America Became Great Because of the Things Trump Hates

Opinion|America Became Great Because of the Things Trump Hates

Every time I read that the strategy of the Trump team is “shock and awe” — a rapid, massive, multifront takeover of the U.S. government to shrink the bureaucracy and overturn established domestic and foreign policy priorities — I think back to the first time I heard that term.

It is not a good memory. It was the strategy that George W. Bush’s administration used in its 2003 invasion of Iraq, where Dick Cheney predicted we would be greeted as “liberators.”

About three weeks after that war started, I went into Iraq with some relief workers to see how “shock and awe” was playing. My first column was titled “Hold Your Applause,” because, as I explained, I was traveling with a Kuwait Red Cross unit to visit a hospital in Umm Qasr, “the first town liberated by coalition forces. But 20 days into the war, it is without running water, security or adequate food supplies.” The Kuwaiti relief workers I was with took “pity on the Iraqis,” I wrote, and tossed our extra lunchboxes out the bus window as we left. I watched hospital workers scramble after the leftover food.

This, I said, “was a scene of humiliation, not liberation. … I’m certain things will improve with time. But for now, America has broken the old order — Saddam’s regime — but it has yet to put in place a new order, and the vacuum is being filled in way too many places by looters, thugs, chaos, thirst, hunger and insecurity.”

Alas, my column came out the morning of April 9, 2003 — the day U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians tore down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad and everyone was celebrating this toppling as similar to the fall of the Berlin Wall. But there I was — someone who had supported the war to spread democracy in the region, not to find elusive W.M.D.s — telling people to hold their applause, while assuring them that things would get better.

I presume by now, dear reader, you have figured out why I am recalling one of the low points of my career. I was so naïve. I thought any U.S. administration that would launch a “shock and awe” campaign to take over a country half a world away would know what it was doing and would be staffed with experts who would know what they were doing. I could not have been more wrong.