Our deficits are now declining

Unfortunately, the only deficit declining is the projected budget
deficit, and that's still projected to be quite large. Our actual
deficit continues to grow, since we haven't had a surplus a several
years now.

and are paid for by the Chinese.

They are loaning us large sums of money, but I suspect they will want it
all back, plus interest.

When the Chinese demand all that money back I'll be happy to print up
little green pieces of paper that say $1.00 and give it back to them.
They can either paper their walls or use them to buy something from me.
Maybe they can claim California, tow it across the Pacific and enslave
the illegal immigrants. In the meantime I like my $850.00 Macbook
which was made in China. (After I-pod and printer rebate)
Still waiting to be harmed, mutilated, disfigured, poleaxed, or
enslaved by a sinister government due to the huge deficits run up
during the Reagan administration and drastic loss of civil rights by
the forces of evil in the Bush administration. I may have to sell my
stock in Halliburton, move to France and walk.

www.victorhanson.com

November 03, 2006
Before Iraq
The assumptions of a forgetful chattering class are badly off the mark.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

What is written about Iraq now is exclusively acrimonious. The
narrative is the suicide bomber and IED, never how many terrorists we
have killed, how many Iraqis have been given a chance for something
different than the old nightmare, or how a consensual government has
withstood enemies on nearly every front.

Long forgotten is the inspired campaign that removed a vicious dictator
in three weeks. Nor is much credit given to the idealistic efforts to
foster democracy rather than just ignoring the chaos that follows war
- as we did after the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, or
following our precipitous departure from Lebanon and Somalia. And we do
not appreciate anymore that Syria was forced to vacate Lebanon; that
Libya gave up its WMD arsenal; that Pakistan came clean about Dr. Khan;
and that there have been the faint beginnings of local elections in the
Gulf monarchies.

Yes, the Middle East is "unstable," but for the first time in
memory, the usual killing, genocide, and terrorism are occurring in a
scenario that offers some chance at something better. Long before we
arrived in Iraq, the Assads were murdering thousands in Hama, the
Husseins were gassing Kurds, and the Lebanese militias were murdering
civilians. The violence is not what has changed, but rather the notion
that the United States can do nothing about it; the U.S. has shown
itself willing to risk much to support freedom in place of tyranny or
theocracy in the region.

Instead of recalling any of this, Iraq is seen only in the hindsight of
who did what wrong and when. All the great good we accomplished and the
high ideals we embraced are drowned out by the present violent
insurgency and the sensationalized effort to turn the mayhem into an
American Antietam or Yalu River. Blame is never allotted to al Qaeda,
the Sadr thugs, or the ex-Baathists, only to the United States, who
should have, could have, or would have done better in stopping them,
had its leadership read a particular article, fired a certain person,
listened to an exceptional general, or studied a key position paper.

We also forget that Iraq, contrary to popular slander, was not
"cooked up" in Texas or at a Washington, D.C., neocon think tank.
Rather, it was a reaction to two events: a decade of appeasement of
Middle East tyrants and terrorists, and the disaster of September 11.
If one were to go back and read the most popular accounts of the first
Gulf War, The Generals' War by Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor of
Cobra II fame, or Rick Atkinson's Crusade, or research the
bi-partisan arguments that raged across the opinion pages in the 1990s
following the defeat and survival of Saddam Hussein, certain themes
reappear constantly that surely help to explain our current presence
inside Iraq.

One was shared regret that Saddam was left in power in 1991. No sooner
had the war ended than George Bush Sr. appeared, not joyous in our
success, but melancholy, and then distraught, once images of the
butchered and refugees beamed back from our "victory" in Iraq.
Culpability for thousands of dead Shiites and Kurds, the need for
no-fly zones, and worry about reconstituted WMD were the charges then
leveled.

The heroes? A troubled former Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz (read
The Generals' War) who almost alone felt tactical success had not
translated into strategic victory, and that we were profoundly amoral
to have let a mass murderer remain in power, while thousands of brave
revolutionaries were butchered just a few miles away from our forces.

We praise the first Gulf War now. Yet, almost immediately in its
aftermath, critics accused us of overkill, of using too many soldiers
to blast too many poor Iraqis. The charge then was not that we had too
few troops, but too many; not that the Pentagon had understated the
need for troops, but overstated and sent too many; not that we had too
few allies, but an unwieldy coalition that hampered American options;
not that the effort was too costly, but that we were too crassly
commercial in forcing allies to pony up cash as if war were supposed to
be a profitable enterprise.

The generic criticism in the 1990s of the United States, both here and
abroad, was that America bombed from on high, and sometimes, as in
Belgrade or Africa, even indiscriminately - its only concern being
fear of losses, not worry over civilian collateral damage or ending the
war decisively on the ground. Indeed, in Europe there was voiced a
certain cynicism that we were cowardly turning war into an antiseptic
enterprise (the "body bag syndrome"), adjudicated only by our
concern not to engage with the enemy below.

