17 posts tagged “iraq war”
We left Vietnam on April 30, 1975.
Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945.
By the numbers, we should have been out of Iraq by April 30, 2005, but here we are with another April 30 come and gone.
I thought I'd feel better when people who supported the Iraq war began slowly to come to their senses and admit they'd been wrong. I don't. I don't feel even a little bit better, because when I read their excuses for why they were wrong it's just a litany of ignorance. That's the excuse at heart--a failure to understand the implications of war, deep-seated cultural divides, all things that could have been fixed with a little research.
So Andrew Sullivan can claim he committed "four cardinal sins," but he didn't. He committed one: willful ignorance. He believed what he wanted to believe, based on the data that he chose to consider. In his little confession on Slate.com, he writes, "What I failed to grasp is that war is also a monster." Come on, Andy! What? You haven't seen any of the hundreds of war films that have been made in the last 70 years? You missed Full Metal Jacket? Saving Private Ryan? The news footage coming out of every war zone in the last twenty years?
General William Tecumseh Sherman spelled it out at his speech to the cadets of the Michigan Military Academy over a hundred years ago: Cadets of the graduating class--boys--I’ve been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It’s entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here. Suppress it! You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is hell!
It's no secret. You don't have to go very far to find out how monstrous war is, but that didn't serve Andy's purpose. Doing research might have made him wobbly in his early support of the war. Knowledge might have undermined his faith in Bush's morality. That's the other thing Sullivan writes in his admission of wrong-doing: that he made a "fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable."
No, asshole. You made a fatal misjudgment of your own intelligence, because with access to all the information necessary to take up an anti-war position, you chose to place your faith in someone who had repeatedly shown a complete lack of real morality. You got it wrong because you were willing to take form over content. You were willing to believe someone who claimed he was a Christian with moral values, instead of looking to see what his actions proved. And how could anyone not know how glib Bush was? That's a man who mocked a fellow Christian on the eve of her execution. Can you get more glib?
So, officially, I'm no longer interested in hearing the confessions of guilt and complicity of those who wanted to invade Iraq. They don't do anything for me, because they all come from the same place: an awkward, self-effacing moment that does no one any good. Andy Sullivan may be struggling to forgive himself for following an amoral leader, but I doubt he's learned anything from the experience, because he hasn't figured out that willful ignorance was his real mistake.
Full text of Sullivan's column: How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I seriously misjudged Bush's sense of morality
Do you ever hear a song that reminds you so specifically of a time in your life that the hair on the back of your neck stands up? Happened to me last night, when through random chance this song came up on my playlist. I owned the vinyl new and at some point in the CD shift, I had the album burned to CD. I haven't listened to it in probably ten years. Listened to it five times last night, thinking about our five-year Fiasco in Iraq anniversary. Sure, when Faith No More released this song, we weren't in the first Gulf War yet, but in the spring of 1991, I was volunteering as a DJ on the college radio station and whenever we ran news about the Desert Storm invasion, I used to play this song. Said something to me about a whole gamut of problems. 17 years later it still does. Some of the cultural references are dated, but we've still got the same batch of crap going on: war in Iraq, chaos and death in Darfur, shuttle disasters, New Orleans, HIV, drugs and guns. (And wasn't Faith No More kick ass when Chuck Mosely was their singer?)
We care a lot
about disasters, fires, floods and killer bees
about the NASA shuttle falling in the sea
We care a lot
about starvation and the food that Live Aid bought
We care a lot
about disease, baby, Rock Hudson, rock
Yeah!
Well it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it
We care a lot
about the gamblers and the pushers and the geeks
We care a lot
about the smack and crack and whack that hits the streets
We care a lot
about the welfare of all you boys and girls
We care a lot
about you people 'cause we're out to save the world
Yeah!
Well it's a dirty job but someone's got to do it
We care a lot
about the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines
We care a lot
about the NY, SF, and LA PD
We care a lot
about you people
We care a lot
about your guns
We care a lot
about the wars we're fighting,
gee, that looks like fun
We care a lot
about the Garbage Pail Kids, they never lie
We care a lot
about Transformers 'cause there's more than meets the eye
We care a lot
about the little things, the bigger things we top
We care a lot
about you people, yeah, you bet we care a lot
Well it's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it
Well it's a dirty song but someone's gotta sing it
I was glad that No Country for Old Men won the Best Picture Oscar, because I keep thinking that it has a lesson to offer Americans that we're unlikely to sit through unless it's in an award-winning movie. Of course, There Will Be Blood has a lesson to offer as well, but it's one that most Americans aren't ready to hear. Heck, we make up new words, like acquisitional and shopaholic, to avoid calling ourselves greedy.
