The calls and e-mails started coming in right after the bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque. What do you Iraq War hawks have to say now -- now that the country is on the brink of civil war and witnessing Sunni-Shiite violence, now that we've "lost" this "unwinnable" war, now that a few marquee conservatives (George Will, William F. Buckley) have gone south on George W. Bush's adventure? Huh? Huh? Huh?
Is it my imagination, or do many of the anti-war left who sally forth at every bit of bad news seem to want Iraq to fail? I know. That's harsh. They wouldn't be rooting against a peaceful and democratic Iraq or the U.S effort there, would they?
But what does an Iraq War supporter say three years after the war's start, three weeks after the Golden Mosque's destruction?
That it's a good thing Saddam Hussein is now in an prison cell instead of the presidential palace.
That it's a good thing Iraq is rid of a mass murderer who brutalized his own people, invaded his neighbors and acted for all the world as if had weapons of mass destruction.
That it's a good thing the U.S. government is now releasing captured documents from Saddam's regime to promote a fuller understanding of his terror ties and WMD plans.
That it's a good thing Iraqis have met every purple-fingered milestone on the path to democratic reform.
Do I wish this all had gone more smoothly? Or that the war had not claimed the lives of 2,300 U.S. soldiers and left thousands more wounded? Or that more won't die in the days ahead? Have the foul-ups and violence brought frustration and even occasional doubts about the whole enterprise? Of course.
But does any of this detract from or delegitimize what we've achieved there? And does the nasty war news that critics take obsessive delight in rehashing make it plain that we're "losing"? Of course not.
After the Golden Mosque bombing, we were told Iraq hovered on the cusp of civil war. Something that might just as easily have been seen as a sign of terrorist desperation was deemed the apocalypse. Those who'd been predicting civil war at every turn now said, "We told you so." Almost a month later, where's a true civil war?
Writer and retired military officer Ralph Peters didn't see it, and he was recently there. "Factional differences are real, but overblown in the reporting," he wrote two weeks ago at RealClearPolitics.com. "After the Samarra bombing, only rogue militias and criminals responded to the demagogues' calls for vengeance. Iraqis refused to play along, staging an unrecognized triumph of passive resistance."
In fact, the under-reported mosque story was the coming of age of the Iraqi army. More than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers hit the streets. "They defused budding confrontations and calmed the situation without killing a single civilian," Peters wrote. "And Iraqis were proud to have their own army protecting them. The Iraqi army's morale soared as a result of its success."
The Hoover Institution's Victor Davis Hanson didn't see a civil war, and he was there, too. He found something else: Americans who believed a legitimate government would soon form and an Iraqi army and police force then "should be able to crush the insurgency, with the help of a public tired of violence and assured that the future of Iraq is their own -- not the [Saddams'], the Americans', or the terrorists'."
It may be unclear for years whether Iraq succeeds or fails, but the army's recent showing and last week's reported progress in forming a unity government are additional promising signs.
"It is an odd war, because the side that I think is losing garners all the press," Hanson, a military historian wrote at National Review Online. "Yet we hear nothing of the other side that is ever so slowly, shrewdly undermining the enemy."
Of course, you might want to take this with a grain of salt: He's actually been there.
So has Peters, and he does see failure -- "On the part of our media. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines."
So what does an Iraq War hawk say three years later? All this, and thanks to our soldiers who went off to fight and sometimes die in a noble and winnable war.
David Reinhard
