Dissatisfaction with the hard to help

Victory Davis Hanson:

Not long ago I talked to a right-wing hardnosed fellow in a conservative central California town about the need to stay and finish the task of stabilizing the democracy in Iraq and rectifying the disastrous aftermath of 1991. He wasn’t buying. Instead he kept ranting about the war in the ‘more rubble, less trouble’ vein. And his anger wasn’t only over our costs in lives and treasure. So I finally asked him exactly why the venom over Iraq. He shouted, “I don’t like them sons of bitches over there — any of ’em.” His was a sort of echo of Bismarck’s oft-quoted “The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.”

There are dozens of tragic ironies in Iraq. The fostering of democracy by a Republican president only alienated his dour realist base. Yet his idealism did not even win as recompense faint sympathy from supposedly Wilsonian Democratic opponents. Indeed, they now sound like Bob Taft isolationists. The fiercest critics of the brave struggling Iraqi elected government remain liberal Senate Democrats, not Republicans.

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All that and the dreary narrative from the battlefield help to explain plummeting public support for the war at a time when empathy for brave Iraqis is critical to the continuance of the effort. But there is another, more worrisome dynamic at work here. I would call it the “them sons of bitches” sentiment that is usually better left unspoken.

By any honest assessment, the great majority of Iraqis are brave citizens who voted en masse for change, at great risk to their safety. Kurdistan is a stunning success. It belies stereotypes that Muslims can’t govern themselves peacefully, practice consensual government, or create vibrant economies. Tribal sheiks and clerics in Iraq hate al Qaeda as much as we do. They suffer far more losses in trying to rid their country of such killers. American soldiers testify to the friendliness and support of the Iraqi people.

But that American alliance with freedom-loving Arabs is not what is reported. Instead the public hears and sees two quite different things. The two are antithetical to each other.

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But, again, most Americans now don’t think it is worth it — and not just because of the cost we pay, but because of what we get in return. Turn on the television and the reporting is all hate: a Middle Eastern Muslim is blowing up someone in Israel, shooting a rocket from Gaza, chanting death to America in Beirut, stoning an adulterer in Tehran, losing a hand for thievery in Saudi Arabia, threatening to take back Spain, gassing someone in Iraq, or promising to wipe out Israel. An unhinged, secular Khadafi rants; a decrepit Saudi royal lectures; a wild-eyed Lebanese cleric threatens — whatever the country, whatever the political ideology, the American television viewer draws the same conclusion: we are always blamed for their own self-inflicted misery.

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We worry rightly about anti-Americanism and winning over the people of Iraq. But the greater problem, at least as we now witness it in the Senate and House, is winning back those here at home.

Seeing more of the purple finger, and less of the shaking fist, is the key to regaining the hearts and minds of Americans — who in the end alone can win or lose this war.

One of the things we do not see enough of is stories about the Iraqis who are putting their lives on the line to help win this war. There are thousands of them and about the only time you hear about them is when one of our troops brings it up in an interview or in an online forum. The Kurds have shown their gratitude in numerous ways, but they wind up having to buy TV spots to break through the filter of negativity from the media.

What Hanson describes as the view of the Middle East is why the progress of the west has largely past this region by and as we try to pull them up the emotional immaturity of many of them make it seem not worth the effort.