[Vision2020] Re: The consequences of losing the Iraq war

[Joan Opyr]

Here's a news flash for you, Coop: we are losing the Iraq war.  We don't have enough troops to secure the country.  We don't have enough international military support and/or financing to train Iraqi police and security forces to replace US soldiers in country; we don't have enough to rebuild the nation's infrastructure and economy; we don't have enough to ensure that the upcoming elections are free, fair, and recognized as legitimate by even a slender majority of Iraqis.  We are now reaping the sad consequences of the Bush Administration's inadequate, pie-in-the-sky, ideologically rigid and unrealistic pre-war planning.  Iraq is no longer a disaster in the making; Iraq is a disaster.

Recently, I've been re-reading a variety of histories of the Vietnam War.  They've been disheartening but instructive.  From 1964 to 1972, militarily-speaking, we threw everything we had short of a nuclear bomb at a small peasant country in Southeast Asia.  We dropped more than 7 million tons of ordnance on Vietnam -- nearly one five-hundred pound bomb for every person living in the country.  We installed the "democratic" Diem regime, which grew increasingly unpopular with every bomb we dropped and every "military advisor" we sent, and when his hold on power became untenable, we sat back and allowed his generals (trained and installed by us) to stage a coup.  They drove Diem and his brother out to the back country and shot them.  Not surprisingly, the generals who succeeded Diem proved to be even less popular, so we sent more military advisors.  And still we were losing the war.

In 1964, President Johnson used the CIA-fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident as an excuse to launch full-scale war on Vietnam.  The Tonkin Resolution, which gave Johnson carte blanche to do as he pleased in retaliation for the "attack," passed unanimously in the House and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate.  Johnson sent 200,000 US soldiers to Vietnam in 1965 and another 200,000 in 1966.  At the height of the war in 1968, there were 500,000 US troops in country.  We dropped almost twice as many bombs on Vietnam as we had dropped during World War II on Europe and Asia combined.  And, guess what?  We were still losing.  Support for Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Cong continued to grow throughout the countryside.  We undermined our own hearts and minds campaigns by being heartless and mindless  We razed entire villages to the ground, established "free-fire zones" where everyone and anyone could be and was shot on sight, and our government, without deviation, lied to us wholesale about the conduct of the war, our chances of victory, and our support within the country.  By the end of 1968, more than 40,000 US soldiers were dead and a quarter of a million were wounded.  And where were we in terms of winning Vietnam?  Nowhere

When Nixon came into office, he began withdrawing US troops.  By 1972, we were back down to 150,000.  The bombing, however, continued.  In fact, it intensified.  Nixon launched an indefensible invasion of Cambodia; he carpet-bombed that country and Laos; and we were losing, losing, losing.

What's the lesson here?  What's the thing we haven't learned?  I don't know, but here's a wild guess: you can't impose democracy at the point of a gun.  The invading army of a far-away nation cannot win a long-term guerilla war against a determined local resistance -- not if that invading army wants to impose democracy rather than just flatten the place.  Some of you might argue, of course, that we should just flatten Iraq: I believe the popular expression is "bomb them back to the stone age."  We might "win" that way, but then we'd lose all that lovely oil.  And perhaps the oil of all of Iraq's lovely neighbors.  And the costs -- not just human but, more important for the Bush Administration, financial -- would be untenable.

It's easy to argue that we can't afford to lose Iraq.  It's also easy to see that we can't afford to keep it.  That's our conundrum, isn't it?  We've broken it, but we can't afford to buy it, and so we're not allowed to leave the store.  Here's my tragic prediction, ready to be printed out and time-capsuled for your reading pleasure in the year 2034: Iraq will be run by an oppressive Shiite militia.  We'll do business with them because we need their oil; they'll do business with us because they need our money.  There will be no democracy in Baghdad, but there will be a new memorial wall in Washington, DC, and on it will be the names of thousands of US soldiers, missed by their families, mourned by their children, and forgotten by their government.

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment      

Auntie Establishment
Serving Idaho's liberal elite since 1993Get more from the Web.  FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com
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