Friday, December 16, 2005
Historical perspective
Similar despair could be recalled from the winter of 1776, the Imperial German offensive of March 1918 or the early months of 1942 after Pearl Harbor and the Allies' loss of the Philippines and Singapore.
America has not fought a war when at some point the news from the battlefield did not evoke a frenzy of recriminations both abroad and at home.
After the carnage of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor and Petersburg in 1864, the conventional wisdom about the Civil War was that the bumbling Abraham Lincoln could never win re-election. Instead, all summer the veteran Gen. George McClellan assured the Northern populace that there was no hope of military victory.
In November 1950, after Americans were sent scurrying southward by the Chinese, most pundits wrote off Korea as lost -- before the unexpected counteroffensives of Gen. Matthew Ridgeway saved the Seoul government by the next spring.
And the lessons, according to Hanson?
First, hysteria arises at home in almost all our wars....
Second, there is also no necessary connection between occasionally terrible news and the final outcome of the war....
Third, American history is far kinder to those who persevered than those who alleged that their country's victory was impossible. Most today revere Lincoln and Marshall, along with Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, who weathered unimaginable slurs.
If the arguments of the home front have taught us anything these last few years, we need for many more Americans -- especially in the chattering classes -- to know much more history than they apparently do.
5 Comments:
By 
Jeff Kouba, at
Thu Dec 15, 11:26:00 PM:
Indeed, a remembrance of history can help us press on even when the fight seems the hardest. Hanson is so valuable for reminding us about that.
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri Dec 16, 01:59:00 AM:
But not *this* time. *These* critics all know what they're about, whereas *those* old ones obviously didn't.
/sarcasm
By Gordon Smith, at
Fri Dec 16, 11:19:00 AM:
"September 3, 1967, 4:00 p.m. Election day in South Vietnam. The polls in the country's forty-four provinces and municipalities were closing. It had been a busy day. In nine hours, 4,868,266 people out of 5,853,251 registered voters had visited thousands of polling stations to cast their votes for president, an 83 percent turnout. Two days later the results were announced: Nguyen Van Thieu would be the president and Nguyen Cao Ky the vice president of South Vietnam. The American establishment in Washington and Saigon was pleased. A State Department spokesman acclaimed the election as a 'major step forward., 'It is an important and heartening fact' he stated, 'that 83 percent who registered actually voted a much higher percentage than in our presidential election of 1964."
By TigerHawk, at
Fri Dec 16, 12:15:00 PM:
Interesting analogy, Screwy. South Vietnam was the target of an invasion from the north. State Department triumphalism was, perhaps, misguided. Is Iraq also the target of an invasion? If so, the case for American withdrawal weakens, I think, rather than strengthens.
I, for one, do not think that the elections in Iraq will stop the violence, and neither does President Bush. He has been quite clear on that point, I think. But in Iraq we already have the precedent that elections have stiffened the resolve of the locals in the fighting of the war. Now we have reason to believe that they have also driven a wedge between Iraqi nationalists fighting the occupation, per se, and al Qaeda, which as an enemy of the United States long preceded OIF. So while I believe that Sunnis will continue to "negotiate" through the insurgency until they have the best deal that they think they can get from the new government, I also believe that al Qaeda is in trouble in Iraq. It staked its prestige on success there, and that prestige is now very much at risk.
By Dawnfire82, at
Fri Dec 16, 05:17:00 PM:
Screwy:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20051101faessay84604/melvin-r-laird/iraq-learning-the-lessons-of-vietnam.html
Get over the Vietnam references. They don't fit. When the guy responsible for writing the plans for withdrawing from Vietnam tells you you're wrong... well, there's no real hope for you.
And don't forget that similar items could be pulled from post-WWII Japan, Germany, and France, Russia after 1991, et cetera. Let's not be selective with our memory.
