"Americans Love A Winner....."

"Americans love a winner.........", four immortal words from the opening speech of Patton. I was reminded of them by an exchange in the comments of this post over a Winds of Change.NET.

The original post (very good, by the way, and worth the read) was a look at the ten plagues that had befallen the Iraqi people. One commenter, Bob, took exception to there only being 10 plagues. He proposed three more: the US invasion, ethnic cleansing, and the looting of history. Another commenter, Samuel Tai, took exception and wrote a point-by-point rebuttal of Bob's points.

But it was this comment that really got me thinking:

The US is not Washington. The US is not corporate America. The US is me, the individual citizen. I, and my fellow citizens, are the force behind Washington. We determine which corporations live or die in the marketplace. We are the ones who have chosen this course of action, because we will not cower in fear. We refuse to wait behind ramparts for the next blow to fall. The best defence is a good offence. If you believe the polls, 3 out of 4 US citizens agrees with this position.

"The best defense is a good offense." It is truly a maxim of American life. Most sports teams live by that motto. It is the basis for our national defense. It is the rule that most of use in some form to better our lives.

We are society that is based on the concept of success. That is what truly differentiates us from the rest of the world, which is primarily based on the idea of failure avoidance.

Success requires innovation and hard work. Our economy rewards innovative and efficient companies. Our society rewards and holds in esteem innovative and hard working people (think Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Michael Dell and countless others). We relish success and are willing to forgive failure.

Other nations attempt to avoid failure. Companies that can't compete are provided subsidies. Individuals can't fail because they always have a societal safety net to catch them (the welfare state). Failure is the process by which we learn. Success is learning how not to fail.

As a result of the difference in policies, the US has begun to dominate the world stage. As we move forward, other nations stagnate.

We were willing to contemplate a regime change in Baghdad because we believed that we could be successful and that it would improve the lives of individual Iraqis. The vast majority of nations opposed us, not for principled reasons, but because they were afraid of what might happen should the regime change fail. Words like "quagmire" and "occupation" were used to express their fear of failure. For them, success was not an option. The status quo, no matter how detestable, was the preferred option because it avoided failure. Inspections were acceptable because their failure was twisted into a false success ("the weapons must be destroyed if we can't find them"). The very idea that we might be successful never occurred to them, it just couldn't happen.

I'm sure that Bob was meaning well, trying to point out some of the potential pitfalls before us with the munitions and the possibility of ethnic cleansing. They are both valid concerns, although maybe not as critical and wide reaching as he makes them out to be.

I will take separate issue with his last point though. For his thirteenth plague he states:

13)Loss of history. Thousands of years of historical and cultural artifacts and texts gone. Looted. Burned. Destroyed. A tragedy on the level of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Imagine if the West Wall were destroyed.

The looting of the National Museum was a world-class tragedy, no doubt about it. I've seen the reports that many of the safes had been opened normally, not broken into. I've also seen reports that say that many of the artifacts on display were fakes (and not very good ones at that).

I still think that what happened at the National Museum and at the Library were both failures and that they both need to be investigated so that we can plan those kind of occurrences out of our next war plan. The reports coming out about the safes and the fakes certainly change the degree of the situation, but it doesn't change that something happened. Investigate and learn; turn the failure into a future success.

But while this is a world-class tragedy, it is not on the scale of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. In Alexandria, the history contained in those scrolls and parchments was truly lost - there were no copies or reproductions. The books in the Library were (or should have been) well studied and copied and reproduced. Is it unfortunate that the original was lost? Absolutely. But the contents were not. We lost the objects, but not the knowledge.

It is not the destruction of the Western Wall, either. We do know, however, what the tragedy of losing the Wall would be like - we have the historical record of what it was like when Titus leveled the Temple - leaving only the Western Wall. But even then, the true tragedy wasn't the loss and destruction of the Temple, it was the loss of life and knowledge that came with the destruction and the subsequent persecution of the Jews. To this day, we still don't know exactly what the Temple looked like or exactly how it sat on the Mount.

The loss of a book or building or an artifact is terrible and should be avoided when at all necessary. But the loss of the object itself is not the greater tragedy; the greater tragedy is the loss of knowledge.

The loss at the Museum was terrible because we lost the opportunity for non-politically motivated scholars to examine and learn from many of the artifacts for the first time. It is that loss of knowledge from the looting that makes it so tragic.

The events at the Museum and the Library were our two most significant failures during the war. But they are not the end of the world. We lost some knowledge in those events, but on the whole, we protected vast amounts of knowledge in the form of ordinary Iraqis who will now live because Saddam has been deposed. The trade off is more than fair.

We risked strategic and suffered tactical failure in Iraq. The ultimate question will be: Was the invasion and regime change a success or a failure? Anyway you look at it, it is a success. We effected our stated goal. We saved countless lives, at a minimal human cost. Even with the losses at the Museum and Library, we saved vast amounts of knowledge.

Many other nations in the world would have continued to accept Saddam, not because Saddam was kind or generous or anything of the sort, but because accepting him allowed them to avoid the failure of making the wrong choice. We chose to risk failure and have achieved spectacular success instead. We are, once again, winners.

And those who wanted to avoid failure, failed.