Iraq III: No Wait! We're Winning

Victor Davis Hanson is a very smart dude, and nowhere more so than when he factors in the long sweep of history in his commentaries on current affairs.

Having said that, Hanson has aligned himself with the folks who, as the Bush administration is so infamous for doing with intelligence reports (see previous post), cherry pick the news out of Iraq to justify the claim that everything is going swimmingly, the talk about civil war is just that, and the whole bloody mess will be judged a smashing success once it is over, whenever that might be.

But to give credit where it is due, Hanson is no armchair pundit. He deeply immerses himself in a story by going to the scene of the story, so his cherry picking is first hand.

Hanson's myopia is in full force in aWall Street Journal commentary.

An excerpt:

If many are determined to see the Iraqi war as lost without a plan, it hardly seems so to 130,000 U.S. soldiers still over there. They explain to visitors that they have always had a design: defeat the Islamic terrorists; train a competent Iraqi military; and provide requisite time for a democratic Iraqi government to garner public support away from the Islamists.

We point fingers at each other; soldiers under fire point to their achievements: Largely because they fight jihadists over there, there has not been another 9/11 here. Because Saddam is gone, reform is not just confined to Iraq, but taking hold in Lebanon, Egypt and the Gulf. We hear the military is nearly ruined after conducting two wars and staying on to birth two democracies; its soldiers feel that they are more experienced and lethal, and on the verge of pulling off the nearly impossible: offering a people terrorized from nightmarish oppression something other than the false choice of dictatorship or theocracy--and making the U.S. safer for the effort.

. . . In sum, after talking to our soldiers in Iraq and our planners in Washington, what seems to me most inexplicable is the war over the war--not the purported absence of a plan, but that the more we are winning in the field, the more we are losing it at home.

Hanson must be smoking some pretty good stuff to make the claim that there has not been another 9/11 in the U.S. largely because terrorists have flocked to Iraq only to be bottled up by U.S. troops.

Given London, Barcelona and other terrorist attacks since 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, such talk is a dangerous fiction.