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Why the war is OVER
The war in Iraq was lost before it began. It was lost the day it was conceived. And if the men who cooked it up had studied 20th-century history, they would have known that.
Very simply, no colonial power has won a war fought against an insurgent army in the insurgents' country. The French in Vietnam. The French in Algeria. The Russians in Afghanistan. Losers, all.
Why is this so? Because wars are not only fought in space --- space unfamiliar to the invaders, space far from the invaders' homeland --- but in time. And time is never the friend of the invader.
Some useful quotes from Jonathan Schell's classic book about Vietnam, The Real War:
The Vietnamese were well-versed in the strategies of time. The Americans, hardly able to see beyond the next election, could at best look four or five years ahead. A decade was already off the political map. The Vietnamese were accustomed to thinking in decades, even in centuries...
We ran out of time. This is the tragedy of Vietnam --- we were fighting for time rather than space. And time ran out.
---Norman B. Hannah, foreign service officer
"You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield," said the American colonel.
The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."
--- Conversation in Hanoi in l975
It's hard to believe this is so simple, but it is. Rock breaks scissors. Poorly-equipped insurgents find ways to defeat the army of the richest nation on earth. The invading colonial power just doesn't understand that some wars are not about might --- they're about culture.
Could we have 'won' in Iraq? Easily! All we had to do is be true liberators. If we had turned on the electricity and kept it on. If we had cleaned the water and made sure it was plentiful. If we had hired Iraqis to do this work and paid them fairly. If, in short, we behaved like the democracy we wanted them to become...and then left.
But we did not do this. We brought our own contractors in, and let them run wild and make obscene fortunes for services they often never delivered. We let our troops use chemical weapons --- white phosphorous, for example --- that Saddam only dreamed of possessing. We used torture as an instrument of policy. We killed civilians. We leveled cities.
Is it any wonder they hate us?
Is it any wonder they want us gone? From The New York Times:
For the first time, Iraq's political factions collectively called today for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces, in a moment of consensus that comes as the Bush administration battles pressure at home to commit to a pullout schedule.
Now pretty much everyone grasps there is no way to win --- that we have seen the problem, and it is us. This creates enormous difficulties for the government and its ever-dwindling cadre of apologists. 2,100 souls have been squandered. Tens of thousands bear physical and psychological wounds that will wreck their lives. Hundreds of billions of dollars down the toilet. And every reason to think our commanders --- or higher --- could be indicted for war crimes.
So you get, as a rationale, for 'staying the course,' this:
"Setting a date [for withdrawal] would mean that the 221 soldiers I've lost this year, that their lives will have been lost in vain," says Army Maj. Gen. William Webster
"If you put yourself in the shoes of the terrorists, if they get to believe that all they have to do is wait, because we're going to pull out precipitously, then something enormously valuable has been lost." So says Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense who has not been right once about the war.
So they get House Majority Leader Roy Blunt to call Congressman Murtha "the poster boy for Al Jazeera." And the President's press spokesman compares Murtha to Michael Moore.
But the facts say otherwise: The Bush team wasted every soldier killed, from number one right up to 2,100.
The good news: Americans have been lied to so relentlessly for five years they're beginning to catch on --- nothing that these white men in suits say checks out. No plan going in, no plan to get out, no reason to stay except to stay.
If they said, 'Hey, we really need this oil --- if we don't take it, you'll be stranded by the side of the highway,' the American people might have gone for it.
If they'd said, 'This is war, and war means torture,' a lot of people might have forgiven them.
But they haven't. And they can't. So our leaders go on losing the war, wasting lives and breaking hearts and bleeding precious resources that we need to fix our damaged homeland. History won't forgive them. Neither, it looks like, will the military, which clearly expressed its desire to leave through Murtha. Neither will the American people.
George Bush, who once looked like our Caesar, will soon be regarded as the worst President in our history --- and outside of Fox News and Loose Canon and a bunch of hard-core, my-country-right-or-wrong 'patriots', no one will remember voting for the guy.
As I say, pretty much everyone --- except for the bozos in charge --- gets this.
