by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
The Australian Financial Review<\/em><\/p>\n A shorter version of this essay recently appeared in the\u00a0Australian Financial Review<\/i><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n W<\/span>riting of the decline of the West \u2014 and the United States in particular \u2014 has been a parlor game from the time of doomsayers Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee to Paul Kennedy\u2019s pessimism of the 1980s. Now the most recent serial epitaphs center on the Anglo-American experience in Iraq that will soon end, it is foretold, in defeat and a global loss of American prestige to the detriment of the West at large.<\/p>\n The extremists in the Middle East \u2014 Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian and Syrian sponsors \u2014 are supposedly empowered as nearby Iraqi Islamists tie down the American Gulliver. Democracy, we are also lectured by leftists, realists, and isolationists alike, won\u2019t work in the Muslim world. Instead elections only provide a veneer of legitimacy to \u2018one-vote\/one time\u2019 terrorists and jihadists like Iraqi Shiites and Hamas.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, China merrily pushes ahead, piling up U.S. dollars as it trolls the Middle East for oil contracts. Other petrocrats \u2014 whether a Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chavez \u2014 cause international mischief with impunity. And they seem to win a pass from a distracted America that lacks an energy policy, other than borrowing profligately to power its Hummers and Chevy Tahoes.<\/p>\n North Korea and Iran may well become nuclear powers. With America bogged down in the Middle East, either one may use its frightening weapons against a Japan or Israel \u2014 or force neighboring decent nations to go nuclear to salvage regional deterrence. Either way the United States no longer has the resources or the will to put such atomic genies back into their bottles.<\/p>\n American armed forces are stretched too thin \u2014 and said to be exhausted after failing to stop the resurgent bloodletting not only in Iraq, but now in Afghanistan as well. A weakened George Bush reaches out to Democrats at home and Europeans abroad in vain. Both seem to be saying that their once loud calls for bipartisanship and multilateralism applied only to a strong rather than lame duck President.<\/p>\n Y<\/span>et most of this entire bleak scenario is media-driven and bears little semblance to reality. While it is true that visible Western elites in politics, Hollywood, and the universities have proclaimed Iraq another Vietnam, and a harbinger of a needed global fall to come, few in the Pentagon, Wall Street, or Silicon Valley apparently are overly worried: military modernization and readiness, sky-high stocks, and new technologies seem oblivious to the fighting in Iraq. The American people are as against the war as much as they were once for it when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled. But their current unease is mostly because of the growing sense that the sectarians and zealots in Iraq simply aren\u2019t worth another drop of American blood, not because the United States could not win should it apply the full extent of its armed power.<\/p>\n Yet Iraq, that just tried, sentenced, and executed Saddam Hussein, is hardly lost. If we add up all the American combat fatalities in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 11, we have lost about fifty soldiers per month \u2014 less than 1% of the rate of fatalities during World War II.<\/p>\n We haggle over whether Iraq is in a civil war, but there is no unified opposition, with a rallying agenda that marshals forces to overthrow an elected government. No one is any longer yelling about \u201cno blood for oil\u201d or Halliburton conspiracies, but only wonderment over George Bush\u2019s stubbornness in staying on until a viable government stabilizes.<\/p>\n Five years ago few knew or cared about Iran\u2019s ongoing nuclear acquisition. Today it is ostracized, and its unhinged president is on his way to make the theocracy an international pariah. Yes, there was the usual violence on the West Bank, but now Hamas and Fatah fight each other as much as Israel. Pakistan is no longer marketing nuclear technology, and Libya has given up its weapons of mass destruction. The Arab coffeehouse now talks of American naivet\u00e9 not its Machiavellism, as a certain moral clarity has emerged that has put the onus on Middle Easterners themselves to put up or shut up in their tired harangues about the former absence of Western support for their democratic aspirations.<\/p>\n The Shiite-Sunni killing in Iraq, the genocide in Darfur, the war between Somalia and Ethiopia, all that reminds us that tribalism, religious intolerance, and autocracy \u2014 not the United States \u2014 are the source of such appalling violence and mostly indigenous phenomena. To let it be \u2014 as we did when Saddam slaughtered tens of thousands, Hafez al-Assad wiped out Hama, or a million died on the Iranian-Iraqi border \u2014 earns us the charge of criminal indifference as much as our present intervention to birth democracy ensures us the opprobrium as naifs or imperialists.<\/p>\n E<\/span>lsewhere nothing much has changed. The American economy is in transformation but booming, still three times larger than its closest competitor in Japan. Last month federal income revenues reached an all-time high, as interest rates, unemployment, and inflation are at historic lows. Globalization continues unabated \u2014 a synonym for Westernization and Americanization in particular. China will soon have a rough rendezvous with environmentalism, unionism, suburban malaise, and most of the other dislocations that the West has long ago weathered from the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n What is changing, however, is not the influence and power of the United States, but perceptions of such prompted by America\u2019s own unhappiness over the inability to establish a democracy quickly in the heart of the ancient caliphate after the three-week victory over Saddam Hussein. Our technological prowess and spiraling wealth have left the Western public with expectations of instantaneous results. In war \u2014 after Panama, Bosnia, and Kosovo \u2014 that means victory without losses; in peace, the absurd notion that if we aren\u2019t perfect in our execution, we are not good in our intent.