No Surprise

The current war has apparently caused many people to believe that the opponents of the war have been proved wrong. One letter to the San Francisco Chronicle suggested that the opponents should eat crow, and cited some facts: 1. The US (etc.) forces scored a swift and complete military victory. 2. Many people in Iraq have been glad to be quit of Saddam Hussein.

In her next letter no doubt she'll tell us something that we didn't all know on March 19, and then we'll know why we should eat crow; meanwhile, the issue seems unresolved. To ease the job of finding something new that was unknown before the war and would tend to make its opponents wrong, I offer a couple of lists.

Not Surprising

• The invasion was not a cakewalk. The troops were not greeted by massive surrenders of armed forces, nor by spontaneous civilian uprisings even in the Shiite south.
• The military victory was quick and efficient by any reasonable standard for the invasion and subjection of a large country well armed and well prepared for war.
• Some people were jubilant at the fall of Hussein and welcoming to Coalition troops, once it was known to be safe. And some people were jubilant at the fall of Hussein and welcoming to Coalition troops, once it appeared to be profitable. Together these groups, which surely overlap, certainly constitute a large number of Iraqis.
• Some people remain loyal to Hussein. In some places resistance was fierce and even desperate; there were hopeless and even suicidal attacks of ill-armed men against tanks.
• There was a tiny number of suicide attacks. (This is entirely distinct from desperate and suicidal resistance.)
• Many Iraqis resent the people who invaded the country and caused destruction, no matter how good the cause was supposed to be.
• Massive popular support for people installed by British and American forces has so far not been evident. Shiite groups are jockeying for power, not falling in line behind the Americans. Turks and Kurds are intensely suspicious of each other, even hostile. (In all fairness, maybe it's surprising that both have stayed pretty well under control.)
• When civil authority disappeared, there was massive looting and worse, with hospitals and government offices badly damaged and some number of people killed.
• Irreplaceable treasures of human history were lost. The loss was extraordinarily bad in one or two places but may not have been widespread.
• There were two incidents in which, flush with victory and filled with patriotic fervor, American troops acted very unwisely with the American flag. Millions of people from whom we need support or at least acquiescence were humiliated and outraged at seeing these on television. The American commanders on the spot rightly and promptly reversed each of these actions, but by then major damage had been done. The American command, having seen the first incident in Umm Qasr, failed to prevent a repeat in Baghdad.
• U.S. and other coalition forces have assisted wounded Iraqis, both civilian and military. Small military units, armed and prepared for trouble, have gone after strategic sites, like water pumping stations, and sewage plants, to get them back into operation as soon as possible.
• So far, evidence of Al Qaeda connections -- collaboration, collusion, or aid and comfort -- has been extremely small. Specifically, zero.

Some Surprise Value

• The firing of oil wells was minor in scope, and apparently easily controlled.
• Nearly four weeks after the invasion started, the evidence for illegal Weapons of Mass Destruction -- operational capability, production capacity, or research facilities -- is not merely small (no surprise) but dead flat zero.

Afterword: Qualifications, Reservations, and an Inference

All these items describe the state of things right now. Some may change seriously at any moment; among these might be the total lack of WMDs and the isolated nature of damage to historical sites. But owing to a strange oversight in the creation of the world, the data we have are all that we have to make decisions on.

The two mild-surprise items, and some others, are signs of a country that was not at all prepared to fight a war, even in defense against an invasion. Did such a nation present a clear and present danger that it was going to attack its neighbors viciously? You decide.

You read it here first: The day after I posted that mini-analysis of Iraq's state of readiness for aggressive war, the same was in Arianna Huffington's syndicated column. Sometimes the lady almost makes one regret our requirement that the President must be a natural-born citizen.

 

Document: http://www.dandrake.com/surprise.html