Much has been made, both better and worse, of President Bush’s comparison of the war in Iraq – and the potential consequences of failure there – with the national disgrace that followed hard upon the heels of our betrayal of allies in Vietnam and Cambodia. In the WSJ today, former Ronald Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan reaches even further back in to evoke the ghosts of Normandy, relaying the tale of a hot-air ballooning trip that landed short in the fields of an octogenarian Norman farmer:
(The French farmer) didn’t welcome us because he knew us. He didn’t treat us like royalty because we had done anything for him. He honored us because we were related to, were the sons and daughters of, the men of the Normandy Invasion. The men who had fought their way through France hedgerow by hedgerow, who’d jumped from planes in the dark and climbed the cliffs and given France back to the French. He thought we were of their sort. And he knew they were good. He’d seen them, when he was young.
I’ve been thinking of the old man because of Iraq and the coming debate on our future there. Whatever we do or should do, there is one fact that is going to be left on the ground there when we’re gone. That is the impression made by, and the future memories left by, American troops in their dealings with the Iraqi people…
We’re so used to thinking of American troops as good guys that we forget: They’re good guys! They have American class. And it is not possible that the good people of Iraq are not noticing, and that in some way down the road the sum of these acts will not come to have some special meaning, some special weight of its own.
Taking nothing away from the bravery and class of American soldiers of yesterday or today, I fear the lady might be playing a too self-consciously pollyannaish role here: Ms. Noonan initially supported the war effort, and the president, before deciding at some point that the effort was irretrievably lost and that the president himself had betrayed both the party and her beloved Reagan’s conservative legacy. Not just because of the war, but also due to the profligate spending attaching to “compassionate conservatism” and the president’s support of immigration reform.
Ms. Noonan is particularly gifted at draping the workaday machinery of politics with beautiful imagery. She makes people believe. When President Bush lost Peggy Noonan, the Beltway wisdom went, he lost not merely the Republican Party machine, but also the party’s heart. Her “whatever happens now” missive uses the iconic imagery of pastoral Normandy to help us all “look on the bright side.” She gives the machine a fig leaf to cover their withdrawal of US forces regardless of facts on the ground in order to support the domestic political time line.
Each of them have their parochial concerns. The president hopes to win the war, to stabilize Iraq, to build an edifice of perceptible success upon the blood-soaked sand and treasure mounded in the desert. Ms. Noonan hopes to save the party.
The French people, and the Germans for that matter, were culturally familiar to the 40’s era GI’s in a way that the Japanese were not. The way that the Iraqi people are not. And yet I wonder how her iconographic Norman would have reacted to her ballooning party dropping in on his back yard if the American invasion had been repulsed at Normandy, his homeland occupied in the interim by fascists. Would he have remembered the kindness and class of the American GI? Or would he have remembered instead the jackboot in his neck, after the Americans had gone home.
Faced with the fractures in Iraqi society, the weakness of Iraqi civil structures and government institutions and the barbarism of our enemies it is difficult to remain optimistic. But even if defining “victory” has become increasingly difficult, the outlines of defeat remain starkly clear: Genocide, a strategically critical region embroiled in conflict, a generational loss of national prestige and the broken heart of a volunteer force that deserved better than to be lightly thrown into the grinder and only grudgingly withdrawn.
Nor should we pretend that a society brutalized by thirty years of tyranny, riven by sectarian violence and mauled by civil war will retain many positive memories of the brave soldiers who passed out soccer balls and medical supplies, once those soldiers were withdrawn to satisfy the constraints of a faraway election cycle, leaving them to genocidal mortification.
It would be a pleasant thing to believe that some good will have come of this, no matter the outcome. But we have come too far, spent far too much and it is much too late to for us to drape their destiny with self-serving illusions. There are serious consequences in balance. We must not avert our eyes from them.
As fashionable as it seems to bag the French among most US milblogs there’s still a town whose school children open the day with Waltzing Matilda.
I take the darker view which you do, Lex. WShakespeare had it right, alas. “The evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.”
Marianne Matthews
I am not optimistic. As Mr. Adams said, our form of government was designed for “a moral and religious people” and was wholly “unsuitable” for any others. Regardless of the personally held beliefs of any one individual, the founders cultural heritage was biblically based common law. Our attempts to export a nation building enterprise has no foundation upon which to build.
Japan is not the exception, but the rule. We won the peace there because, for all intent and purposes, we razed some of the extant foundation with the overt threat to sterilize the building site.
The part where Bush goes off the track with his analogies is where he talks about Japan. Japan for all its faults in 1945 was still a better “soil” to build from than the Iraqis are. They are unified ethnically and at least had a national tradition to build from.
No time to say more-but its alawys a bad analogy to compare Iraq with Japan.
Typical of us Americans to always worry if people are going to “like us” one day…as if we’re constantly running for class president.
“Keeping your eye on the ball” is truly about our national strategic interests in the Middle East. Just as our interests were in a stable, democratic Japan and Germany, so too must we be interested in a stable, democratic Iraq.
There are other world players who would love to be the best friend of Iraq…and they’re all looking to “check” American power. Whether it’s palatable to you or not, a stable oil supply from the Middle East is directly tied to our national security…we must protect our interests, lest we lose our ability to sustain ourselves (just ask the Carter administration).