We might just be getting to a point where we can learn a hard lesson about pride. Look at the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage lending market and its massive fallout in the investment market. That little problem is all about pride, because one of the causes behind the situation is failure of this conservative, capitalist myth about self-regulation. Where did we ever get the idea that businesses could regulate themselves? If self-regulation worked, we wouldn't have police, because everyone would regulate their own behaviors. We don't trust regular people to do that, so why did we trust various investment banking types to regulate the crazy and dangerous transactions they used to get cash out of the sub-prime mortgage market? Some of them readily admitted they didn't know how the financial instruments behind the scenes even worked to make money. Is the game different because most of these companies are run by college-educated white guys? We're supposed to believe they can be trusted to self-regulate? Most college educated white guys can't be trusted to self-regulate their clean underwear supply, and we let them self-regulate financial market transactions that may well cripple our economy. That's pride.
Maybe it's a stretch but I thought of that immediately when I watched No Country for Old Men, which contrary to what a lot of people have said, isn't a story with a sad ending. It's a story with a cautionary ending. It's about pride and how pride destroys otherwise rational people. Consider Llewellyn, who gets into trouble through greed, but ultimately dies because of pride. Worse, he actually has a chance to save his wife, but his pride pushes him on, keeps him playing a game in which he's outmatched. His wife is a casualty of that game, and although Chigurh kills her, he makes it clear that Llewellyn's pride is the reason she'll die. Consider Chigurh himself, a man whose pride is dangerous to him as well as other people. He endangers himself by going after Llewellyn's wife and he does it only as a matter of pride.
The folly of pride is also reflected in our tenure in Iraq. What made us so sure we could ride in and put that country on the orderly path to democracy? Our pride. What keeps us there? Not the lie of "terrorism," but our pride. We're not ready to stop waving our flag and singing, "Team America, fuck yeah!" We're not ready to repeat the humiliation of the evacuation of Saigon. How did we end up in Iraq? The failure of self-regulation. We've put ourselves in a position that we have to regulate our own behavior and we've failed. If another country had declared its intention to invade Iraq on the flimsy evidence we presented, there would have been a mechanism to stop the invasion. Because America has positioned itself as the world's police, there is no one to stop us. Not even when we're about to step off a cliff.
At the end of No Country for Old Men, the only one who really walks away from the experience is Sheriff Bell, who's willing to swallow his pride. He's not necessarily satisfied with his choice--how many of us are when we sacrifice pride to pragmatism? Still, he makes a wise decision to let Chigurh pass into the jurisdiction of other men, younger men, more prideful men. He goes home to his wife.
Let it be a cautionary tale against pride. Our much vaunted American pride, the one we trumpet on bumper stickers on our SUV's in the parking lot of the NASCAR speedway outside Olathe, KS.
Last night, Hubzilla and I went to see No End in Sight. It's the sort of movie that I wish I could recommend to you, but I don't know that I can. If you aren't already horrified and depressed about the US occupation of Iraq, this movie will do you no good. You aren't paying attention or you're watching FOX News. You won't believe anything in this movie anyway. If, like me, you're already horrified and depressed by the situation in Iraq, this won't do anything other than remind you of why.
Rather than looking at the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a whole, the movie focuses specifically on the planning failures of the Bush Administration for a post-invasion Iraq. It interviews several high-ranking people who were involved in the early days of the occupation, including Jay Garner, Richard Armitage, Barbara Bodine, and Paul Hughes. In short, it's a convenient summation of what went wrong and why. It's not news--it's the simple facts, readily available in the news during the early days of the invasion:
- The failure to stop the looting of Baghdad.
- The dissolution of the Iraqi Army and Police.
- The de-Ba'athification of government ministries and other public service posts.
Oh, there are things to shock you in the film, like the fact that only two months were spent planning for a post-invasion provisional authority vs. the two years we spent planning how to occupy Germany. Or the fact that the original contingent of people who were supposed to somehow set up a provisional authority number just 167. Among them only a dozen had any experience in the Middle East. Five spoke Arabic. Or the fact that support personnel were hired for three month contracts, thereby destroying any semblance of continuity. Or the fact that recent college graduates whose parents were Bush donors were hired for important tasks for which they were not qualified. In one astounding example, a young woman with a BA was given the task of improving traffic flow in Baghdad, a thing she had no education or experience in.
