Ever since we went into Iraq (and even before) I have argued that our debates about that war (and other wars) turn on our predictions of how the future will look back upon it.
No one today, for example, would argue that the world is a better place because of what we did in Vietnam. One could argue that our motives were pure, that our intervention was just, that knowing what we knew at the time intervening was the right thing to do, etc., etc., but I don’t believe that, knowing what we now know of how things turned out, anyone could argue that we, Vietnam, or anyone else is better off as a result of what we did. (Well, maybe John Kerry is better off, but that’s another story.)
Thus those of us who support our war in Iraq do so at least in part (and I believe in very large part) because we believe that if we succeed there both the U.S. and Iraq itself, the middle east, and indeed the whole world will be better off as a result of our actions. We are predicting, in short, that reasonable people looking back on this conflict in five, ten, fifteen, sixty years will conclude that our efforts were justified. If the future results of this war are deemed positive, I would go even farther and say that that judgment would hold even if “smoking gun” evidence turned up that “Bush lied.”
On the other hand, if Iraq goes to hell in a handbasket, as the war’s critics both predict and to varying degrees hope, then our policies will be judged to have been unwise, wrong, criminal.
I was thus pleased to see that Samuel Hynes, in his lead OpEd in today’s New York Times, took precisely this approach to wars then and now. The one bold pull quote from his essay, referring to Iraq, asks, “60 years from now, how will we feel about this war?” But since this did appear in the New York Times, after all, my pleasure with Hynes’s question was quickly replaced by the sadly predictable nature of his answer:
American wars since the Second World War have been different: lost, or not won or even finished, or trivial, and morally ambiguous at best, though brave men fought in them. The Second World War was our last just and victorious war, the last war a man could come home from with any expectation of glory.
The old men must be thinking about that as they gather together, must be glad that their time of testing came when it did, in a war where the Americans were the good guys beyond question, and the bad guys were absolutely evil. Perhaps that new memorial down on the Mall is our national monument to that last time of national goodness, before we lost our way.
I try to imagine a day 60 years from now, when the veterans of our present conflict
You know, I realize that the American victory wasn’t as absolute as it was in WW2, but surely Hynes can’t be arguing that the Americans weren’t “the good guys beyond question” in Korea, can he?
It’s almost sixty years past the Korean conflict, and I hope that he looks back with pride at the fact that the 50 million people of South Korea don’t live in the hell on earth that’s North Korea.
Certainly one can argue that at the time it wasn’t so clear, but in hindsight, decades later, it’s clear that while it’s a shame we couldn’t liberate North Korea also, it was a pretty huge victory that we won by keeping South Korea safe.
John,
Amen to that.