Everyone sees the Iraq that they want to see. This has been the case ever since America invaded three years ago. Either it’s a relentless bloodbath, a hopeless chaos that America can only exacerbate, or it’s a burgeoning democracy, a scrappy but yet shining example for a new Middle East.
What astounds us is that such perceptions, born more out of political ideology than from evidence on the ground, can persist for so long and even in the face of strikingly contrary evidence.
Today, on the National Review Web site, Victor Davis Hanson gives one more stunning example of how resilient and persistent our delusions can be.
Iraq is not looking good this week. For the first time people who would have never uttered the words “civil war” are coming to the conclusion that this is indeed what is about to happen. The Askariya shrine bombing in Samarra and the brutal reprisal killings, along with news that Sunnis have pulled out of negotiations for the formation of a new unity government, is reason enough for despair.
But Hanson, who has just returned from Iraq, is having none of it. To underline how completely blinkered his vision is, check out the first line of his piece published today:
“The insurgency in Iraq has no military capability either to drive the United States military from Iraq or to stop the American training of Iraqi police and security forces — or, for that matter, to derail the formation of a new government.”
Newsflash: derailment has occurred.
Hanson turns sour only when he ponders that great “ally” of the insurgency, the global media — which, you guessed it, “always favors the severed head in the street over the completion of yet another Iraqi school.” In his mind, it is this global media, not grim events, that has given us the false impression that things are not going so well.
The media, Hanson writes, over-reports news of IEDs, assassinations and suicide bombings, thus helping the terrorists to erode the resolve of the American people.
One day after the death toll for the week in Iraq mounted to a bloody 138, Hanson is here to tell us that television and newspapers are giving us the wrong impression that there is a sectarian divide in Iraq. “In the world that we see on television,” he opines, “there is no such thing as a secular Iraq, an Iraqi who defines himself as an Iraqi, or a child born to a Shiite and Sunni. No, the country, we are told, is simply three factions that will be torn apart by targeted violence. Sunnis blow up holy places; Shiites retaliate; and both sides can then blame the Americans” — which sounds to us, frankly, like a pretty accurate description of yesterday and the day before.
What, according to Hanson, accounts for the extreme violence? That one’s easy. Remember the 100,000 prisoners Saddam let out of jail before the invasion? Bingo! “The terrorists have succeeded in making all the daily mayhem of a major city appear to be political violence — even though much of the problem is the theft, rape, and murder committed by criminals who have had a holiday since Saddam freed them.” (Our italics)
But ultimately Hanson went to Iraq to discover who will win the contest of the “IED v. democracy.” He tells us (not surprisingly) that he only talked to Americans, and he got exactly what he was looking for (the National Review could have saved themselves the price of a plane ticket): “A government will emerge that is seen as legitimate and will appear as authentic to the people. Soon, ten divisions of Iraqi soldiers, and over 100,000 police, 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 Husseins’, the Americans’, or the terrorists’.”
And by the way, he writes, the Iraqi military “is developing into the best trained and disciplined armed force in the Middle East.”
We sure hope so. Though we have reason to doubt Hanson’s optimism. Look how he approaches the problem of dwindling electricity and stalled oil production: “Much has been finished that awaits only the completion of pipelines and transmission lines.” Yes, Victor, but that’s the problem — no pipelines, no oil; no transmission lines, no electricity.
Bizarrely, the last paragraph of Hanson’s piece manages to completely undermine the rosy picture he has painted before it. He lays out with precision the obstacles in the path of success:
“Can the United States — or anyone — in the middle of a war against Islamic fascism, rebuild the most important country in the heart of the Middle East, after 30 years of utter oppression, three wars, and an Orwellian, totalitarian dictator warping of the minds of the populace? And can anyone navigate between a Zarqawi, a Sadr, and the Sunni rejectionists, much less the legions of Iranian agents, Saudi millionaires, and Syrian provocateurs who each day live to destroy what’s going on in Iraq?”
Hanson lays out that grim list of obstructions, but it’s clear he does not even really see them. He visits Iraq, talks to a few soldiers and delivers an account in line with what he wants to believe and what he believed before he went there: that, as he says in his closing, “there does not seem to be much of anything we should be doing there that in fact we are not.”
The gulf between Hanson’s Iraq and the one we see in the newspapers this morning is stunning (which is partly his point). But you can’t invent blood, and there is plenty of it today. Iraq right now is in a maddeningly complex, almost impossible situation, a beleaguered country just barely balancing on the head of a grenade pin, and no honest account, whatever publication it appears in, can wash that reality away.
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.