The thing that stings most is watching the interspersed clips of Donald Rumsfeld glibly dismissing questions about problems in Iraq. "Freedom is messy." "Stuff happens." I have to remind myself that when he speaks, he speaks for the whole smug, ignorant, arrogant raft of them--Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Bremer, and Rumsfeld. (For Colin Powell, I reserve a spot in a raft full of his compatriots--intelligent but cowardly toadies.) I left the film deeply regretting that I don't believe in heaven or hell, karma or universal justice. No death is too terrible for those people. No fate too cruel.
See the film if you can stomach it.
Oh, right, they're fooling people who believe everything they see on FOX News.
Remember when John McCain visited Baghdad and was declaring that it was safe to walk around in the market, and all the various media outlets were showing footage of McCain walking around in the market?
It should not surprise anyone to learn that the market in question is nothing more than a facade, created by none other than General David Petraeus, who will likely soon declare that things are going great in Iraq (oh, and that your horse must lose. Really, he looks pretty elven to me.)
The Washington Post suddenly decided to get all journalistic and really look into the the Dora market, where McCain went for a stroll in a flack jacket, surrounded by security. Dora was once a very popular market in Baghdad, with 800+ shops. Now, it has 300 shops, and the primary reason most of them exist is a "grant" program initiated by Petraeus, in which merchants who open a shop in Dora received $2,500. And they can only get 300 merchants to open up? What does that tell you?
The security of the market is produced in part by walling it off, prohibiting vehicle traffic, and doing body searches of everyone who enters the market. Imagine going to your local mall and being patted down before you were allowed to enter. Add to that the fact that American soldiers police the market, doing things like repairing broken shop windows, fixing doors and replacing locks. For 300 shops, 50 soldiers patrol the area. Again, imagine your local mall with 50 security guards armed with M-16's. Is this an Iraqi marketplace or just a Disney PX?
Then consider this: most shop keepers are Sunnis, and when the Iraqi police showed up, almost all of the shopkeepers closed down early and left the market in fear. Yet this is the showcase that is presented by administration lackeys as proof of the success in securing Baghdad.
So, whatever Petraeus has to say in his report, remember above all that he works for the Bush Administration. He built this little pretend Iraqi market and uses it to demonstrate how safe Iraq is. Whatever he says, keep in mind that the product he's selling is the continued US presence in Iraq. If Bush didn't already know what Petraeus was going to say, he wouldn't let him open his mouth.
(Have you noticed, too, that his name sounds suspiciously like "betray us"?)
Yup, it's official. The folks in charge of the US occupation in Iraq have started to suggest that maybe, just maybe, after all, we're not going to be able to bring democracy to Iraq. Nice. So, no weapons of mass destruction, no link to 9/11, and now we're not even going to democratize Iraq. Exactly what are we doing over there?
It's what I've said all along. Everyone was so eager to trash-talk Saddam Hussein, but nobody had any idea how hard his job was. Sure, he killed people, but do you have a clue how hard it is to hold together an artificially created country where three different groups of people want to kill each other? Do you? Suddenly, we're looking around and thinking, "Dang, this is really hard."
Right up until they dropped the trapdoor under him, I thought we'd keep Saddam in reserve, in case we needed to reinstall him as dictator in Iraq. I thought that was an evil and stupid idea, but killing him was a mistake. I mean, we've killed the one guy who knew how to run the country. You don't have to like him, or name your kids after him, but just admit it: he was killing fewer people than we have been on an annual basis. (Not that I think governments ought to be killing any of their people, but I'm always going to prefer fewer dead to more dead. The numbers don't look good for the US occupation.) Plus, under Saddam, Iraqis had schools, electricity, clean water.
Sounds like we've just imported democrazy to Iraq.
So, if Iraq isn't going to have a democracy, does that mean that the US just destroyed the country's entire infrastructure, invited terrorists in, killed an estimated 500,000 civilians, plus 3600 US soldiers, all to topple one evil dictator and replace him with another evil dictator? (Trust me, my people, there is no such thing as a benevolent dictator.) All at a cost of one trill-i-on of dollars?
A bargain at twice the price. If you've got stock in the oil industry or the military industrial complex.
