Iraq and Misplaced Metaphors

Victor Davis Hanson on why the current metaphors the left use about Iraq are misplaced.

Here is just a sample, be sure to read the whole thing.

One of the more curious aspects of the commentary on this war has not been the bias of the mainstream media but the cynical punditry that somehow ends up as the conventional wisdom among our New York and Washington elites. Here is a small sample of misplaced metaphors, allusions, and conventional wisdom of the last three years.

THE POTTERY BARN RULE

"You break it, you bought it" — so we were told ad nauseam throughout the war in Iraq. Bush and his Team America posse supposedly barged into an upscale store, rashly knocked over items, and now, quite startled, must stay on and pay the tab for the mess they made. How deep.

In truth, it was the wrong metaphor even before becoming hackneyed. The Pottery Barn image doesn't work for a variety of reasons. First, Saddam's Iraq was not a pristine, upscale shop. It was, rather, a trash heap of broken shards — its power, water, sewage, and garbage all fractured and scattered in pieces; its people both brutalized and often brutalizers as a result of three decades of institutionalized mass murder; its leadership a choice between Soviet-era killers and Dark Age jihadists.

Second, unlike the naïve buyer who takes umbrage that he must pay for something he inadvertently knocked over, we went into Iraq with the explicit intention of fixing things. Indeed, we announced quite openly that we did not want a repeat of Lebanon, Afghanistan of the 1980s, Mogadishu, or the first Gulf War, when we let the locals murder and bomb after we pulled out.

Third, the peeved naïf of the metaphor is left shelling out money for something that is permanently ruined. But we are mending the ware that others smashed, hoping to ensure that what we leave behind is far better than what was there when we arrived.

A final, darker thought: I don't think when Sherman went into Georgia, or Patton crossed the Rhine, or the Marines hit the caves of Okinawa, our elites warned them — or they would have much cared to hear — "Be careful folks: You break Georgia, Germany, or Japan, you buy it."