“There is no light at the end of the tunnel.”
by James Buchanan
Bush continues to insist that we can “win” the Iraq war. The definition of winning the war is extremely vague. Bush has repeatedly said that our forces will stand down when the new Iraqi army stands up. There’s just one little problem. There’s not a chance in hell the Iraqi Army will be able to beat the rebels. A http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070513/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_strykers_struggle;_ylt=Au_ely42ppW2oKOTs5bwmeCs0NUE reports that the US recently lost five Stryker armored vehicles in just one week. If the US Army is losing equipment at this rate, what will become of the Iraqi Army which will have only a fraction of our resources?
The most sane course of action for George W. Bush would be to bail out of Iraq. Bush has painted himself into a corner by repeatedly dismissing this as a “cut and run” policy. If Bush had been more open-minded and much less stubborn, he could have dropped the Iraqi mess, the minute it began to fester and smell. Recent history has favored American presidents, who pulled out of Third World disasters after getting their fingers burned. Ronald Reagan had enough sense to cut his losses and get out of Lebanon after 241 Marines were killed in a massive truck bombing. Bill Clinton had enough sense to cut his losses and get out of Somalia after the “Blackhawk Down” disaster. Americans don’t care about these Third World nations. By “staying the course” Bush is guaranteeing that he will have a negative political legacy. Even if through some miracle, we built a stable democracy in Iraq, it would still be seen as a failure because of the half-trillion dollar price tag and because of the fanatic religious mullahs, who would be elected by the Iraqi people. Staying in Iraq is a “lose-lose” proposition.Right now the US is supposedly trying to defeat the Iraqi insurgency. The rebels have grown in numbers and sophistication each year we’ve spent in Iraq. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is only more tunnel until we eventually hit a dead end.
To defeat an insurgency, we need an overwhelmingly large army that literally suffocates the rebellion (like the Red Chinese Army occupying Tibet) or a large dose of inhumanity, which would outrage any American with a conscience. Since it’s usually impossible to tell who set off the last roadside bomb or who was sniping at our troops, we have to be willing to round up people and to execute them based on the flimsiest evidence. Rounding up bewildered Iraqi civilians near a roadside bombing is an exercise in futility as the real culprits lay low or run away.
Anyone who doesn’t believe a guerrila war makes the occupying army less humane just has to look at our first year in Iraq. Our military started operating the prison and torture chamber at Abu Ghraib almost as soon as Saddam’s old henchmen abandoned their posts. The Bush regime has repeatedly insisted that it “needs” to use torture and use secret prisons and our Congress disgracefully rubbered stamped a pro-torture bill to protect Bush from criminal prosecution.
A politician should make a check list to see if an occupation is feasible or a waste of time. For example:
1).Does the target nation have a history of resistance?
Iraq is historically one of the worst nations to occupy in terms of rebel activity. An attempted British occupation of Iraq with 90,000 troops failed in the 1920s.
2).Will the target population believe it has been liberated?
Hell no! The Iraqis are much different in terms of race, culture, language and religion than White Americans. Most Third World nations remember the days of colonialism and see any modern occupation as neo-colonialism. The Iraqis suspect that we’re there to steal their oil and occupy their nation for Israel.
3).Are we willing to do what it takes to crush rebel activities?
No. We don’t have enough troops to watch all the roads all the time and police the whole nation. The Iraqis will always be able to plant roadside bombs to harm us. The alternative would be to execute all suspected rebels and even entire villages to suppress the rebellion. This would lead to more hostility from surviving Iraqis and eventually such policies would wipe out the entire populations of major cities. A less brutal policy would mean that some rebels would escape and a certain level of rebel activity and American deaths would result. Right now we’re losing about 1,000 soldiers per year in Iraq.
4).Can US politicians survive supporting the Iraq occupation?
Absolutely not. The Republicans were just voted out of Congress thanks to the Iraq War. Americans don’t want 1,000 soldiers being killed every year and thousands more maimed for a “nation-building experiment” that has clearly gone wrong. Most Americans see the war as being for oil and Israel. The war is NOT for a “noble cause” as the pathetic Bush (with his 28% approval rating) keeps claiming.
Those “brilliant” Zionists, Wolfowitz, Pearle and Feith, from that neocon think tank apparently never asked any of these questions. Maybe they didn’t care what happened as long as America crushed Iraq for Israel. Their job was to lie us into war and they didn’t care what happened after their rosy predictions turned out all wrong.
George W. Bush should have done his own study to predict how an occupation of Iraq would turn out –using historical and military experts, not just lying, biased neocons. Then again, Bush never did have a reputation for carefully thinking things out.