..And it’s one two three

What are we fighting for?

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
8/25/07

If there was any reason to believe the occupation of Iraq was a viable military operation at this juncture, there were several things this week that would pretty much have polished it off.

First, there was the news that Senator John Warner, Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on the admin to pull 5,000 troops out of Iraq by December, the first step of a general withdrawal. The White House, apparently taken by surprise, made the limp response that they hadn’t received word that Warner planned to change his vote on anything.

Why Warner’s statement surprised the White House isn’t clear. Clear back last October, Warner went to Baghdad and came back and, in the words of the docile American media, “offered a stark assessment,” which is reporterese for “it’s a real clusterfuck and we’re getting our asses kicked.” Except Warner was more direct, stating flatly that America was losing.

Nothing has improved in Iraq since last October, and there’s no credible reason to suppose that anything WILL improve. So it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that Warner moved from Step One to Step Two.

Granted, for some Republicans, all elevators should have a sideways button. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the senior Republican on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said Bush's goal of instilling democracy in Iraq "should not be our objective" and Iraq needed new leadership committed to fighting insurgents. Drop the fig leaf, and keep on doing what wasn’t working before. That should be a real crowd pleaser, and I bet even the morons at the White House cringed when they heard it. The Iraqis “committed to fighting insurgents” now are the leading cause of American deaths. They either do it directly, ambushing Americans they are supposed to be receiving training from, or indirectly, leading the US troops into IEDs and other ambushes.

It seems in occupied countries where nearly everybody hates the occupiers, finding reliable collaborators isn’t all that easy.

Warner’s statement was followed within a day by the PENTAGON urging the administration to pull at least half the troops out by next spring. While they didn’t address the strategic position America has in Iraq, they did note that America’s ability to fight elsewhere was being seriously compromised and that they simply couldn’t maintain the troop levels in Iraq that the US was using. At the same time, the LA Times polled troops on the ground and found half of them saying morale was “low” or “very low.”

In the meantime, Americans keep rounding up civilians and tossing them in their ghastly gulags to be tortured, raped, and humiliated. Oh, you don’t think that STOPPED, do you? In the past six months, the number incarcerated has jumped from 16,000 to 24,500. That doesn’t count those who died under American care, of course.

The Brits are pulling out of Basra as I write this, effectively ending Tony Blair’s role in the Iraq misadventure. Mussolini had Ethiopia; Blair had Iraq. Blair at least didn’t end up like Mussolini, hanging upside down from a lamppost, although his future career as a vassal for the Bush family leaves that possibility open.

Last week, the head of the British military said the American Special Forces needed to get out of Afghanistan. They have a cowboy tendency to fire at anything that moves and call in air strikes on anything that doesn’t, and the resulting civilian carnage was making the civilian population of Afghanistan, never an easy administrative responsibility, nearly completely ungovernable. So this week a trio of British soldiers were killed and a dozen more injured when an air strike called in by Special Forces accidently dropped a 500 pound bomb on them.

Not only is Putsch busily winning the hearts and minds of the civilian populations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in the villages of Blighty, too.

There is open argument among the generals at the Pentagon who favor getting out of Iraq and the more political appointees on the ground in Iraq who keep insisting, against all evidence, that the surge is working. I don’t think that’s happened in the American military since the civil war, when there was some consternation over the fact that some of the leading generals were drunken imbeciles and were losing the war to the South. As a rule, in times of conflict the generals like to present a united front.

Various reports from the Pentagon and other sources in Iraq show a nation in complete disarray, with a government that is nearly wholly without popular support and incapable of any meaningful action, a “police force” that is riddled with insurgents, and a jubilant al Qaida gaining ground.

A book by the London-based western journalist Abdul Bari Atwan states unequivocally that in 2002 Osama bin Laden wanted the US to invade Iraq, sensing that not only would this get rid of Saddam’s regime, which was hostile to al Qaida, but that it would deplete American forces and make US troops sitting ducks for al Qaida attacks. Atwan states that OBL expressed a desire to get America bogged down in an occupation of a middle east country where al Qaida could pick them off back in 1996. He hoped to goad Clinton into that, but Clinton was too smart. Putsch, on the other hand, was the sort of arrogant idiot that people like bin Laden dream of having as foes.

Then there’s the Petraeus speech. General Petraeus was supposed to give a “report card” speech on Iraq. At first, the admin said they would write and release the report for Petraeus. When that ran into a wall of Congressional and journalistic skepticism, they asked that Petraeus give his report in secret to Congress. That didn’t fly, either.

So now they are going to have him give the report to Congress on September 11th. That’s right. 9/11. But hey –that’s just coincidence, right? And two out of three Americans are prepared to disbelieve anything Petraeus has to say. Not surprising, under the circumstances.

Finally, there’s the Vietnam allegory. For Putsch – who skipped out on the Vietnam conflict – to raise it at all was an act of mind-numbing political stupidity. To try to claim that America had some sort of choice about leaving, and should have stayed another year is the sort of revisionist nonsense that informs the whack jobs at Free Republic or the National Vanguard. And to try to claim that Iraq was like Vietnam – a hopeless quagmire in which America got in without good reason, stayed without good reason, and slaughtered millions without good reason, and had nothing left to show for it but the scenes from the rooftop of the American embassy, a general shooting a kneeling man in a public street, and a burned nine-year-old girl running naked down a lane.

Yeah, that’ll drum up support for Iraq.

Give it up, Putsch. It’s over.

Warner Downbeat After Iraq Trip
U.S. at Risk of Losing Bid to Control Baghdad, Senator Says

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 6, 2006; Page A03

The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday offered a stark assessment of the situation in Iraq after a trip there this week, saying that parts of the country have taken "steps backwards" and that the United States is at risk of losing the campaign to control an increasingly violent Baghdad.

Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the senior Republican on the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said Bush's goal of instilling democracy in Iraq "should not be our objective" and Iraq needed new leadership committed to fighting insurgents.