There were other issues now forgotten. After the acrimony in the debate
over Iraq in 1990, followed by the successful removal of Saddam
Hussein, Democrats were determined never again to be on the wrong side
of the national security debate. So they supported the present war
because they were convinced that after Panama, Gulf War I, Bosnia,
Kosovo, and Afghanistan, they could regain credibility by supporting
muscular action that seemed to pose little risk of failure. That is why
only recently have Democratic supporters of the war bailed - and only
when polls suggested that any fear of "cut and run" or McGovernism
would be outweighed by tapping into popular dissatisfaction with Iraq.

Realism is much in vogue these days, with James Baker returning as the
purported fireman, and even Democrats demanding talks with horrific
dictators in Iran and North Korea. That was not the mantra of the
1990s. The Reaganism that rejected Cold War realpolitik and risked
brinkmanship to bring down a rotten and murderous Soviet Empire was
considered both the wiser and more ethical stance, as even Democrats
reformulated their opportunistic criticism after the fall of the Berlin
Wall. Mutually Assured Destruction, Kissingerian tolerance for the
status quo, and mere containment - all that was scoffed at in the
afterglow of Reagan's squeeze that popped the Soviet bubble.

Not long ago, abdication - from Rwanda or Haiti, or from the Balkans
for a decade - not intervention, was the supposed sin. There were
dozens of Darfurs in the 1990s, when charges flew of moral
indifference. The supposition then - as now - was that those who
called for boots on the ground to stop a genocide would not unlikely be
the first to abdicate responsibility once the coffins came home and the
military was left fighting an orphaned war.

Apparently all the high-minded talk of reform - Aristotle rightly
scoffed about morality being easy in one's sleep - was predicated
only on cost-free war from 30,000 feet. Now the wisdom is that Colin
Powell - the supposed sole sane and moral voice of the present
administration - was drowned out by shrill neocon chicken hawks. But
that was not the consensus of the 1990s. In both books and journalism,
he was a Hamlet-like figure who paused before striking the needed blow,
and so was pilloried by the likes of a Michael Gordon or Madeline
Albright for not using the full force of the American military to
intervene for moral purposes. That was then, and this is now, and
in-between we have a costly war in Iraq that has taken the lives of
nearly 3,000 Americans.

The unexpected carnage of September 11 explains so much of our current
situation. It has made the realist, neo-isolationist George Bush into
an advocate for Wilsonianism abroad, but only on the calculation that
the roots of Islamic fascism rested in the nexus between dictatorship
and autocracy - the former destroys prosperity and freedom, and the
latter makes use of terrorists to deflect rising popular
dissatisfaction against the United States.

The U.S. Senate and House voted for war in Iraq, not merely because
they were deluded about the shared intelligence reports on WMD (though
deluded they surely were), but also because of the 22 legitimate casus
belli they added just in case. And despite the recent meae culpae,
those charges remain as valid today as they were when they were
approved: Saddam did try to kill a former American president; the U.N.
embargo was violated, as were its inspection protocols; the 1991
accords were often ignored; the genocide of brave Kurds did happen;
suicide bombers were being given bounties; terrorists, including those
involved into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, were given sanctuary
by Saddam; and on and on.

So it is not those charges, but we who leveled them, that have changed.
Americans' problem with the war is not that it was not moral, but
that it has been deemed too costly for the perceived benefits that
might accrue.

The conventional wisdom was that, after Afghanistan (7 weeks of
fighting) and its postbellum stability (a government within a year), a
more secular Iraq (3 weeks of fighting) would follow the same
timetable. In September 2002, well after the "miracle" in
Afghanistan, I listened to a high-ranking admiral pontificate that war
on the ground was essentially over in the new age of Green Berets and
laptops, that after Bosnia and Afghanistan, air power and Special
Forces were all that were needed.

This did not come from Rumsfeld surrogates, but was a fair enough
reflection of the wild new intoxication before Iraq - that a supposed
"revolution in military affairs" had changed the ancient rules of
war, as if our technology would now give us exemption from hurt. Many
of those who now most shrilly condemn the war had in fact years ago
rattled their sabers for "moral" wars to eliminate dictators -
predicated on just this foolish utopian notion that GPS bombing and
laser-guided missiles had at last given us the tools needed for
removing the tumors with precision and at little cost, as we conducted
lifesaving moral surgery on diseased states.

No, nothing has changed about Iraq other than its tragic tab. Changes
of view are fine, as long as those who now criticize the effort at
least acknowledge the climate in which fighting in Iraq was born, and
the real conditions under which they themselves once supported the war
- and lost heart.

©2006 Victor Davis Hanson