<\/p>\n Europe \u2014 with its vaunted constitution in peril, stagnant economic growth, unassimilated minorities, demographic stasis and puny militaries \u2014 treads carefully. The notion that Americans may think they are in trouble cheers many. But privately they rightly fear even more that the United States might just do what continental intellectuals dream of \u2014 withdraw from the world stage. That would mean pacifist Europeans would have to rely on their utopian principles to reason with an energy-rich Russia, a nuclear Iran, and radical Islamist or autocratic regimes cross the Mediterranean and in the nearby Middle East.<\/p>\n So there is real danger from the fallout from Iraq. But it is not that the United States must pack up, in an admission of its new limitations. Rather the daily mayhem and its attendant criticism have tired Americans to the point that the notion of pulling in our horns and letting the world be seems attractive and guilt-free as never before.<\/p>\n \u00a92007 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson The Australian Financial Review A shorter version of this essay recently appeared in the\u00a0Australian Financial Review Writing of the decline of the West \u2014 and the United States in particular \u2014 has been a parlor game from the time of doomsayers Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee to Paul Kennedy\u2019s pessimism of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[762],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-XN","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4003,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/for-better-or-worse\/","url_meta":{"origin":3707,"position":0},"title":"For Better or Worse?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 5, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Is the U.S. better off with the Middle East as it is now than as it was before 2001? by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online After September 11, there were only seven sovereign countries in the Middle East that posed a real danger to the policies and, in some\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2006"","block_context":{"text":"May 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/may-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4519,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-challenges-in-the-year-ahead\/","url_meta":{"origin":3707,"position":1},"title":"Our Challenges in the Year Ahead","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 26, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"What we learned from three years of war. by Victor Davis Hanson Private Papers A shorter version of this essay recently appeared in the\u00a0Australian Financial Review. No American President this century suffered the level of slander as did George Bush in the recent campaign. Yet despite Moveon.org, George Soros, Michael\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "December 2004"","block_context":{"text":"December 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/december-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8227,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/our-dangerous-historical-moment\/","url_meta":{"origin":3707,"position":2},"title":"Our Dangerous Historical Moment","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 19, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Obama and European leaders are repeating the mistakes of their 1930s predecessors. by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online\u00a0 World War II was the most destructive war in history. What caused it? The panic from the ongoing and worldwide Depression in the 1930s had empowered extremist movements the world over.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Ukraine"","block_context":{"text":"Ukraine","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/ukraine\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/pic_giant_021915_SM_ISIS-Putin-Iran-500x292.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3523,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/winning-ugly\/","url_meta":{"origin":3707,"position":3},"title":"Winning Ugly","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 2, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Iraq doesn't need to be a Kodak moment. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There is no need to review the now common judgment on the Iraqi war as a fiasco, quagmire, or \u201cworst\u201d something or other in American history. We have paid over four years, a high price\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2007"","block_context":{"text":"October 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/october-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4996,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-strangest-of-times-a-perplexing-world-stage\/","url_meta":{"origin":3707,"position":4},"title":"The Strangest of Times: A Perplexing World Stage","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 4, 2002","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Skeptics cite a number of hypothetical disasters that might befall the United States should we attack Iraq. These are very legitimate worries; but it seems to me more likely that the far more serious ramifications will follow elsewhere, especially should we be successful\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2002"","block_context":{"text":"October 2002","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2002\/october-2002\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8440,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-the-next-president-will-face-a-dangerous-predicament-abroad\/","url_meta":{"origin":3707,"position":5},"title":"Why the Next President Will Face a Dangerous Predicament Abroad","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 28, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online For a time, reset, concessions, and appeasement work to delay wars. But finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm, and face down enemies. That gets dangerous. 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