Yes, yes. We’ve heard this before. In Afghanistan, the cheering crowds, the women with “the sun on their faces for the first time in years”.

A Navy SeAL friend of mine who was in country during the first part of the action told me that the situation was bad, worst then being told by the media. I thought he was BS-ing, sailors do that when telling stories. How could the government hide ten or hundreds of casualties.

Now Eric S. Margolis has an article in American Conservative making the same points. Margolis seems to have actually been to Afghanistan and know the people and the history.

Remember this when you see the cheering crowds greeting their liberators. Remember to think a year down the road? Will peace, order and democracy reign in Iraq outside the US garrison towns? Or will chaos reign, like it appears to be doing in Afghanistan?

Lets see, it took us 12 years (1763-1775) to get really mad at the British government; 8 years (1775-1783) to fight them and get them off the continent; six years (1783-1789) to create the form of government a majority felt comfortable with and then a century (the 19th)to develop the institutions to the point where they half-way worked and in the middle we had to fight a Civil War to get things straight. Now we are expecting the Afghanis and Iraqis to complete this task is less than a year or we will consider them failures. I would remind Mitchell that Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither was America and neither will a deomcratic Middle East or Central Asia. But even knowing this, isn’t it worth trying?

“But even knowing this, isn’t it worth trying?”

Yes it is. In fact, I do not think we really have any choice. Constitutional democracy, limited government, and free enterprise are in the long run the only way to defeat terrorism. But this is a long term project, and we should be prepared for that, and for the excercise of imperial power it entails.

Here is the report of Iraqis yearning to be liberated from Hussein, from the March 21 New York Sun:

The Iraqi mood was illuminated, as well, by the comments of a foreign correspondent of the New York Times, John F. Burns, who was in the enemy capital and was interviewed on PBS the first night of the war. Mr. Burns said, “Many, many Iraqis are telling us now, not always in the whispers we have only heard in the past but now in quite candid conversations, that they are waiting for America to come and bring them liberty.” This notion seemed to amaze Mr. Burns’s interlocutor on the publicly funded broadcasting system. “It’s very hard though for anybody to understand this,” Mr. Burns said. “It can only be understood in terms of the depth of the repression here. It has to be said that this is not universal of course…All I can tell you is, and every reporter who is currently here will attest to this, that the most extraordinary experience of the last few days has been a sudden breaking of the ice here, with people in every corner of life coming forward to tell us that they understand what America is about in this,” said Mr. Burns, “There is absolutely, can I just say, there is absolutely no doubt, no doubt, that there are many, many Iraqis who see what is about to happen here as the moment of liberation.”

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And here from UPI is the story of a pro-Hussein Western peace demonstrator being shocked into reality:

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip “had shocked me back to reality.” Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera “told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn’t start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam’s bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head.”

http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030321-023627-5923r