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One of the things that most military professionals will do after a significant campaign or engagement is review and analyze the action to extract the “lessons learned.” In fact, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told an audience of adoring vets that: “Some seem not to have learned history’s lessons.” Now, as we have committed more time to the war in Iraq and the “war on terror” than we gave to WWII, what are the lessons to be learned, and who, if anyone is learning them? Lesson # 1: Tell the truth, and live it. If you say you come to a foreign land to liberate oppressed people there, and be their champion for the hope of a better life, you had better damn well mean it, and live by it. Everything you do must seek the wellbeing of the people you come to liberate. You must have a plan on how you will achieve a wide range of goals, such as fair and free government, a real free press, relief of human suffering, redevelopment of national assets, real empowerment of that nation and people as an independent entity, no matter what course they choose after helped back to their feet. If instead you have a mindset that you will make this foreign land over in the image you desire, to further your interests, provide for your security at the expense of theirs, secure their resources for the betterment of your people and not theirs, manipulate their press and media to convey your message, then you will automatically invite, create and most likely lose a war of insurgency and resistance because of this obviously transparent imperialism. If you see their land as a place to simply establish military outposts, air bases, massive intelligence gathering embassies to further the projection of your power and wellbeing, you will have betrayed the trust and aspirations of the people you claim to be liberating, and you will lose their support and gain instead their enmity for generations to come. You will end up liberating nothing, securing nothing, and fighting a war that will never end. At home, if you tell your own people that war in a foreign land is imperative, then tell them why, and tell the truth. If instead you create a pretext for war to justify actions you wish to take and circumvent any potential popular resistance at home in so doing, your duplicity and manipulation will be exposed by good and well reasoned men, your credibility will erode, and support for what you are doing will falter and fail. What if George Bush and Dick Cheney had stood before the American people after 9-11 and said that they believed it was imperative that America take decisive steps to transform and uplift the Middle East, eliminate autocratic and oppressive governments, foster and support freedom and democracy as chosen by those people, and pledge the long standing economic support that would be necessary to achieve this aim—because America relied, and would continue to rely indefinitely on the petroleum resources there, because these resources and their free flow to world markets were absolutely vital to sustain our nation and the fate of the free West, and they were endangered by radical, unstable governments that opposed the West. What if they had proposed the same kind of massive commitment by this nation that we saw in WWII to in include a military draft, and a formal declaration of war by congress against any and all states that harbor or support terrorist organizations. If Bush and Cheney had made it perfectly clear that this region had the energy resources the free West needed to survive, and that we were going there to secure them, and truly liberate and uplift the people and nations living under oppressive autocratic regimes there, and that we were going there with massive application of American power…well, they might have had better results. Would Eisenhower or Macarthur have fought this war as Rumsfeld has? In Iraq we have done the equivalent of landing at D-Day and then fighting the next four years in the bocage of Normandy, with no real decisive results or victory. Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld stood before us and presented false and sometimes wholly concocted “intelligence” to demonize their perceived targets, asserting they had lethal weapons of mass destruction, all completely exposed as falsehoods and lies. Then they shifted their motives to democracy, creating nothing more than a divided nation beset with a low grade civil war. Yet all along the real motive of securing access to oil resources in the Gulf region, and bases from which to project American power, was never so much as whispered—a great lie by omission, and anyone who suggested this obvious oversight was deprecated as being jaded or cynical in their views. To this end they assigned all the resource contracts to American companies, along with lucrative contracts to weapons makers and defense contractors who continue to feed at the trough of war dollars like pigs rooting out truffles. And as for upholding our values, our assertion of the dignity of human life, our sacred mantras about freedom, individual rights, due process—all that went up in smoke at Abu Ghuriab and places like it all over the globe serviced by black CIA jets ferrying “detainees” from one torture camp to another. The post-war plan to uplift Iraq and Afghanistan? Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next military planner who dared to mention it—and many who asserted the plan he devised was inadequate were indeed fired or quietly retired from service. Instead of telling the truth, and living by that truth, we were handed lies, duplicity, politics, power mongering and self-serving corporate greed. As for how they then went about their business, once the smoke and mirrors used to sell it to the American people worked, there were more painful lessons to be learned. Lesson #2: You may win battles, but you cannot win a war by air power, or anything remotely conceived of as “force multiplication.” The US military doctrine of the “Air/Land battle” was proven to be strategically sound for the conventional military conflicts for which our military was designed. The first Gulf War was a perfect example of how air power integrated seamlessly with a powerful, mobile land component to achieve startling results in record time. That war also proved the absolute superiority of US military training and hardware relative to that of the old Soviet block. American planes, tanks and troops were overwhelmingly superior in every respect, but this led to a kind of hubris in military planners, and the wrong assumption that the Air/Land mobile battle model would become a cure-all for every engagement in the deserts of the Middle East. The successful bombing campaign in Kosovo years later, combined with increased accuracy and lethality of US air delivered ordinance, further contributed to the wrong conclusion that air power could be a dramatic “force multiplier” allowing the deployment of smaller, lighter ground components and achieving the same result. While this conclusion may still hold true in conventional military battles, such as the two week operation to unseat Saddam’s regime in the Iraq war, it encountered a decisive check when the same model was tasked to secure order in that country after Saddam’s government fell…to do the very thing that Rumsfeld insisted there be no plan for, under threat of termination to any who dared speak up. The forces committed to Iraq were smaller, lighter, more agile and yet amazingly lethal with the support of air assets. But they were simply insufficient to secure the nation, control the borders, disarm the population, guard the thousands of ammo depots and provide even a modest level of security after the insurgency began. While it has never lost a tactical engagement above squad level in Iraq, the US Army has been decisively defeated there by a persistent irregular insurgency and lightly armed militias. After witnessing the US defeat in Viet Nam, ex Iraqi foreign minister Terek Aziz warned us in advance that this was coming, that the Iraqis would make a jungle of their cities and fight guerilla style, and he has been proven correct. Apparently he learned the lessons of history well enough.
What we have seen in Iraq is a decisive shift in how wars will be fought throughout this region, indeed, how they have been fought successfully by resistance groups that arise from indigenous populations to contest powerful military invaders. We have seen this model in Afghanistan where the Taliban have yet to be defeated, in Lebanon where Israel’s powerful military ground to a halt against Hezbollah and, most strikingly, in Iraq. Clearly, our perceived enemies have learned an amazing lesson in Iraq—that not even the most powerful military on earth can defeat them! What nation will ever again quail at the thought of US invasion after the debacle of Iraq? Recent events have proven again that America’s military is still too ponderous to ever successfully contest a war against an organized and determined guerilla force. Our over reliance on the big ticket items of war is our undoing. The system of corporate collusion feeds that cycle from one congressional committee, to a hefty appropriation, to an expensive weapon system that counts for nothing in the urbanized nightmare of a war like Iraq. Our soldiers are teenagers, for the most part, who were sitting in front of 3D shooter computer games just a few short years ago in Middle School. They do not speak the language of the people they are trying to “liberate,” for we still teach our children French and Italian as their elective language course. They have no understanding of the culture, and so quickly come to disdain it. They have become isolated, ‘strangers in a strange land’ wielding enormous firepower that causes more harm to their cause than help when it is used, as the traditional American way of war fighting is to minimize casualties with heavy ordinance. Americans want their wars to begin with a lot of flag waving, shock and awe, and end quickly in a ticker tape parade. We haven’t even a glimmering of an understanding of what it will take to prevail in this vast asymmetrical struggle that we continue to stoke by attacking one Islamic nation after another, and creating generations of resentment and hatred toward America among a quarter of the earth’s population who live in those nations. We think we can just take our football and go home when we choose, forgetting that the reason we come to those deserts of the Middle East is because we desperately need what lies beneath those war torn sands. And so, at least under this administration, we will remain locked in this endless war that seems to be expanding