We aren’t even going to ask Norwegians to expend blood or treasure in our behalf. If Norway were to turn its back on America entirely, the most serious consequence would be, as our ambassador recently had the temerity to intimate, that Americans might stop thinking of Norway as a friend. Which would mean, I suppose, that we might be slow to come to its aid against an invading Australian armada.
Because the United States is so strong in relation to any conceivable combination of other countries, it places few burdens on friends and exacts few penalties from non-violent enemies. Therefore, it is not important for the average citizen to hold informed opinions about America, and, with admirable intellectual economy, most don’t bother. Thus what they tell pollsters is likely to be superficial, based on impressions casually picked up from newspaper headlines, TV sound bites and the steady stream of “America the menace” commentary. Someone who reads no more than “U.S. Defies U.N.” will probably show up in a poll as disapproving of U.S. policy, but the disapproval is shallow. We would naturally be gratified if it didn't exist, but should we therefore direct our policy toward garnering nice-sounding headlines, regardless of the substance of our actions?
Newsweek [whose cover story that week had labeled America an “arrogant empire”] would, it seems, say “yes”. Its version of multilateralism is “go along to get along”, leavened with veiled but unmistakable contempt for foreigners, who are seen as so thin-skinned that withdrawing from treaties “brusquely”, instead of with a smile, outrages them and so gullible that gestures like token adherence to the International Criminal Court (which could not in practice arrest an American citizen) would appease their wrath. If we followed that prescription, we would gain friendships as insubstantial as the present hostility, at the cost of adopting policies that, at best, were chosen for reasons unrelated to their merits and, at worst, undermined our liberty, security and prosperity.
March 22, 2003:
The current air campaign against Iraq represents the flowering of neo-Douhetist principles. While many strikes are no doubt hitting traditional military targets, the main thrust is directed specifically against the morale of the enemy leadership, starting with Thursday morning’s “decapitation” strike. The goal is evidently to kill, or, failing that, force into hiding and disrupt communications among, the Ba’athist hierarchs. Judging by results on the ground, that objective is being realized. The Iraqi armed forces show no signs of mounting a coherent resistance to allied advances. Saddam Hussein, if he is physically able to lead, is keeping his head down. My guess is that he is alive but essentially catatonic, terrified that any conspicuous action on his part will attract a cruise
missile. . . .
As I write, reports indicate that the allies have suffered two combat fatalities in the course of advancing to and beyond the line that they occupied at the end of the Gulf War. There may be a few unreported casualties, but the death toll from enemy action is clearly negligible. We are losing far more men to
accidents. . . .
To expect the “cakewalk” to continue all the way to Baghdad would be highly optimistic. The odds are that we will eventually encounter enemy formations that won’t give up and can’t be bypassed. By that time, though, they will have little superiority in numbers and gross inferiority in firepower. The resulting battles will be extremely one-sided.
In actuality, all of the Iraqi forces did either give up or run away. So I was wrong about that one.
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