The Dead Enders

Pic From: Jayel Aheram, fickr creative commons.


I watched the very good "No End in Sight" last night with several of my friends. That movie and the discussions I had with people about it before and afterwards provided fodder for several posts. So, let's start from the beginning.

First, the movie makes a prediction that had we avoided some grave missteps early on (such as allowing the looting to occur), we could have WON TEH IRAQ!! To me, this is mostly empty guessing. If all we learn from this war is that when you invade a country, it is a bad idea to allow gangs to run rampant while you look on with machine guns, then we really have historic levels of waste from our Iraq adventure. I imagine that if you polled Mouthbreathers Anonymous, they would have provided you the same insight and then we would have had nearly two trillion dollars back in the economy to invest in the future and spend on limp-wristed liberal payout programs like children's healthcare. Even the Bush administration realizes that the Bush administration has executed this war poorly but that leaves two questions to be answered. 1) Absent the colossal fuck-ups, could this have been a good idea in some alternate reality? 2) What do we do now?

1) There are two schools of thought on whether or not fighting Iraq could have been a net good if it had been pursued another, less monumentally retarded way: YES and NO. This is an important question that deserves further discussion but in book form, not a blog post. My feeling is that the way that the War on Iraq would have had to have been executed to make it a net good would have made it too unpopular to have happened. It would have required openness and honesty about the reasons for going, the costs that could be expected and it would have required more deliberation about how we were going to win the peace. Faced with the reality of those choices, my guess (based on our current queasiness) is that the American public would have been less gung-ho about kicking the sandy shit out of Iraq.

My impression has always been that America was hit by a spitball on 9-11 and we knew it was one of the geeky kids over on the other side of the room. As the big, popular kid, all those nerds french-kissing their inhalers looked roughly the same and so we beat the one who seemed most likely to have shot the spitball and then, because we were angry, beat the snotty-nosed kid who had reputedly made comments about our mother. Unfortunately, the relation between nations is quite high schoolish, at base, with much posturing and self-perpetuating power moves.

All of this ties into the way the war was sold, another issue too big for the blog medium, but suffice to say that as evidenced by the poll numbers, America was not expecting the war to go the way it has. At the very least, America should have been ready for the possibility and if we were going to get into a war, should have been steeled by our leaders for the task of sacrificing as necessary to see the accomplishment of our goals. No sacrifices were demanded of most Americans today (those are being made by mortgage for the folks not serving) and the rosiest of scenarios were played up. No wonder that there is no will to continue to fight when most folks have nothing invested and it appears that we were misled.

2) What do we do now? Most folks around me are pinko terrorist-coddlers and so they advocate a gradual draw down of troop levels starting immediately. To my best guess, the ostensible reason for gradualness is to keep from creating a power vacuum. However, the best part of "No End in Sight" is that it clearly shows the power vacuum already happened back in the early days when looting was allowed to continue without interference from the US troops and when the Iraqi army and civil servants were cast out of their jobs.

Basically, the only way for things to get worse is for current trends to continue but since they are current trends, they ARE continuing with American troops there. To my mind, it is the gladdest of hopings to think that our troops are going to get some magical ability to broker a political compromise to warring factions that are as much Bloods and Crips at this point as inter- and intra-necine crusaders. Since the worst scenario is the continuing (or acceleration) of present trends and since these are occurring with full troop levels, I sincerely cannot fathom what a deliberately staggered troop withdrawal accomplishes. I am open to arguments, though.

Let me add, as a coda, that the American fighting forces are the best in the history of man. I have no doubt that, given good leadership and a good plan, the American military could fight any other conventional force and come out victorious. Also, we should be very grateful to the men and women who serve and their families because they are the only adults who are actually sacrificing for this war. The children are, but they do not yet know it. The basic problem is that the mess we have in Iraq is no longer a military issue, it is a political one with military/law enforcement symptoms. As a facile metaphor, if I had a Blessed Hammer of Hitting +5, I could hit anything with that hammer and probably repair a deck in record time with a great outcome, because that requires nailing boards to other boards. However, I could not repair a broken relationship, because, though both situations call for repair, only one primarily calls for a hammer. In fact, wielding the hammer in that second case could even be thought to make the situation worse if you were a goddamn freedom-hating hippie.