By Victor David Hansen over at NRO. In the midst of an election year, it’s important to have a historical perspective.
About this time 60 years ago, six weeks after the Normandy beach landings, Americans were dying in droves in France. We think of the 76-day Normandy campaign of summer and autumn 1944 as an astounding American success — and indeed it was, as Anglo-American forces cleared much of France of its Nazi occupiers in less than three months. But the outcome was not at all preordained, and more often was the stuff of great tragedy. Blunders were daily occurrences — resulting in 2,500 Allied casualties a day. In any average three-day period, more were killed, wounded, or missing than there have been in over a year in Iraq.
And an article by Philip Chase Bobbitt, linked to by Jonah Goldberg, published before the invasion of Iraq, states that we can’t measure future outcomes based on the present, but rather we must judge future outcomes based on other possible future outcomes. So the question, “Are we better off now than we were four years ago” is meaningless:
Or, consider the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Are we better off now than we were the day before we intervened? Probably not. Before that war we knew where Al Qaeda had its bases and it had not struck since Sept. 11; a number of American and allied soldiers who became casualties were then alive and unwounded; public opinion in Pakistan was less hostile to America; there was a greater measure of sympathy around the world for our losses in New York and Washington; our economy and confidence in our markets were stronger.
But let’s ask the relevant question: Are we better off today than we would have been if we had let the Taliban continue arming and sheltering our Qaeda enemies, many of whom we killed and captured in our intervention? Clearly, we are vastly better off for having acted.