More "lessons from Iraq" from Victor Davis Hanson:
...we underestimated homegrown opposition to the war. Thus we saw little reason to confront it intellectually or morally. Assuming few here could identify with fascism, gender apartheid, terrorism, and intolerance, we forgot that forty years of postcolonial studies, multiculturalism, cultural relativism, and aristocratic pacifism in our schools and public discourse had imbued a real mistrust of the United States that was far stronger than any ideological revulsion to Islamic fascism. Shrill Deanism morphed into conspiratorial Moorism and finally ended up as the canonical outrage of the Democratic Party...... Let us face it: the Left in this country has gone absolutely crazy...
(via RealClearPolitics)
Posted by dan at July 3, 2004 11:51 PMI "read it all," and this is some of the most ridiculous garbage I've heard yet about the war.
Hanson is every bit as illogical and biased toward the right as Moore is to the left. I sincerely plan to never listen to either of their opinions again.
While Hanson et. al. are busy waving the flag, seven more Marines died today along with 16 Iraqis. The Marines were from my former unit, I MEF. On Friday night, my friends and I toasted one of our fallen comrades from Quantico, Corporal Thiry, along with his wife and 2 year old son. Six more Marines from my Battalion shipped out for Iraq last week. Not a week goes by that we don't hear about an officer we trained here getting killed. Some of them left this school just a few weeks ago.
And all I keep hearing is that we need more "boots on the ground."
Do those things qualify as "Lessons from Iraq?"
Posted by: Al at July 6, 2004 09:43 PMThanks for your comment, and I am genuinely sorry that people you know and know of have lost their lives in Iraq to killers who oppose a free Iraq.
But I'm not sure who you keep hearing saying we need "more boots on the ground". (although the Kerry camp, until recently had been making this case.) The people who really make those calls, Bush and Rumsfeld, et al, have resisted the facile cries for "more troops" all along. The "more troops" calls seem to me a pose made by people on both sides politically, who think it sounds good and that it has no negative political PR effects. Certainly Hanson doesn't say that, does he?
The only boots on the ground advocated by people I read and listen to are more Iraqi boots. I missed Hanson's unseemly "flag-waving" in that piece. Unless you count quoting verbatim the words of Michael Moore, which ooze contempt for everything American. By that standard I suppose Hanson comes off as quite the flag-waver by comparison.
Comparing the scholar Hanson with the unhinged Moore is way below the belt, however. I'm interested in specific examples of Hanson's illogic and ridiculousness. Love you, man.
Posted by: Dan at July 7, 2004 03:00 AM