each year, worsening, spiraling down into more chaos and violence and death--and a war we are decisively losing. The “war plan,” and the army that Rumsfeld created to fight it, have been largely ineffective in providing even the most basic security, yet the only lesson that the defense secretary seems to draw from this is that the problem lies elsewhere, with a deficit of willpower. In a speech to the American Veterans of Foreign Wars he remarked: “And surely, we have learned the dangers of giving the enemy the false impression that Americans cannot stomach a tough fight.” This is nothing more than stubborn and shallow-headed thinking. It ignores even the lessons of Viet Nam, and all past history regarding the struggles of conventional armies against insurgencies. It seeks to gloss over the enormous errors made in failing to provide adequate power on the ground to replace the government and institutions his soldiers were about to destroy, which leads us to our third lesson. Lesson #3: An insurgency must be strongly suppressed, by overwhelming military presence on the ground, before it gets rooted. The point is that it would not have been a tough fight if adequate means were brought to the war effort in terms of real manpower right from the beginning. What the “war planners” completely overlooked was the fact that they were about to dismantle and destroy all secular authority in Iraq. By eliminating the government and disbanding the old Iraqi Army, while failing to replace those institutions with real American power on the ground, the only remaining source of moral and civil authority became the mullahs. This was a recipe for the religious militias that grew up to foment the present chaos in Iraq. Instead, the war planners put in just enough force to go about the real business they desired—the building of military facilities, securing the oil installations, building out a fortified “Green Zone” where the green dollars would flow to favored contractors who brought their own small army of Blackwell trained mercenaries along with them. This was never about the Iraqi people. All the power play by the US was for the benefit of US corporations. The effort to “build a new Iraq” was nothing more than the insistence on creating a subservient client state that would allow for US power projection in the region. The result was inevitable , because the real motives for our invasion of Iraq were craven. And this is why nearly 70% of Americans now oppose the war. They have finally seen through the flag waving and the persistent references to 9/11. They have finally seen that all we have brought to Iraq was fear, greed, misery and an incipient civil war. Would you resist an occupying army if that was all going in your home town? Insurgencies are only ever defeated by a vast numerical advantage. The key to winning is to never allow the insurgents to really take root, like dandelions in the Devil’s Garden. Once they go to seed after that fateful first flowering, your battle is all but lost. To do this the defeated Iraqi Army, mostly composed of average men who joined up so they could have a job and paycheck, should have been immediately embraced, in an honorable way, after the fall of Baghdad. The war planners did not even understand the mindset of the people in Iraq, and the cultural importance of honor and dignity for the average Iraqi. In his book “Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,” Thomas E. Ricks points out the success of the 101st Airborne division in Mosul when the commanders understood these cultural imperatives. The concept of honor and “honorable resistance” is as essential for the Iraqi male as Viagra seems to be for the US male these days. The point being that when the US disbanded the Iraqi army, they created and fueled the insurgency. No worse plan could have been conceived. Then, once the insurgents established themselves in the Anbar province, battles like Fallujah in 2004 were the inevitable result. Look at this chart of insurgent attacks month by month, and see how the insurgency arose and eventually became a civil conflict.
Five hundred thousand troops on the ground as US units entered Baghdad in early April of 2003 could have made a decisive and intimidating physical presence. It would have echoed and reinforced the totality of the victory we achieved in the first Gulf War. Had those troops been in place when the looting started in Baghdad, and then acted forcefully to restore immediate order, a message would have been given that could have prevented the insurgency from ever gaining a foothold. Had those troops been in place to secure the borders, then outside infiltration and arms smuggling would have been prevented. Had those troops been in place to secure the vast stores of conventional munitions in Iraq, the Insurgency would have been effectively disarmed, with no 155mm rounds to serve in their IEDs. 500,000 troops meant at least ten full divisions deployed to the fight this war, augmented by numerous supporting forces, and this would have meant our entire standing army. To complicate matters Turkey refused her ports and rail lines to allow a northern axis of approach, the Saudis refused to allow US to stage from their soil, and our one friend, little Kuwait still grateful after Gulf War I, simply did not have the port capacity to in-flow all those forces.
