First, President George W. Bush, VP Dick Cheney and a coterie of neo-conservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle misled Americans into an unprovoked, unnecessary war by claiming Iraq was about to attack the U.S. with nuclear and biowarfare weapons. This was a grotesque lie that anyone with knowledge of strategic weapons knew was arrant nonsense, but few had the courage or honesty to refute.
Next, the White House gravely misread the strategic situation by swallowing neo-con assurances the "liberation" of Iraq would be a cakewalk and oil bonanza. Last week, Iraqis responded to Bush's foolish challenge, "Bring 'em on," by blowing up UN headquarters in Baghdad and inflicting serious sabotage on Iraq's oil infrastructure.
These attacks show the U.S. has got itself into a truly awesome mess in Iraq. Far from easily plundering Iraq's oil wealth, U.S. occupation troops - almost half the U.S. Army's combat forces - are now under siege, at a cost of $1 billion US weekly.
Except the cost are now over a Billion a week.
This writer, who covered the Afghan struggle against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, sees many of the same elements developing in Iraq: tribal and ethnic divisions, a foreign-supported puppet regime with a useless army, an intractable guerrilla war and a great power with overreaching imperial ambition.
Worse for the U.S., Iraq may be emerging - like Afghanistan - as a new, pan-national cause for the Muslim world. Thousands of jihadi volunteers are reportedly slipping into Iraq to battle U.S. troops. They range from youthful idealists to battle-hardened jihadis from other wars and a handful of suicide bombers. Just as the Afghan jihad electrified the Muslim world and helped assuage its feelings of weakness and inferiority, for a new generation Iraq may come to be a passionate struggle against another foreign invader.
And Bush still likes to talk about making us safer. The reality is we have created a decade long hot spot that is far more dangerous now that in was in 2001.
The U.S. finds itself in a disturbing analogue of the long Lebanese civil war, with confused American troops, like Israeli soldiers in Lebanon, not knowing why they are there or who is the enemy and venting their frustration on civilians. Protracted guerrilla warfare eventually turns even the best-disciplined troops into brutes, and corrupts entire armies.
And it most definitely is. Low number of recruits mean we allow those who we may have kicked out of the Army to stay in. We accept persons into the Army that in the past we would have refused. Criminal behavior is seen in commands world wide, and punishment, when it is delivered, is weak.
Another I told you so moment.
1 comment:
Damn, he sure nailed it.
The story is a must read, and like you, he points to the historical reality of Israel's move into Lebanon and the failure that was.
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