Just finished reading an article about how Army and Marine reenlistment bonuses have skyrocketed, with some special forces jobs getting bonuses of $150,000. Almost makes me wish hubby were still in the Marines. I said almost.
In the article Col. Mike Jones, who is in charge of retention in the National Guard (good luck with that, sucker) is quoted as saying, "War is expensive. Winning a war, however, is less expensive than losing one."
Really, Mike? I'm not calling you a liar or an ignoramus just yet, but I'd like to see your statistics on that before I take you at your word. What you're saying is that it would have been cheaper for us to stay and "win" in Vietnam? Because we're not talking about the old days, when losing meant being overrun by the enemy and trampled under his boots. If Britain had lost WWII, that would have been expensive, but "losing" in Iraq is a whole different ballgame.
The thing is, war isn't and never has been like a sporting event. Does the phrase Pyrrhic* Victory mean anything to you? It should. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I don't think we can afford to win.
After defeating the Romans at the battle of Asculum, Pyrrhus is reported to have said, "One more such victory and we are lost."
Sorry, my people, but after a long weekend of adorable kitten posts, it's time to face the ugly again. While I was playing with kittens, plenty of people marked yesterday as the 4-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. The BBC marked it with a particularly disheartening interactive display of all the attacks in Baghdad since the invasion. To get a real glimpse at how poorly things are going, just grab the scroller and move through the last four years of truck bombings and rocket attacks. They go from scattered, then to intermittent, and by February 2007, they are a steady rash of red dots on a pastel map delineating the ethnic divides in Baghdad.
Bush doesn't even talk about victory anymore. Is it that he knows it'll be over soon for him? When we started out, he talked about bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. Then we were settling for bringing stability to the region. Now, we're just trying to bring a little security to Baghdad. How the dreams of the mighty have crumbled. By the time he leaves office, we'll be down to trying to minimize casualties in one little corner of Baghdad.
[walks through the living room, where the drunken celebrants in the Scooter Libby Guilty! Conga Line collapsed in a stupor last night, into the kitchen / begins to brew the coffee of harsh reality]
On the walk to work this morning, I listend to a Democracy now interview with Wes Clark that depressed me. As much as I think we committed a terrible crime in invading Iraq, and as much as I wish we could remove American troops from Iraq as soon as possible, Gen. Clark makes an observation that I suspect will cause me to lose sleep tonight:
...let's say we did follow the desires of some people who say, “Just pull out, and pull out now.” Well, yeah. We could mechanically do that. It would be ugly, and it might take three or four months, but you could line up the battalions on the road one by one, and you could put the gunners in the Humvees and load and cock their weapons and shoot their way out of Iraq....You’d probably get safely out of there. But when you leave, the Saudis have got to find someone to fight the Shias. Who are they going to find? Al-Qaeda, because the groups of Sunnis who would be extremists and willing to fight would probably be the groups connected to al-Qaeda. So one of the weird inconsistencies in this is that were we to get out early, we’d be intensifying the threat against us of a super powerful Sunni extremist group, which was now legitimated by overt Saudi funding in an effort to hang onto a toehold inside Iraq and block Iranian expansionism.
In short, the American Monster Machine that created Al-Qaeda in the first place, by giving money to Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, has created a whole new monster in Iraq. Thanks to Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, and that lying bastard Colin Powell, we have created a situation that is a thousand times more threatening to our national security than Saddam Hussein was. Sure, Saddam was a murderous creep, but 1.) we created him, 2.) his job wasn't easy, and 3.) we're not exactly succeeding as his replacement.
Clark also mentions in the interview that a friend of his in the Pentagon, who shall remain nameless, told him about "a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” The only thing that has apparently held this goal in check is our absolute failure to get a handle on Iraq.
I can't help but cast the Bush Administration as a group of kids, celebrating at a birthday party. Someone has strung up a Middle East piñata from the tree in the front yard and everyone is clamoring to take a swing at it. They're greedy for the candy inside (or in this case, oil and power), and the first blow has released a little trickle of treats. But the Bush kids are milling around, eager for the blow that will break open the piñata's belly. When the Middle East bursts open and spills all over the front lawn, they want to rush in and grab up as much as they can. Some will come away with their pockets full of ill-gotten gains, some will come away with bruises and scratches from the melee, and at the end of the day, the piñata will still be lying on the front lawn, its papier mâché entrails hanging out. As dusk falls, the sprinkler will kick on.
