I’m reading around the Blogosphere and check into LGF, and there’s an excerpt from Victor Davis Hanson’s latest article on how the violence in Iraq will end.

The Western media was relatively quiet about the quite amazing news from the recent trifecta in Iraq: very little violence on election day, Sunni participation, and approval of the constitution. Those who forecasted that either the Sunnis would boycott, or that the constitution would be — and should be — rejected, stayed mum.

But how odd that in the face of threats, a higher percentage of Iraqis in this nascent democracy voted in a referendum than did we Americans during our most recent presidential election — we who have grown so weary of Iraq’s experiment.
(…)
There have been three great challenges with the Iraqi reconstruction that would determine its success or failure — once the spectacular three-week invasion both falsely raised public perceptions of perfection in war, and posed the problem of how to rebuild an entire society whose pathological elements were never really defeated, much less humiliated during the actual conventional war.

That last sentence got me thinking — maybe our guys were too efficient. Maybe “shock & awe” wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe we should have been willing to take more casualties in the initial campaign in order to fully engage the Republican Guard, and in order to utterly decimate Saddam’s regular army.

Can war be too surgical? Can we, as a society be such pussies that our government has to risk the eventual outcome of the war by waging a super-sanitary engagement? We revel and rejoice in the fact that our men and women plow straight through to Baghdad with almost no resistance, and tear down the statues and smoke cigars in Saddam’s palaces. I cheered this as well as anyone else that is sane. Now I wonder . . . did we move too fast?

What if we went slower? What if we allowed them to group, regroup and engage our guys? Our air force could still pound them into putrid puddles of grunge. We could have incinerated them by the thousands! Those that are now a part of the terrorists/insurgents would have been just so much fertilizer rotting in the arid desert sands.

Is that harsh? Oh, U-bet-cha! Is that the reality of war throughout the ages? Again, you bet. Take a good hard look at the footage of WWII, especially of the campaigns in the South Pacific. That wasn’t pretty folks. There are lots of dead and mutilated GIs in that footage. But, there are a lot more dead Japanese, and that’s the point.

I can’t second guess President Bush too much, he’s leading a country that has little taste for supporting war, even when the stakes are as high as they are today. He looked at the success in Afghanistan and figured that Iraq needed to be taken down quickly, like a bust on the TV show Cops. I’m proud and hopeful for what has been accomplished in Iraq so far, I just wish that our guys had killed a few tens-of-thousands more of the bad guys while the killing was good. Maybe then Zarqawi and his ilk would have had second thoughts about engaging us there. (db)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 7:10 pm and is filed under G.W.O.T., Iraq War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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