Up until now there had been only two ways to look at the
history of a painful episode. You could look at it from the winner's point of
view or you could look at it from the loser's point of view. Serious historians,
writing scholarly textbooks, have always elaborated on both sides of the
ledger, letting the readers decide what to make of the events that unfolded
long ago.
Victor Davis Hanson then came on the scene and worked on a
third way to write history. He does it in the article that came under the
title: “An Iraq of Myth and Fantasy,” published on February 23, 2016 in
National Review Online. Briefly stated, Hanson does not write history but
argues the abstracts of a paradoxical situation in which superpower America
messes every cause it embraces by botching what it touches as if the Midas touch
had been turned on its head.
In fact, that trend began to take shape during the final
year of the Vietnam War. Serious historians were beginning to sense that America was
going to lose the war, thus began to write history from the loser's point a
view. This brought to the fore the writers of “popular” history who wrote as if
they did not care about the facts, their interest resting solely on the
opinions of the side with which they were aligned. And of course, the opposite
side had its own popular historians who articulated the opinions they were
supporting.
But how do these people write a history of opinions as
opposed to a history of facts? Victor Davis Hanson shows us how. To be brutally
honest, however, it must be said that he did not invent the method because it
had been there since the Vietnam War. Indeed, what the popular historians of
the era had said was that America
won the war because it killed more than a million Vietnamese at the cost of
only 65,000 American lives. But America
had to evacuate its troops and personnel in a hurry, they explained, because it
was losing the home front. That is, the politicians and the media in America
defeated their military, thus handed the Vietnamese a token victory. That's
only a token victory, you see; not a real one.
Hanson does not repeat that explanation verbatim in
conjunction with the Iraq War; he only uses Vietnam as a model to tailor-make
arguments that fit the new circumstances. The current two-sided obsession being
the prior events that led to the war and the events that transpired post the
official end of the war – the author sees no need to mention historical facts
that would stand scrutiny, opting instead to argue opinions that create their
own supporting facts.
Pitting himself against Donald Trump who said that George W.
Bush knew there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq , Hanson discusses the abstracts of a
paradoxical situation in which superpower America crushed the Iraqi army in
record time … but in so doing created a vacuum that attracted terrorist
organizations. These would be organizations that Saddam Hussein was accused of
harboring and equipping with WMD, but turned out to be a series of false
accusations; a pile of myths and fantasies that Hanson assigns not to the side
he is backing, but to the opposite side, as can be seen in the title of his
article.
He then goes on to blame the war of 2003 not on George W.
Bush or Dick Cheney but on “Bill Clinton who bombed Iraq on December 16 and 19,
1998;” also on “Madeleine Albright [who] often voiced warnings about Saddam's
aggression.” As to the interest in the bogus WMD claims, he blames that on the
“violence [which] spiked in June and July 2003.” And so, he laments: “Had the
occupation gone as well as the initial war, WMD would have been noted in the
context of there having been 20 other writs for going into war”.
He now gets nostalgic: “The invasion was brilliantly
conducted [but] securing Iraq
was poorly managed.” And he offers a piece of advice: “It is legitimate to
change opinions … but it is not ethical to deny prior positions or invent
reasons why what once seemed prudent later seemed reckless”.
Having blamed the Iraq War on Clinton and Albright, and
having blamed the interest that developed in the non-existent WMD – on the
violence of June and July 2003, Hanson invokes a historical event to blame
Obama for the whole thing. He does that by spinning historical circumstances in
a way that allows him to speculate.
Here is what he does. He writes that Harry Truman did the
right thing when in 1950, he sent reinforcements to Korea . He saved South Korea and
changed the course of history, says Hanson, but ended his tenure at a low point
because of bad circumstances and the bad behavior of his underlings.
The situation began to improve again, says Hanson, when
Eisenhower was elected, and he sent reinforcements to Korea . He goes
on: “Had Eisenhower, in Obama-like worry over his 1956 reelection bid, yanked
out all U.S. peacekeepers in 1955 … we can imagine a quick North Korean
absorption of the South, with the sort of death and chaos we are now seeing in
Iraq”.