War and 'Competence'
What Abraham Lincoln could teach John Kerry about Iraq.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004 12:01 a.m.
A week before Election Day, John Kerry and his allies have once again changed their line of attack on Iraq. The issue isn't any longer whether we should have fought the war at all ("wrong war, wrong place, wrong time"), it is that the Senator would fight it with more "competence."
The peg for this line is yesterday's story that a stockpile of explosives was stolen from under the Coalition's nose in Iraq. This is certainly bad news and looks like a blunder. But what is it precisely that the Kerry campaign is asserting? That if it were running the war, mistakes would never be made? That amid the fog of war, and facing a determined enemy, nothing bad ever happens?
Implicit in this accusation is the assumption that the Bush Administration has faced a series of easy decisions in Iraq, and somehow blown them all. Come to think of it, this has been a staple of the criticism from all of those sunshine hawks, such as Mr. Kerry, who supported the war before it began but have since had second thoughts. Toppling Saddam Hussein seemed like a good idea at the time, but the Bush Administration messed it up by not heeding their sound counsel.
Yet who ever said war is easy? On the eve of the war, in 2003, we wrote that "the law of unintended consequences has not been repealed, no war ever goes precisely as planned," and that "toppling Saddam is a long-term undertaking."
We had no doubt that the American people had the staying power to win, but our main concern was "whether Americans can generate the political consensus to sustain involvement in Iraq." Alas, that worry has been borne out by Monday-morning four-stars on both the left and right.
Certainly the Bush Administration has made mistakes, as these columns have noted along the way. The CIA failed to anticipate the Baathist strategy of yielding the war conventionally in order to wage it later unconventionally. Stopping the Marine advance in Fallujah last April sent a message of hesitation that is only now being corrected. Muqtada al-Sadr's career ought to have been ended when he was an upstart; today he's an untouchable. The political handover should have happened much sooner than it did, and we should have trained more Iraqis to fight by our side before the war. And so on.
Yet to acknowledge these blunders in hindsight doesn't mean anyone else would have done better. From the decision to disband the Iraqi army, through the complex negotiations over the Iraqi Constitution, to the calibration of force employed in Najaf, the Administration has faced one hard call after another. We know now of the consequences of those calls, good and bad, but how certain are we that the alternatives would have turned out better?
Also welcome would be a bit of historical perspective. Prior to September 11, Americans had grown accustomed to swift and certain victories in places like Panama, Kuwait and Kosovo. The brilliant campaign in Afghanistan also posed some difficult choices--topple the Taliban, join with the often unsavory Northern Alliance?--that were fiercely argued at the time. But because they turned out well, Mr. Kerry is able to say in hindsight that that is the kind of war he likes.
The truth is that war is nearly always a trial-and-error business in which bad decisions and failure tend to precede good ones--and victory. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln hired, then cashiered, Generals Scott, McClellan, Burnside, Hooker and Meade before settling on Grant. That took about two years, during which the catastrophes of Bull Run (Union casualties: 2,896), Fredricksburg (13,353) and Chancellorsville (18,400) intervened. How's that for poor Presidential personnel choices leading to unnecessary loss of life?
Or consider the Allied campaign in Europe during World War II. This too contained its share of squandered opportunities (the failure to seal the Falaise Gap, through which the bulk of the German Army escaped France in August 1944), fiascoes (Operation Market Garden of "A Bridge Too Far" fame) and costly diversions (the invasion of Italy). By these historical benchmarks, the Bush Administration has done reasonably well in Iraq.
Throughout most of 2003, a sufficient fraction of America's liberal elite concurred in the Administration's view that the choice America faced in Iraq was between Saddam Hussein's eventual rehabilitation or his destruction, and that the first option was intolerable. They further agreed that the goal of a free and moderate Iraq was both attainable and essential if America was to prevail in the overall war on terror.
Not much more than a year later, this pro-war liberal elite has broken with that earlier consensus, much as the liberal elite that initially supported the Vietnam War headed for the tall grass as the going got tough after 1965.
This time the excuse is competence--as if competence, in the absence of political will, can win this or any other kind of war. In their support for Mr. Kerry, they apparently see a modern-day version Richard Nixon, circa 1968, a man who isn't saddled by his predecessor's mistakes and who will fight "a better war."
But in order to win a war, you have to have the vision and determination to fight it despite setbacks and political difficulties. Americans should be wary of politicians who promise more "competent" leadership in a war that those same politicians say they'd rather not fight.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110005807
