Hanson on History of WWII and Iraq

[Annie]

I could read him all day long:

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200407160827.asp

excerpts

About this time 60 years ago, six weeks after the Normandy beach landings, Americans were dying in droves in France. We think of the 76-day Normandy campaign of summer and autumn 1944 as an astounding American success — and indeed it was, as Anglo-American forces cleared much of France of its Nazi occupiers in less than three months. But the outcome was not at all preordained, and more often was the stuff of great tragedy. Blunders were daily occurrences — resulting in 2,500 Allied casualties a day. In any average three-day period, more were killed, wounded, or missing than there have been in over a year in Iraq.

Pre-invasion intelligence — despite ULTRA and a variety of brilliant analysts who had done so well to facilitate our amphibious landings — had no idea of what war in the hedgerows would be like. How can you spend months spying out everything from beach sand to tidal currents and not invest a second into investigating the nature of the tank terrain a few miles from the beach? The horrific result was that the Allies were utterly unprepared for the disaster to come — and died by the thousands in the bocage of June and July.

Everything went wrong in the days after June 6, and 60 years later the carnage should still make us weep. The army soon learned that their light Sherman tanks were no match for Nazi Panthers and Tigers. Hundreds of their "Ronson-lighters" — crews and all — went up in smoke. Indeed, 60 percent of all lost Shermans were torched by single shots from enemy Panzers. In contrast, only one in three of the Americans' salvos even penetrated German armor.

We know about the horrific German massacres of American prisoners, but little about instances of Americans' shooting German captives well before the Battle of the Bulge. Such murdering was neither sanctioned by American generals nor routine — but nevertheless it was not uncommon in the heat of battle and the stress of war. No inquiry cited Generals Hodges, Patton, or Bradley as responsible for rogue soldiers shooting unarmed prisoners. Whom to blame?

The catastrophes did not end after the Normandy campaign. More Americans were killed between December 1944 and January 1945 — when we wrongly pushed back the bulge by confronting it head-on rather than slicing it off far to its rear — than all those lost previously in the months since the D-Day landings. Germans had heavy overcoats and white camouflage; GIs froze and were easy targets in the snow with their dark uniforms. Whom to blame?

I could go on, but the point is clear. War is a horrendous experience in which the side that wins commits the fewest mistakes, rather than no errors at all.

In other words, Kerry and Edwards sense that Iraq has had some strange — but as yet not fully understood — positive effects that are just beginning to ripple out. Are Middle Eastern autocracies and monarchies such as Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia talking more or less about democratic reform after Saddam's removal? Are rogue regimes such as Iran and Syria now more or less worried about scrutiny of their terrorist subsidies?

With extremists like Michael Moore and ANSWER breathing down their necks, Kerry and Edwards cannot accept history's tragic verdict that there are terrible costs to pay in any necessary war. Yet they also don't know what else could or should have been done to get us where we are now.

And so otherwise savvy politicos talk mindlessly of allies, the U.N., and multilateralism — nice, fuzzy ideas that did nothing to stop the horror in the Balkans or Rwanda, and will do nothing either to prevent it in the Sudan — but never of getting out of Iraq now or lamenting their votes that helped get us in.

So, yes, they talk around the edges — nuancing this, quibbling with that — as they search for an edge in an election year. So does Bill Clinton as he attempts to rewrite history and airbrush his past appeasement of terrorists. And so do we all as we pretend that the real danger is the Patriot Act, not cold-blooded killers from the Middle East, or that our rudeness needlessly offended true friends like France.

We talk the easy talk, but history, I think, is not listening.