Again, Victor Davis Hanson puts the calls of "quagmire" in Iraq into perspective in his typically graceful style. A sample:
The earlier conundrum put to rest by the rapidity of our victory insidiously resurfaced as it became clear that it was not a cost-free task for 140,000 Americans to institute democracy among 26 million Iraqis tyrannized for three decades. Newspaper pundits, NPR commentators, and Democratic aspirants, knowing nothing of the challenges of postwar Okinawa, the dilemma of ex-Nazis in occupied Germany, or the mess in 1946 Korea, implied that 60 American dead meant failure and a Chechnya-style inferno. Our soldiers’ job, of course, was made no easier by the usual Arab mendacious fare broadcast freely into the country — Jews were now buying Iraqi land; Jewish troops were capitalizing on the occupation, Jews, Jews, Jews…Worse, still it was not only that our enemies wished us to fail, but our so-called friends in the region were equally apprehensive that the virus of democracy might well be contagious.
Hanson has the singular ability to take current events and put them in the valuable historical context that our media and policymakers love to conveniently forget. No one said that building the peace in Iraq would be easy – nearly everyone agreed that the nation-building part of the equation would take far longer than the war itself. It doesn’t help that the nations that border Iraq have every interest in maintaining the bloody status quo.
At the same time, it is especially important to note that US troops are rebuilding Iraq, sometimes from the ground up. They are putting their lives on the line to keep order, rebuild the national infrastructure, and protect civilan lives. The elitist liberal media only cares about hyping the doom and gloom and using words like "quagmire" and "Vietnam" in order to sell more papers and hype their ratings. The story that isn’t being told is one of self-sacrifice, heroism, and absolute bravery by our troops. Thankfully we have more balanced and rational people like Mr. Hanson to remind us.
And this differs from the Republican reaction to the killing of 19 American servicemen on the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 under Clinton in what way???
The primary difference being that our mission in Iraq is much clearer than the one in Somalia. Somalia was a mission that was tremendously mishandled – our mission was to deliver aid, but that quickly proved impossible under the reign of warlords like Aidid.
Iraq is different in that we already have swept away the old mission and have a clear exit strategy. Granted, it’s not an easy mission, and it will take some time, but it’s not like Somalia where we entered into a situation where we didn’t have the force or will to bring it to endgame.
We have a “clear exit strategy?” You must be pretty close to the powers that be because no one has mentioned an exit strategy, and since this will probably be like a 10 year commitment it is too early to discuss exit strategy. The only exit strategy I can think of is our troop really start to get killed and Bush pulls them out in an effort to save his re-election. We are re-builing a country, not exiting one.
I thought the exist strategy was pretty clear? We get Iraq up and running on their own… and we exit!