To an American television audience, al-Qaida videos of pajama-clad killers in ski masks beheading captives look scary, of course. But a platoon of Rangers would slaughter hundreds of them in seconds if they ever approached Americans openly on the field of conventional battle or even for brief moments of clear firing. In Mogadishu, Somalia, everything boded ill for a few trapped Americans—outnumbered, far from home, facing local hostility in urban warfare—and yet the real lesson was not that a few Americans were tragically killed, but that the modern successors to Xenophon’s Ten Thousand or the Redcoats at Rorke’s Drift managed to shoot their way out and kill over 1,000 in the process.
Nevertheless, the numerous setbacks of Western armies from Thermopylae to Vietnam prove that there are several ways to nullify these military advantages, both on conventional and irregular battlefields. The question is: Are such historical precedents still relevant to the modern age?
Dutifully performing his function here, Hanson tries to to cast the war against terrorism as just the latest in a long series of battles pitting the courageous, enlightened West (white hats) against the barbaric, much less frequently bathing East (black hats). It's one thing to buy into the characterization of the relationship between the Islamic and Christian world as a "clash," though I think this characterization is selective, chauvinistic, and ultimately counterproductive, but reaching back to the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, fer chrissake, in order to support this bone-tired thesis is really above and beyond the call. Leaving aside the fact that classical Greek society would have seemed only slightly less alien to the modern West than would Persian society, Hanson wants us to ignore the hugely important role played by Islamic scholars in the preservation of Greek texts and development of the sciences, work which was inherited by the West after the West decided to grab a shower and emerge from the Dark Ages.
Hanson then cuts this jewel:
The hysteria over the Iraqi war in the 2004 election did not really result from a failure to find weapons of mass destruction or to publicize a clear link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. These were issues raised after the fact for political purposes during a campaign that happened to coincide with a change in American perceptions as the war’s rocky aftermath unfolded. After all, on the eve of the invasion over 65 percent of Americans supported the war, and three weeks later, when Saddam’s statue fell, support was nearing 70 percent. The current depressing debate about preemption, allies, WMD, and al-Qaida ties originated in the subsequent inability of the United States to project a sense of absolute victory in the postbellum occupation, as looting led to terrorist reprisals, an insurgency, and televised beheadings.
"Political purposes." Right. You've got to love Hanson's insinuation that it's somehow tawdry for the opposition to point out that the administration's two most significant reasons for war have turned out to be bunk. It's also funny that Hanson refers to the growing concern over the ever-increasing chaos in Iraq as "hysteria," given that hysteria is precisely what Bush was trying to create in the lead-up to the predecided invasion with grave comments about mushroom clouds and the nonexistent (at least before the war) Iraq-al Qaeda relationship. Bush over-represented the evidence for these things to create public support for the Iraq invasion, in other words: He did it specifically for political purposes. Unlike Hanson, I'm not going to feign shock that there is politics going on here, but I will point out that the difference between Bush and his opponents in this case is that Bush said things that are not true.
In his favor, though, Hanson is probably right that the Iraq war would be enjoying better ratings now if the post-war occupation was going better. I applaud him for this stunningly incisive observation.
One doesn't particularly enjoy slogging through the muck of Hanson's propaganda, but it's important to have as clear an idea as possible of the Bush's worldview, such as it is, and Hanson's work is acknowledged to have a strong influence on the perspective of the President and his inner circle. I strongly suspect that's mostly because, without fail, he tells them what they want to hear, and is willing to perform all sorts of rhetorical gymnastics to defend their misguided (partly by him) policies.
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