The Bad News is the Good News: We lost. Let's get our troops home. And then let's get on to our real work --- finding some way to make it up to the families of the dead and maimed.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Very simply, no colonial power has won a war fought against an insurgent army in the insurgents' country. The French in Vietnam. The French in Algeria. The Russians in Afghanistan. Losers, all.
Why is this so? Because wars are not only fought in space --- space unfamiliar to the invaders, space far from the invaders' homeland --- but in time. And time is never the friend of the invader.
Some useful quotes from Jonathan Schell's classic book about Vietnam, The Real War:
The Vietnamese were well-versed in the strategies of time. The Americans, hardly able to see beyond the next election, could at best look four or five years ahead. A decade was already off the political map. The Vietnamese were accustomed to thinking in decades, even in centuries...
We ran out of time. This is the tragedy of Vietnam --- we were fighting for time rather than space. And time ran out.
---Norman B. Hannah, foreign service officer
"You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield," said the American colonel.
The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."
--- Conversation in Hanoi in l975
It's hard to believe this is so simple, but it is. Rock breaks scissors. Poorly-equipped insurgents find ways to defeat the army of the richest nation on earth. The invading colonial power just doesn't understand that some wars are not about might --- they're about culture.
Could we have 'won' in Iraq? Easily! All we had to do is be true liberators. If we had turned on the electricity and kept it on. If we had cleaned the water and made sure it was plentiful. If we had hired Iraqis to do this work and paid them fairly. If, in short, we behaved like the democracy we wanted them to become...and then left.
But we did not do this. We brought our own contractors in, and let them run wild and make obscene fortunes for services they often never delivered. We let our troops use chemical weapons --- white phosphorous, for example --- that Saddam only dreamed of possessing. We used torture as an instrument of policy. We killed civilians. We leveled cities.
Is it any wonder they hate us?
Is it any wonder they want us gone? From The New York Times:
For the first time, Iraq's political factions collectively called today for a timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces, in a moment of consensus that comes as the Bush administration battles pressure at home to commit to a pullout schedule.
Now pretty much everyone grasps there is no way to win --- that we have seen the problem, and it is us. This creates enormous difficulties for the government and its ever-dwindling cadre of apologists. 2,100 souls have been squandered. Tens of thousands bear physical and psychological wounds that will wreck their lives. Hundreds of billions of dollars down the toilet. And every reason to think our commanders --- or higher --- could be indicted for war crimes.
So you get, as a rationale, for 'staying the course,' this:
"Setting a date [for withdrawal] would mean that the 221 soldiers I've lost this year, that their lives will have been lost in vain," says Army Maj. Gen. William Webster
"If you put yourself in the shoes of the terrorists, if they get to believe that all they have to do is wait, because we're going to pull out precipitously, then something enormously valuable has been lost." So says Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense who has not been right once about the war.
So they get House Majority Leader Roy Blunt to call Congressman Murtha "the poster boy for Al Jazeera." And the President's press spokesman compares Murtha to Michael Moore.
But the facts say otherwise: The Bush team wasted every soldier killed, from number one right up to 2,100.
The good news: Americans have been lied to so relentlessly for five years they're beginning to catch on --- nothing that these white men in suits say checks out. No plan going in, no plan to get out, no reason to stay except to stay.
If they said, 'Hey, we really need this oil --- if we don't take it, you'll be stranded by the side of the highway,' the American people might have gone for it.
If they'd said, 'This is war, and war means torture,' a lot of people might have forgiven them.
But they haven't. And they can't. So our leaders go on losing the war, wasting lives and breaking hearts and bleeding precious resources that we need to fix our damaged homeland. History won't forgive them. Neither, it looks like, will the military, which clearly expressed its desire to leave through Murtha. Neither will the American people.
George Bush, who once looked like our Caesar, will soon be regarded as the worst President in our history --- and outside of Fox News and Loose Canon and a bunch of hard-core, my-country-right-or-wrong 'patriots', no one will remember voting for the guy.
As I say, pretty much everyone --- except for the bozos in charge --- gets this.
The Bad News is the Good News: We lost. Let's get our troops home. And then let's get on to our real work --- finding some way to make it up to the families of the dead and maimed.
Happy Thanksgiving.