Compare results: While our fathers (under Roosevelt, Eisenhower and MacArthur) defeated an axis of enemies that had overrun half the world, decisively defeated Italy, Germany, and Japan in the space of four years, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Neo-Cons have yet to truly liberate or secure Ramahdi, Fallujah, Baghdad and any number of other places that are largely controlled by the insurgents now, and can not even begin to lay any claim of victory. In Afghanistan, the Taliban prepare for their next Ramadan offensive, and in Iraq, the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al Sadr is perhaps the most influential and powerful force in the country now, not the US Army. Sadr has simply held his men in check up until now, but he could easily muster tens of thousands of fighters and turn the apparently quiescent southern portion of Shi’ite Iraq into a hornet’s nest, through which all the vulnerable US convoy supplies must pass...and all this while Bush contemplates opening a new front against Iran. The US treasury is all but bankrupt, we have lost almost all our allies and are increasingly isolated in the world. Leaders of third world nations like Sudan now openly laugh at our president in the UN, and others like Chavez of Venezuela mock him in disdain. What a tremendous misapplication and squandering of national power, economic might and political credibility! This will be history’s verdict on the Bush Presidency. Lesson #4: Once an insurgency has rooted itself, the application of strong outside military force is counterproductive, particularly in urban settings. This gets at the Viet Nam maxim of “We had to destroy it to save it.” Fallujah was the perfect example of what it really takes to defeat a determined guerilla force in an urban environment where you have to fight house to house, and often room to room. The damage it caused was completely counterproductive. The Marines and Army lined up six to eight battalions, assigning a specific quadrant of the city to each one in a crushing north to south operation. The troops moved through like a fire in an old forest, and the toll in both civilian death and sheer destruction was very high. The US won the battle, in military terms, but back then I argued that Fallujah would stand as a kind of Alamo for the insurgency. Was I correct? Of all the hundreds of thousands of people who fled the city, how many ended up joining the resistance in their bitterness and humiliation? Far more than the number of “stay behinders” the Marines killed there . In effect, this kind of war simply ends up killing innocent civilians and converting all their grieving family members, and the tribal groups they belong to, into life long enemies. Fallujah was won with American blood, arms and military prowess, but lost by the commanders who allowed themselves to be placed in a position where they ever had to fight that battle. Since then the city has never been completely secured. The sad fact is that after the US battalions finished there, they were needed elsewhere. To this day Fallujah and Ramahdi remain stubborn centers of insurgent resistance, and all the battle proved is that the cost of heavy handed military action was now greater than any result it could produce in Iraq. It is too late for a massive ratcheting up of troop levels now. As lesson #3 argues, you win wars of insurgency in the first year, or you loose them five or ten years later. It all depends on how much “stomach” you have for a badly managed, stupidly conceived and morally bankrupt war plan that you insist must survive in spite of lessons on the ground that prove you wrong. As author Thomas Ricks points out in his book “Fiasco,” Iraq was “the worst war plan in American history.” Few who truly know anything about military history could argue with that assessment. Iraq was a case of too little, too late; of unanticipated consequences, misallocated resources, and lack of foresight and imagination in the conduct of the war. It violated so many principles of strategy and war fighting that the historians will be writing about it for decades to come. The only possible solution to Iraq now, given the forces available, would be to scale back and select one region of the country to truly secure it. Provide security and the rule of law there, stand up secular power, and let that region stand as an example in opposition to the lawlessness that will likely prevail everywhere else. Lesson #5: Trying to establish a new national army while an active insurgency is present results in civil war. This is a no brainer. If your own military forces are unable to prevent or suppress an incipient insurgency , then setting up a national army to take over the job automatically creates a civil war, particularly when you allow large political or ethnic factions to set up their own armed militias, and the loyalty of that army is in question. After “Bloody April” in 2004 when Muqtada al Sadr defended the Shrine of Ali in Najaf, the US forces declared Sadr an outlaw and sought to arrest him. My advice then was to let the graybeards like Al Sistani handle Sadr, but the fact remained that his large armed faction would eventually have to be disarmed. We have also seen what happens when a new government allows a faction to maintain its own standing militia in Lebanon. This is a recipe for internal conflict and civil war, yet the US allowed it to take shape, being unwilling to alienate the large Shi’ite populations from which Sadr and the Badr Brigades drew their strength. Again, if they had brought power with them, real power on the ground, they would have been able to proceed with their operations without worrying, and further, it is likely the insurgency would have never gained traction in the first place. 