The local paper has an op-ed today about the status of the war in Iraq by Diether Haenicke. Haenicke spent about a decade as the president of Western Michigan University (the university I attended as an undergrad and currently work at). Haenicke also has a unique perspective on the war in Iraq as he spent his childhood in another nation that was conquered by an American-led coalition — Germany.
Haenicke describes his childhood experiences around the time of the German defeat,
As a German schoolboy in 1944, I remember exactly what my teacher told us about the enormous losses inflicted upon the American soldiers as they stormed the beaches of Northern France. I also remember that in the following weeks we carefully studied the map of France at home, underlining the towns from which military action was reported. It showed us that the American troops were advancing and that the “invasion” was much more successful than our teachers and radio news led us to believe. I also remember my teacher’s jubilant reports when, in the middle of a harsh winter, a last German counteroffensive temporarily stalled the Americans in the Battle of the Bulge.
On D-Day, as the allied forces established their first bridgeheads in France, thousands of American lives were lost in one single day and tens of thousands more were wounded. Years later, as a teenager, I looked across the endless fields of white crosses in Normandy, each marking a young life’s premature and violent end; each cross a life given to destroy a murderous political system and its brutal dictator; each cross a sacrifice to defend the survival of freedom of the peoples of Europe. I knew then and still feel strongly that I owe my free and prosperous life to those many brave young men who fought against evil and who died horrible deaths. I carry with me a never-ending sense of gratitude toward all those American veterans who survied that terrible war and were allowed to return home safe and sound.
Today, of course, even extremely small numbers of casualties are considered all-but intolerable and politically unpalatable. The small number of casualties from the Iraqi war has those on the Left shouting for a complete withdrawal and the media complaining about a quagmire comparable to Vietnam.
But as Haenicke notes, even with all of our high-tech weapons, war is still messy and creating order after a war is something that takes years, not months,
. . . Wars, no matter what post-modern naive perception prevails, have lost nothing of their horror, even today.
And they don’t end over night. We look with impatience at Iraq and want the occupation ended quickly. It took Europe several years after WWII to return to normalcy. Hunger, joblessness and economic chaos were the order of the day for years. An elected German government was not installed until four years after the war; in Japan it took even longer. And we are incredulous that in parts of Iraq water or energy or food shortages still exist and that all schools are not yet opened.
I view these impetuous criticism with disbelief. A country that was just devastated by war and has no familiarity with free elections and the rule of law as we know it, cannot in a few months be pacified and be made functional. While we may argue amongst ourselves, and with good reason, how and why we got ourselves into this war, we must realize that the war is long from being over. It will take our common resolve to end it so that the most good will come from it, for the Iraqi people and for the rest of the world. On Veterans Day, my grateful thoughts were with our troops. I hope that we at home have the courage and the patience to hold steady and to make their sacrifices worthwhile.
Source:
War is as horrible today as it was in WWII. Deither Haenicke, Kalamazoo Gazette, November 26, 2003.