Tom over at The Redhunter has an excellent analysis on one of the favorite liberal mantra’s:
Once again we?re hearing all the things that we ?should? have done in Iraq. Over the last two days I listened to General Barry McCaffrey and Senator Joe Biden on the radio and both of them excoriated the administration for not having followed their oh-so-wise advice.
At least these two have our best interests at heart. I do truly believe that they want us to succeed in Iraq. Others, like Moveon.org, and, well, the entire leadership of the Democratic Party, seem only to be concerned with scoring political points.
Some of the things that McCaffrey, Biden, and others tell us that the administration should have done in the early days of the Iraqi War are:
1) We should have used more troops
2) We should not have disbanded the Iraqi Army
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The problem I have with the “more troops” crowd is not that they’re necessarily wrong, but that they don’t even think it necessary to consider that the presence of more troops might have made the situation worse.
For example, we are told that with more troops we could have “stopped the looting.” Really? How exactly? It is not clear that the mere presence of our soldiers would have stopped anything. By shooting the looters? Oh that would go over well in the rest of the world. By “detaining” them? And put them where, and for how long? What about trials, which our “human rights” groups would not be long in demanding? They never say.
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We should not have disbanded the Iraqi Army
The first thing to say is that we did not disband the Iraqi army; it disbanded itself. It literally disintegrated in the closing days of major combat operations. We would have had to recall it. People who advocated this need to think carefully about the consequences.
Once again, those who say we should have kept or recalled the Iraqi army only see the potiential positives. They fail to even consider that doing this may have made the situation worse.
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Again, what bothers me so much about the sort of 20/20 hindsight analysis that we hear so often is not that it is wrong, but that it is not even stated correctly. The critics do not even think it necessary to consider that had we done things their way, things might be worse. They only see the positives. As Lowry makes clear in his article, the idea that there was “no plan for after the invasion” is utter nonsense.
That is always the problem with armchair quarterbacking, it always looks so easy after the fact. Remember all the calls from the left that the battle for Iraq would be horrendous, the battle for Baghdad would be a bloodbath and so on…none of that happened because of excellent planning and execution of the battleplans. Yes, we did not prepare for the terrorists after the war was over and that was a mistake but as I said earlier, its always real easy to be prepared after the fact.
We deal with this in law enforcement all the time, civilians believing we should of done this or done that when we have to make life and death decisions in a matter of milliseconds. It’s always easy to figure out what to do when you have a couple weeks to go over it….but that is not reality.
Go check out the rest of Tom’s analysis…well worth the read.
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