500,000 troops could have systematically disarmed the population, city by city. Here the absence of both a strong secular Iraqi army or sufficient military and civil authority provided by the US was keenly felt. The only solution was for a respected greybeard clerical like Sistani to take charge, but the US eschewed this for fear that it would lead to an Islamic government instead of the US controlled client state that we wished to create there. This violated lesson number #1: We wanted to remake Iraq along our designs, not those of the Iraqi people. In late August of 2006, while US troops coalesced in Baghdad for operation “Together Forward,” Mahdi militias forced the local Iraqi army units to flee the city of Ad Diwaniyah south of Baghdad, and re-established their own security checkpoints. And in Baghdad, as US patrols move into Shi’ite stronghold neighborhoods, the Mahdi militias just melt away until they pass by, returning after they leave. The effect is like that of a knife through water, and slowly but surely, the knife is rusting away. Yet when Iraqi national army units conduct these patrols, they are often targeted by the insurgents and militias, who are now locked in a lethal round of attacks and reprisals that kills nearly 50,000 Iraqis per year. This is civil war. And the point is this: once you clear, you simply must hold. That requires manpower, and time--both in short supply these days where Iraq is concerned. And Mr. Rumsfeld, no amount of will power will suffice if those other two elements, power and time, are not fully applied. Lesson #6: War is hell. Don’t fight one unless you are prepared to go there. WWII showed what the unrestrained application of military power could achieve when unleashed, yet such destruction is now intolerable in our world, where cameras follow each bomb on its lethal arc to the target, and war is something televised on prime time TV. What would it have been like, I wonder, if media camera crews were broadcasting live from Tokyo on the night of March 9, 1945, when 334 B-29s took off from the Mariana Islands and delivered a two hour firebombing attack to the heart of the city? How would the live coverage of the firestorm have looked in “living color?” What would Americans have felt and thought if they had been glued to TV sets as they are for “breaking news” today , watching the slaughter of 100,000 souls that night in an agony that must have been almost beyond comprehension? TV makes the horror of war just real enough to act as a restraint on the application of total military force . Even Israel’s three week bombing campaign in Lebanon, as bad as it looked on TV, killed only one percent of the 2-hour Tokyo bombing death toll. Still, Israel’s bombing campaign was roundly vilified throughout the civilized world by reasonable heads and hearts. For there is still a place in many of us, perhaps in most of us, that thinks the brutality, destruction and slaughter of war should be intolerable. So the key thing here, in this modern age of conflict, is to never be forced by inept policy, lack of diplomacy, lack of foresight, or sheer incompetence to ever have to fight a battle like the Tokyo bombing again, or even a tiny little fight like Fallujah. (And I note that even after Tokyo, Japan fought on – so what makes Cheney and others think they could ever achieve a victory over a modern nation like Iran by “air strikes?” ) Israel learned a hard lesson under this rule when it was reluctant to really tangle with Hezbollah on the ground, trying to rely on air power as in rule #2. When the body bags started to fill up, the Israelis lost their nerve. They realized that the end of their war, if they were to believe their own bellicose statements, would end in Damascus and Tehran. They were simply not prepared for what that would take to achieve: confronting over ten times their population, some 90 million Persians and Arabs, in a war that would be fought differently than any in the past, a war they simply could not win. This is why they hope the US will do much of their fighting for them, but the cream of our military has been unable to subdue even a tiny portion of Iraq’s 23 million. And this leads us to lesson seven. Lesson #7: The world is unconquerable. Unless you are prepared for a massive intervention, with full application of military power at the outset, even small and relatively powerless nations have proven themselves unconquerable. This is the great military lesson of the late 20th century, and certainly of the 21st: the world is unconquerable. Defeating a nation’s conventional army no longer assures any victory. Assuming a defeated nation will automatically acceded to your desires and become your ally is equally naïve, particularly when you try to transplant your cultural values and system of government in an alien land. (Again, violating rule #1) You cannot impose democracy on a nation. If you do fight to liberate them, they must be allowed to choose their own government, even if it conflicts with your “interests” in the region. These are other vital lessons to be taken to heart after what we have seen in the Middle East these last four years. