Opinion: Smugness Is Our Greatest Enemy

Smugness Is Our Greatest Enemy
By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek, April 28 Issue

I know it's a common complaint, but why can't people ever admit that their side might be wrong? The doves can't admit they were wrong about the rightness of freeing 24 million Iraqis, however chaotic the aftermath. And the hawks can't admit that they are wrong about the go-it-alone occupation, including a boneheaded Pentagon decision I came across that helped open the door for the looting of some of civilization's treasures. Both sides are more dug in than the Third Infantry Division at Baghdad International Airport.

LET'S BE CLEAR about the doves. They never said the United States wouldn't win militarily; their objection was based on other factors (rejection of "preventive" war, botched diplomacy, etc.). And they may be proved right: history's jury will be out a long time. Even so, I can't get over how churlish the left has become. When did the liberals take the "lib" out of liberation? This was a totalitarian regime we're talking about, with a boot on the face of the Iraqi people. The same folks who led the charge against fascism in Europe; who rightly spoke up against the U.S. government about "disappearances" in El Salvador and Guatemala; who carried high the banner of human rights--now they yawn at revelations of mass graves in Iraq and argue that the Iraqis will be no better off than before. Freedom's just another word that liberals have figured out how to lose.

The explanation is partly partisan politics. Many Democrats are so blinded by their loathing of George W. Bush that they can't think straight. In their hearts, they don't see Bush as the legitimately elected president, just as Tom DeLay and the right-wing attack machine tried to deny President Clinton's legitimacy from the outset, without even a Florida rationale. In both cases, this thinking can take you right over the cliff. (See Gingrich, N.)

Today too many Democrats are playing Charlie Brown to Bush's Lucy. Just as they started talking about a quagmire, the war was won. Next football to be snatched away: WMD. At the precise moment this week or next that the liberals proclaim that Iraq has no chemical weapons after all, they'll finally turn up in Syria or some bunker. Promise. Republicans, meanwhile, remind me of Chris Rock's foe in "Head of State." His slogan is "God Bless America--and no place else." Ari Fleischer says the White House can't keep the Rev. Franklin Graham, who has called Islam "a very evil and wicked religion," from performing Good Friday services in Baghdad and trying to Christianize the country. How about a phone call from his good friend the president (at whose Inaugural he spoke)?

Then there are those images all over the Arab world of Gen. Tommy Franks & Co. smoking cigars and getting comfortable in Saddam's presidential palace, as if they were the pigs in George Orwell's "Animal Farm" celebrating their revolution by moving into the farmer's house. Doesn't look too good to the other animals--or the Iraqi people. Gens. Douglas MacArthur and Lucien Clay took great pains to understand Japanese and German society before administering their occupations. This crowd is more Kiplingesque.

Smugness can kill. It may be satisfying to say "Screw you" to the United Nations, and the United States got away with it during the war. But in an occupation, it's not smart. Isn't it about time the DOD started playing some defense? Which is the more likely target of suicide bombers: a barracks full of American soldiers or a barracks full of peacekeepers--including Muslim troops--from around the world? You'd think we could figure out how to run the occupation without presenting such a fat target.

In short, the fighting was brilliant; the immediate "follow-on" a failure. Donald Rumsfeld was right to have a light, speedy war plan. Another division wasn't necessary. But the "retired officers embedded in TV studios" (to quote our draft-deferment vice president about former generals Barry McCaffrey and Wesley Clark, who have four Silver Stars between them) were not entirely wrong. I learned last week that many Army officers wanted to airlift in 3,000 MPs (military police) from Europe to protect supply lines and police Baghdad. That would have aided the drive to the capital and helped to protect institutions like hospitals and museums once forces arrived there. As it was, the main hospital wasn't even secured until an officer was alerted to the looting by New Yorker reporter Jon Lee Anderson.

But Rumsfeld apparently decided: no MPs. The European MPs would have had to be replaced by reservists. And if more reservists had been called up in the middle of the war, it would have reinforced the criticism that Rumsfeld hadn't sent enough troops. When the real history is written, we may find out that some ofthe world's oldest treasures were lost to looters in part because someone at the Pentagon suffers from the oldest of human sins--pride.

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.