I’m all for getting out of the Gulf…never pleasant sitting in the cockpit on the flight deck when it’s 140 degrees. But you and I both know it’s absolutely necessary for us to be there…and it has nothing to do with how well the Iraqis like us.
Confirmation of no WMD’s…check.
Stablization of Iraqi oil…check.
Preventing Iranian hegemony…check.
Fighting terrorists there and not here…check.
So far, so good…hope it keeps up.
Americans get what Prowler said… no check.
It is sad, but, I’m afraid most Americans won’t see things in the pragmatic fashion you put forth Prowler. I wish they would. From my perspective, there is no withdrawl possible. This has got to be about staying the course, finishing the job, and providing for our own security through security of that whole region. Listening to the loudleft pundits and peaceniks clamoring for our immediate withdrawl is the worst solution on the table. The truth is, we ARE making headway in Iraq, and maybe not soon, but EVENTUALLY we WILL succeed. We have to.
When you are sitting in that cockpit, roasting under the dead calm sun of the Persian Gulf, know this Prowler, there are many of us here at home who’ve walked a few miles of P-Ways in similar boots (mine were black). We are proud of you, and want you there at the tip of the spear.
Oh yeah, is it at least still a dry heat?
Respectfully,
Lee
DCCS(SW) USN, Retired
Good points on Noonan – she appears increasingly to yearn for a prior period as her memories appear to become more selective.
All this reminds me of how Fr. Rutler addressed another conflict in his book Coincidentally “Wilson’s utopian solution to the Great War was a general armistice based on “Peace without victory,” which Chesterton called war without excuse.”
Bottom-line, well meaning as she is, Peggy is a politico. Easy ain’t in it-Remember early on, Bush kept saying we had “hard work to do” and it was “generational”? Almost precsient I’d say, eh?
Peggy, like most civilians talks tough but can’t sustain the gut check…However, I still like her, the way I like anybody, who can touch you from time to time because they write well and hold the same basic philosophy.
ProwlerS has distilled it down, but I don’t agree with his term “check” on a cuppla. If it was a Take-off challenge-reply checklist I’m not sure I’d roll with it..some of the stuff is a work in progress. Notice I said progress though!
However- I’m ready to salute the cat officer over this ProwlerS statement:
“Fighting terrorists there and not here- check”
Fugging-A! That’s a fact Jack!
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Web Reconnaissance 08/26/2007…
A short recon of what?ǂ
Web Reconnaissance 08/26/2007…
A short recon of whats out there that might draw your attention updated throughout the day so check back often. This is a weekend edition so updates are as time and family permits….
People seem to be so blissfully unaware of history! It drives me nuts!
Recently I cleaned out some more of my books, so I have it here in my hot little hands. “How the Irish Saved Civilization” by Thomas Cahill. Forget the politics of the author. Forget the Irish (if you can/dare). The book starts with a bang – “On the last , cold day of December in the dying year we count as 406, the river Rhine froze solid, providing the natural bridge that hundreds of thousands of hungry men women and children had been waiting for. They were the barbari….”
Read it all. Think about it. We do not have a choice. We must win the war. On every battlefield – Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor, Muslim Paris suburbs – all of them around the world) for as long as it takes. It is like AIDS. Forget the sheepdog/flock analogy. Think T cells.
You won’t read the book, I know, but one lesson is that the Romans could not conceive of the fact that the most magnificent civilization in history could fall to uncivilized barbarians. And that it can happen JUST LIKE THAT! When things seem to be going as usual.
It is totally beside the point whether or not the Iraqis like us, or whether their culture is fertile soil, or whether or not the troops are getting worn down from constant redeployment, or whether or not we have support from our Europeans ‘allies’, or whatever facile, emotionally comforting, Bush bashing rationalization for quitting some jerk like Murtha or Punch can come up with. Lose, or even APPEAR to lose one more war – one more!, kids, and we, as a nation and a culture are yesterday’s stale toast.
Another thing that bugs me is ignorance of (for want of a better short title) the avalanche effect. But I really need my own blog….
That was a great book Cottus, and when I was last in Ireland visiting I enjoyed looking up at those round towers and thinking of some medieval Irish monk sensing the barbarians coming for to burn his Aristotle and climbing his ladder with a heavy sigh before pulling it up after him.
God bless them.
Actually, I enjoyed reading a number of Mr. Cahill’s books. From another standpoint, I honestly believe that no matter what Mr. Bush had said, the press would have twisted his words and put their own spin on it. His words wouldn’t have gotten a fair hearing no matter what. Also, most people hear what they want to hear anyway, so we are free to interpret Mr. Bush’s remarks through our own prisms.
I posted late, so others have said what I would have liked to have said. I will say that, back when this whole thing got started in 2001, I attended a Navy League lunch in NYC, where Lt. General Robert Magnus was the speaker. I asked him how long he though the war would go on. He responded “About thirty years.”
Thank G for those Irish Monks that they saved the “gouge”! Without that and Charles Martel we’d already be toast Cottus!
Cahill also wrote “Gifts of the Jews”. Another good one. One ALL Muslims should keep in mind as they support this senseless Islamofacist B.S…..
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