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thought to attack his critics when he said: “Some seem not to have learned history’s lessons.” Let us place his name at the very top of that list. So war is hell, and the world is unconquerable. Lesson: Maybe war was not the solution to those energy problems that seemed at the heart of the Bush-Cheney plan. Perhaps a combination of diplomacy, economic ties and a concerted effort at living differently here in this country would have been a better solution. Yes, that’s all water under the bridge now, but instead of taking any of these lessons to heart, all we hear is “stay the course,” because they aren’t done yet. They want to attack yet another Islamic nation and ignite the region from the Caspian Sea to Palestine. Lesson #8: When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, and get out. Both the Neo-Cons who conceived the war in Iraq, and the conservative camp in congress along with the media who supported it, take up this same thread by insisting that all opposition to their failed war plan is simply a failure of nerve. The term “cut and run liberals” has been used to emasculate the opposition while playing to the notion of American invincibility that most people secretly harbor—in spite of the clear “facts on the ground” that prove the contrary. Yet these ideas, and propaganda spinners who advocate them, do nothing but demonstrate that the lessons of Iraq have not been learned by those in charge, which means the failure to date will only be compounded in the months and years ahead as we “stay the course.” In this instance, staying the course is little more than blind stubbornness, and false determination. It demonstrates the inability to adapt, innovate, evolve a strategy that might produce results. To achieve results will mean a fundamental commitment of the nation as a whole to rectify the errors of the past and set a new course. We cannot win this thing with a couple of over stretched line divisions and the national guard. The army has been worn thin. Readiness is at a low ebb, equipment is failing and needs replacing, more men are needed in all services, but particularly the Army and Marines. The current force we have, in spite of its skill and dedication, is simply insufficient to the task at hand--it was always insufficient, and this fact has yet to penetrate the calcified brain of Donald Rumsfeld. So staying the course at this time is nothing more than embracing failure. We must either mobilize this nation and prevail, or we must withdraw and suffer the consequences. This struggle can no longer be fought on the cheap. Still, Rumsfeld dismisses the criticism that is shoveled his way as coming from those who “blame America first.” When asked if the army was being bogged down, he forcefully asserted that we had the means to do whatever we needed to defend America, and high on the list of needed things is an attack upon another Islamic nation called Iran. Speaking of history lessons, in 2004 I wrote an article by that same title about the failure of US policy regarding the Middle East and Central Asia, and it darkly predicted all that has since come to pass in the Iraq war. The bottom line is this: while all the rhetoric and rallying calls of this administration are derivatives and regurgitations of our national anthem, the real reasons we occupied Iraq, delayed the elections there and establishment of a new secular government until we could sign off the oil and resource contracts to US corporations, are all self evident. They need no argument. The US did not invade to liberate an oppressed people, or to install democracy, or even to transform the region to a new Middle East. All those reasons were mere corollaries to the principle occupation of Iraq as a place to set a watch on the resource flows coveted by US oil and energy companies. And the center of the target is Iran. Look how US bases now ring that nation!
If that were your country (Iran) would you be nervous, worried about US stated intentions to overthrow your government and repeat what you have seen in Iraq? What would you think of US news anchors calling your leadership kooks, nut jobs, or maniacs? (All terms used regularly by FOX correspondents, who then get huffy when Hugo Chavez called Bush “el diablo” at the UN.) Would you be trying to develop a deterrent to US aggression if you were Iran? This self-serving US policy, so transparent to everyone on the planet except the news casters and commentators at FOX, has created a situation where America is now isolated in the world. Our European friends distance themselves from us like Republican senators hold Bush at arms length in the mid-term elections. Russia and China have formed a loose cooperation to secure their own energy needs, and with Russia now the number one oil producer on earth, (passing Saudi Arabia in August of 2006), that is a very significant economic alliance. These nations have also gathered in the good will and cooperation of to other major oil states, Iran and Venezuela. Together these states have tremendous political, economic and military power, and the “West” is no longer a unified political and economic block to stand in opposition to them. You don’t see China going about the planet building military bases everywhere, making lists of “evil” places and resistance groups like a twelve year old, invading