"I am heartsick when I think of the mismanagement of our army.... There never was such a shambling, half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government before or since the world began."
That was the hard judgement of a United States Senator on the conduct of the war by the U.S. Administration; only, the senator was Maine's William Pitt Fessenden, the war was the American Civil War, and the Administration was President Abraham Lincoln's. History has been much kinder than the distinguished senator from Maine to Lincoln and his men.
George H.W. Bush was booted from the White House after a single term, derided as a loser: "Stick a fork in him, he's done," etc. In the 1990s he was recalled as a failure for not "rolling on to Baghdad" and "finishing the job" in Iraq, and soulless for abandoning Iraq's Shiites to Saddam Hussein's bloody enforcers. Yet today he is venerated as the wise statesman, prudently averting the hornet's nest of Iraq, and his former detractors are liable to say, "I always liked him." Evidently not enough Americans truly did "always" like him, or he would have had that second term.
Harry Truman is today as uncontroversial a past president as any, and recently ranked seventh-greatest. In his last year in the Oval Office, however, Truman scored the lowest presidential approval rating yet registered by the Gallup Poll: 22 percent. The Korean War, which was truly Truman's war, launched without even consulting Congress, cost 2.8 million lives all 'round, only to end in stalemate. International Communism made its greatest advances under Truman's watch. And the man now beloved and admired by partisans on both sides was unwanted as a candidate in 1952 by his own party.
Even Winston Churchill was famously tossed out on his ear by British voters while the Second World War was still unfinished, informed that he was no longer Prime Minister while representing his country at the war's last summit meeting. He was largely responsible for such catastrophes and debacles as the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War and the Norway expedition in the second. Detested in the 1930s as a blinkered imperialist and warmonger, his career to 1939 earned the biography title, A Study in Failure. And today Churchill is universally understood to be certainly the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, and one of the great figures in all history.
The initial conventional wisdom in these cases proved to be passing. Some distance and subsequent developments changed the perspective entirely. On Iraq, the conventional wisdom has been written and re-written several times already; there is no reason to believe it must necessarily be fixed where it stands today.
At the time of the 1991 Gulf War, the conventional wisdom was that the war was won, Saddam Hussein defeated. That wisdom shifted as the 1990s progressed, and the troubles and military skirmishes with Saddam Hussein continued, to the thinking that the war had been aborted half-finished. By 2005, the conventional wisdom had undergone a third revolution, to the current certainty that removing Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it with a democracy was wrong, and Iraq ought to be left to its own devices.
So if the past 16 years are anything to go by, and if the conventional wisdom in its present iteration is heeded and Iraq is abandoned to the jihadists and Iranian proxies, we can expect a new conventional wisdom to form sooner or later, that leaving Iraq was disastrous, and why, oh, why did we not stay on and finish the job when we had the chance?
Iraq and conceivably also Afghanistan may indeed take a dishonourable place in history even after the dust has settled and partisan passions have dimmed, and the leadership may remain villains and scoundrels even in their obituaries. Vietnam and the Johnson and Nixon Administrations are the obvious cases in point, although even there, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon have benefitted somewhat from more recent reappraisals. But the Vietnam War cost 54,000 more American lives than Iraq has, lasted eight years longer, was fought by a draft army instead of volunteer professionals, lacked the context of the 9/11 attacks, and of course ended in defeat. And no, Iraq and Afghanistan are not lost just yet.
"The government has conceived the war wrongly from the start, and no-one has more misconceived it than the Prime Minister himself." The sentiment has been repeated countless times in the past few years on the prosecution of the present wars, but those were the words of British MP Aneurin Bevan in 1942, three years into the Second World War. Even "the good war," the valiant, brilliant, unstoppable crusade, seemed in the darker hours much more like a disaster and a lost cause. The view from the middle of a war is not the clearest.
Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia
Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia
That was the hard judgement of a United States Senator on the conduct of the war by the U.S. Administration; only, the senator was Maine's William Pitt Fessenden, the war was the American Civil War, and the Administration was President Abraham Lincoln's. History has been much kinder than the distinguished senator from Maine to Lincoln and his men.
George H.W. Bush was booted from the White House after a single term, derided as a loser: "Stick a fork in him, he's done," etc. In the 1990s he was recalled as a failure for not "rolling on to Baghdad" and "finishing the job" in Iraq, and soulless for abandoning Iraq's Shiites to Saddam Hussein's bloody enforcers. Yet today he is venerated as the wise statesman, prudently averting the hornet's nest of Iraq, and his former detractors are liable to say, "I always liked him." Evidently not enough Americans truly did "always" like him, or he would have had that second term.
Harry Truman is today as uncontroversial a past president as any, and recently ranked seventh-greatest. In his last year in the Oval Office, however, Truman scored the lowest presidential approval rating yet registered by the Gallup Poll: 22 percent. The Korean War, which was truly Truman's war, launched without even consulting Congress, cost 2.8 million lives all 'round, only to end in stalemate. International Communism made its greatest advances under Truman's watch. And the man now beloved and admired by partisans on both sides was unwanted as a candidate in 1952 by his own party.
Even Winston Churchill was famously tossed out on his ear by British voters while the Second World War was still unfinished, informed that he was no longer Prime Minister while representing his country at the war's last summit meeting. He was largely responsible for such catastrophes and debacles as the Gallipoli campaign in the First World War and the Norway expedition in the second. Detested in the 1930s as a blinkered imperialist and warmonger, his career to 1939 earned the biography title, A Study in Failure. And today Churchill is universally understood to be certainly the greatest statesman of the 20th Century, and one of the great figures in all history.
The initial conventional wisdom in these cases proved to be passing. Some distance and subsequent developments changed the perspective entirely. On Iraq, the conventional wisdom has been written and re-written several times already; there is no reason to believe it must necessarily be fixed where it stands today.
At the time of the 1991 Gulf War, the conventional wisdom was that the war was won, Saddam Hussein defeated. That wisdom shifted as the 1990s progressed, and the troubles and military skirmishes with Saddam Hussein continued, to the thinking that the war had been aborted half-finished. By 2005, the conventional wisdom had undergone a third revolution, to the current certainty that removing Saddam Hussein's regime and replacing it with a democracy was wrong, and Iraq ought to be left to its own devices.
So if the past 16 years are anything to go by, and if the conventional wisdom in its present iteration is heeded and Iraq is abandoned to the jihadists and Iranian proxies, we can expect a new conventional wisdom to form sooner or later, that leaving Iraq was disastrous, and why, oh, why did we not stay on and finish the job when we had the chance?
Iraq and conceivably also Afghanistan may indeed take a dishonourable place in history even after the dust has settled and partisan passions have dimmed, and the leadership may remain villains and scoundrels even in their obituaries. Vietnam and the Johnson and Nixon Administrations are the obvious cases in point, although even there, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon have benefitted somewhat from more recent reappraisals. But the Vietnam War cost 54,000 more American lives than Iraq has, lasted eight years longer, was fought by a draft army instead of volunteer professionals, lacked the context of the 9/11 attacks, and of course ended in defeat. And no, Iraq and Afghanistan are not lost just yet.
"The government has conceived the war wrongly from the start, and no-one has more misconceived it than the Prime Minister himself." The sentiment has been repeated countless times in the past few years on the prosecution of the present wars, but those were the words of British MP Aneurin Bevan in 1942, three years into the Second World War. Even "the good war," the valiant, brilliant, unstoppable crusade, seemed in the darker hours much more like a disaster and a lost cause. The view from the middle of a war is not the clearest.
Andrew W. Smith / Andrew Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia
Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia
