{"id":1029,"date":"2006-03-11T18:45:22","date_gmt":"2006-03-11T18:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:38","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:38","slug":"victor_hansen_o","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1029","title":{"rendered":"Victor Hansen on Surrender"},"content":{"rendered":"

Go over and read Victor Davis Hanson on Iraq<\/a> at NRO. he details the growing consensus among the punditry that the war is lost, and then goes on:<\/p>\n

There are many reasons why such pessimism, and indeed depression, is unwarranted \u2014 although I concede that very few Americans and still fewer pundits would agree with my own explanations.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

He points out things which I fully agree with – we are closer to our European former-allies; closer to emerging world power India; closer to Japan. Elections worldwide (with the notable exception of Spain) have moved governments closer to – not further from – the US.<\/p>\n

Our military is better, more capable – albeit more strained – than it was three years ago.<\/p>\n

Our enemy has placed his cards on the table, and people around the world are looking at reality, and beginning to make decisions based on that reality – decisions that will be in our interest in the intermediate and long run.<\/p>\n

Kaplan, in the Atlantic article<\/a> I blogged<\/a> below, says:<\/p>\n

The patrol wasn’t over. After dark, we went house to house in another neighborhood from which mortars had been fired at a new Iraqi police station. In the fifth house, someone finally cooperated and supplied information about the make of the car, the men inside it, and where they had set up the mortar. The next step would be to deploy snipers there for several days running, hoping to eliminate the culprits when they returned. If that happened, the people in the other four houses might start cooperating. “I hate to say it,\u201d said Turner, “but sometimes the best confidence-building measure is to kill certain people.\u201d Another thing you could do was to pay people significantly for tips that turned out to be accurate. None of this was new, or noble. But these young soldiers were learning by trial and error that such tactics worked, assuming you had a lot of patience. It was like the old clich\u00e9s about watching the grass grow, or the paint dry. “The media says there’s no strategy to win this war,\u201d Turner observed. “There is; we’re doing it. But it’s slow, and it doesn’t make headlines like Abu Ghraib.<\/b>“<\/p>\n

\n[emphasis added]<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One thing that I see is that opponents to the war often seem to vacillate between images in which our opponents are inexhaustible, overwhelming in number, and implacable – and those in which our heavy-booted power unjustly tramples the weak and powerless.<\/p>\n

We are powerful; but our enemies have power as well. We have to defeat their power, and we can do it – in an instant of unthinkable brutality, or slowly, over time with patience and judicious application of force.<\/p>\n

Hansen concludes:<\/p>\n

So here we are \u2014 close to victory abroad, closer to concession at home.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I agree. I am befuddled by those who – like Andrew Sullivan<\/a> – once supported the war and now try and distance themselves from the reality of it.<\/p>\n

Has the war been conducted with perfect – or even acceptable – competence? Hardly. But what war has? For that matter, what effort of any consequence has been – what is the project that our critics would measure the war against?<\/p>\n

So what’s my response, what’s my role? To play some small part in pushing back against consensus, and to push for things that I think matter – like aid to rebuild Iraq, and an Army with enough troops to maintain the effort in Iraq and credibly deal with the rest of the threats we face.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

VDH has a column worth reading up at NRO. His conclusion? “So here we are \u2014 close to victory abroad, closer to concession at home.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}