countries, sailing its fleets in the Persian Gulf. The Chinese have been building their empire economically, by signing lucrative contracts and agreements and building good will through business and financial dealings, and by pursuing this economic strategy China has also gained enormous leverage over our own economy by forcing us to rely on her to pay the daily interest on our massive debt, (and by manufacturing most of what you buy at Wal-Mart.) They advance their national agenda economically, not through military threats, insistence on Chinese control of other governments, branding other nations and planning their downfall, dictating what arms they may build, what energy programs they may undertake. It is amazing to me that it is the democracy that does all these belligerent things, while the “commies” are slowing booking business and building a formidable countervailing force to American power. The Neo-cons have led our nation to a disastrous state of affairs. We are witnessing a decisive shift in global power, all precipitated by the bungled, greedy, short sighted policies of the war-hawk neo-cons and the trans-national corporations they serve. They argued that, as the world’s sole hyper-power, the US could create its own reality. This we have done, in the grim reality of defeat in both Afghanistan and Iraq under the Bush-Cheney regime. I predict now that both these wars will be decisively lost, that the Taliban will eventually unseat the Karsi government in Afghanistan, and that Iraq will continue to evolve through a civil war to a hostile and unstable Islamic state which will enflame the entire Middle East. As for Iran, a nation the US has encircled with its military to isolate it for downfall, the Iranians are now stronger than ever. By eliminating their regional rivals, (the Taliban and Saddam), and failing to replace them with real US friendly power, we have slipped the chains from the great lumbering beast that US policy makers have sought to bridle and ride throughout the last 50 years. Our first attempt at overthrowing the Iranian government and installing a strong man, the Shah, led to the Khomeni revolution. Now the neo-cons are at it again, hoping a little more shock and awe air power will do the job and lead to the downfall of the mullahs there. How blind and ignorant can they be? How is it that good and loyal Americans in government fail to perceive the disaster now unfolding for the United States? Do Republicans actually agree with Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld and all the rest of the former lobbyists and think tankers that now control the executive branch of our government? Or is it that they, are simply too much in debt to the corporations who influence their votes with wealth? Is it all about politics? When a few intrepid Democrats held a hearing and invited General Eaton (Who trained all the Iraqi Police) and General Batiste (Former Commander of the elite 1st Infantry Division) to tell the real story of what was going on in Iraq, none of the Republican Senators even bothered to attend! I listened to these experienced, loyal and dedicated veterans, who stood the line in Iraq, and heard their story of frustrated and coerced plans, muzzled opposition, inadequate resources, insufficient national mobilization, improper strategy--yet no Republican Senator would even hear them! What an insult to their service to this country. What is wrong with these Republican Senators who walk together in lock step, forsaking conscience, abrogating their constitutional responsibility, and frankly, betraying the trust this nation has placed in them to secure instead just one thing, their continued hold on the power they so arrogantly misuse. Are there no good men of character and integrity with an “R” after their name who will face the reality of what we have done in Iraq and stand for change, party urgencies aside, for the good of this nation? What we must realize, and soon, is that this “War on Terror” is no longer just a matter of a few dissident radicals out there who wish us harm. That was how things sat in the year 2000, but that war is now over, and in case you haven’t noticed, we lost it. Now another war is starting, not against a few shadowy terror organizations, but against a rapidly rising global movement of newly radicalized jihadis--and this war was entirely of our own making, it arose through our incompetence and mismanagement of national power, at every level. And in a very real sense, it is Mr. Bush’s war, and the war all his neo-con supporters have been longing to fight--their gift to America in exchange for the trust of so many misguided voters out there. The incompetence of our current political leadership has seen the terrorist movements evolve and coalesce into something far more serious and dangerous to this nation--a global jihadist movement that is gaining strength and confidence with each setback we suffer. It is winning the fight for Iraq--decisively. It is resurgent in Afghanistan, it held the line against Israel in Lebanon last month, and it now threatens to inflame all the moderate governments of the Middle East, the nations that sit astride the life blood of the free West, the oil that drives the engine of our economy and society. This jihadist movement, rapidly rising from the cinders of Iraq, now threatens to engulf the entire region, with consequences too dire to contemplate. Yet where is any