Hanson On the Iraqi War

Victor Davis Hanson has written yet another excellent piece on Iraq

"Start with the fact that intelligence failures are part of every war. This should not excuse the miserable recent record of our CIA and other agencies. But history tells us clearly that accurate intelligence gathering on enemy intentions has always been a difficult practice.

The ancient Athenians invaded Sicily in 415 B.C. believing the false report that plenty of silver to pay for the expedition and ready allies to help with the fighting awaited their arrival. Josef Stalin was utterly convinced by his intelligence agencies that Hitler would never invade the Soviet Union. The surprise at Pearl Harbor was no aberration in American history. Just a few years later, General MacArthur assured President Truman that the Chinese would never cross the Yalu River. They invaded in the hundreds of thousands. Nor did Sovietologists in the CIA or elsewhere have any notion that our 50-year Cold War would end abruptly with the precipitous fall of the Berlin Wall.

And wars rarely follow the script laid out before hostilities commence. Sparta said it was battling Athens to free the Greek city-states from imperialism. Yet during the Peloponnesian War the Spartans gradually built themselves a larger fleet of war ships than Athens, then used them to try to create their own hegemony at home and overseas.

On the eve of the Civil War, Lincoln convinced a divided public that the North would fight merely to “preserve the Union.” Only later when news from the battlefield swelled his public support did he offer the Emancipation Proclamation and redefine the moral purpose of the entire conflict.

The truth is, wars that adhere strictly to limited preset objectives — ejecting the Kaiser’s armies from France and Belgium in World War I without invading Germany, staying south of the DMZ after defeating Chinese and North Korean aggressors in 1951, not removing Saddam after the liberation of Kuwait — usually prove incomplete, and only lead to a bloodier Round Two for some future generation."

Read it all

http://victorhanson.com/articles/hanson020806.html