I was using the new iPhone at work this afternoon to
surreptitiously surf the web and see what was up with the Chuck Hagel
confirmation hearings for Secretary of Defense. (So sue me, beloved current employer, why
else do you have a guest network, eh?).
What a farce. Is there anyone - ANYONE - left in these United States
besides John McCain and six Republican senators who thinks the Iraq war was
anything other than an unmitigated disaster?
4,488 of our sons / daughters / mothers / fathers killed. Thirty three thousand wounded. Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed. Ethnic cleansing of Sunni and Shia, not to
mention Christian and Jew. $757.8
billion spent in direct cost alone, per Pentagon estimates, which don't include
the billions spent on indirect costs like servicing the debt on money we
borrowed to pay for the damn thing. And
for what? So W could prove he was just
as much of a man as his father? So Dick
“I had other priorities” Cheney could make up for blowing off the Vietnam War? So we could overthrow a secular dictator who
hated Islamic terrorists, and who waged a ten-year war to the death against
Iran and the Ayatollahs? (A war that
ended in a tie, but you get my drift.)
But Saddam was a murderous tyrant, you say. And it is our moral duty to depose murderous
tyrants! Well, if that were the case we
would've invaded half a dozen Central American countries where we installed our
own thugs, wouldn't we, Senator McCain? Or maybe Egypt, and gotten rid of
Mubarak. Dang, didn't see us doing that,
did you? It's like the saying goes - he
may be a bastard, but he's our
bastard. And if you only off the bastards you don't approve of (a policy I
happen to approve of) then you surrender all pretense of morality, and by the
way, welcome to the world as it actually exists.
The worst of it, in my jaded view, is that we took a “force in
being” and turned it into a force in reality, and for no good reason. A force in being? It's a play on an old naval term - a fleet in
being. A fleet in being, as in Kaiser
Bill's Germany early in the 20th century, is a couple dozen big ships with big
guns sitting in a harbor and maybe occasionally sailing out to sea for a firing
exercise and then returning to port to drink schnapps and eat schnitzel. The mere fact of this fleet and the threat
that it might be used drove the English mad with worry.
Until, of course, war came, and despite early losses, the Englanders
figured out how to master the Germans, and the High Seas Fleet ended up
scuttled at the bottom of Scapa Flow.
It's the same on land. A big,
powerful army is at its most imposing and fearful before it is used. Once it's in battle - especially a battle far
from home - if the enemy can last long enough, it figures out that army's weak
spots and begins to hold its own.
In my view, that's what happened in Iraq: we took the world's most powerful force in
being, turned it into a force in reality and proceeded through a series of
incredible blunders to end up looking less like the liberators we assumed we were, and more like your garden variety conquerors, i.e.:
- Not stopping the looting after Baghdad fell,
- Dismissing
thousands of Iraqi army officers and civil servants because they were members
of Saddam's Baathist party, even though a man couldn't get a decent job in
Saddam's Iraq if he wasn't a Baathist - thank YOU, Paul Bremmer - thus destroying the two groups we needed to help keep the country under control, and
- Locking up and abusing prisoners in Saddam's old torture
palace (an excellent piece of P.R. - NOT!)
All of which gave the opposition - and there were bucket loads of opposition - time to figure out our weak spots. They could never defeat us, but we could
never quite defeat them. Until, of course John
McCain's beloved surge. Was it a success,
the surge? Yes or no, Senator
Hagel? Yes or No? Yeah, John, it was a success. That plus the Sunni Awakening in Anbar Province plus U.S. military payments to Sunni leadership (nothing like bribing your enemy to lay low - another tactic I heartily agree with) allowed us get out of that hell hole with a semblance of honor. And in that, Johnny Boy, the Surge succeeded. But in nothing more.