sense of this penetrating the dim awareness of our citizen shoppers over here? Where is there heard any real call to rally this nation to the enormous effort it will now take to prevail over this dangerous insurrection? Where is there any sense of sacrifice, as we sit in our comfort worrying about housing interest rates? Where is real leadership? Where are the good men who will stand up now in this grave hour? If we are to have any hope of averting even greater setbacks, and our own downfall, we must first purge our house of these shallow thinking, self-serving and incompetent men who have used the Republican Party as their war horse. They have learned nothing from their enormous errors and costly mistakes, and they are leading this nation to a reckoning that will go down in history as the greatest squandering and diminishment of national power the earth has ever seen. It will make fall of the Holy Roman Empire seem mild, the retrenchment of the great British Empire a mere precursor to the inevitable fate this nation will suffer if we stay the course they have set. And “democracy” that daring and sacred experiment we have been at here for three centuries, shall indeed “perish from the earth.” If this economy collapses under the weight of these bungled policies, our civil rights and freedoms, already teetering at the edge of an abyss, could easily be lost. That is the great consequence of failure at this crucial nexus point in our history. The neo-cons have bet the US economy on their plan, and our chips are on the table in stacks of debt, (both national and personal debt) as far as the eye can see. The numbers have not been hitting for us these last four years, and now they are pushing out the chips one more time, for one last gamble as they spin the wheel of war. And if they fail, as they will, this economy could come crashing down around us, and our precious freedoms with it. We could lose so much more than this war in Iraq, and most of America remains complacent, uninvolved, distracted, sitting around in sports stadiums, fast food restaurants, or in front of their TV sets as if nothing of consequence was going on. We owe those honored dead who did stand and fight, both Americans and Iraqis and Afghans, and all those who fought and died before them, so much more than that.
Article By: John Schettler, September, 2006 |
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But here’s what Rumsfeld says he has learned from Iraq: “Surely by now we have learned the lesson that when our country gives our troops
a mission, they should have the resources and support to finish the job.” Now one might be tempted to interpret this remark as an admission that the US force committed to Iraq, over the objection of military
professionals like Powell and Shinseki, was indeed not equipped or properly scaled to do the job. This assertion was earlier dismissed by Rumsfeld when he said: “You fight
with the army you have, not the army you might want.” Yet in the same timeframe that saw the US build massive fleets, tens of thousands of planes and new tanks in WWII, we barely managed to provide the
troops in Iraq with up-armored Hummers and flack jackets. If Rumsfeld perceived that he did not have the army he needed to prevail in Iraq, as he has been told by countless other professional analysts
throughout the course of the war, he seems to have been unable to adapt and modify his war plan to achieve success. Instead we see nothing more than the delusional assumption that the disaster of Iraq is merely “
No matter—Eisenhower attacked Normandy on D-Day with five seaborne and three airborne divisions—and with no port, flowing in many more divisions after that
successful landing. Our fathers, (or grandfathers for some of you) took the business of war seriously. To quote the 24hr on-line museum commemorating that
campaign: “The amount of supplies required to sustain, arm and equip this huge number of troops was immense. Much of what was needed to outfit, feed, and arm
millions of soldiers, sailors and airmen was shipped across the Atlantic. The invasion and follow-on forces required 16 million tons of supplies, over 4,200 tanks and
other tracked vehicles, 3,500 artillery pieces, 140,000 transport vehicles and 12,000 aircraft.…thousands of specialized landing craft had to be gathered in British ports from the US, where most
were built, or from the Mediterranean. Less than a month before D-Day, almost 2.88 million Allied troops were encamped in southern England.” And this was just one of many campaigns ongoing in the
war effort at that time! We were also fighting in Italy and Asia.
Consider how Roosevelt inherited a depression ridden economy and a military that did not even rank in the top ten at the outset of the war. He saw a significant chunk
of his Pacific Fleet crippled at Pearl Harbor, and was now faced by enemies with stronger armies, better planes, tanks, and ships than anything the US could field. His
European allies were already defeated or forced on the defensive, and he was now matched against the most powerful armies the world had ever seen, with vast swaths
of Europe and Asia under Axis occupation. Yet Roosevelt rallied the nation to a massive national effort that soon made the US the “Arsenal of Democracy,” and
the most powerful military force on earth. The result was the liberation of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brussels, Denmark, Norway, Egypt, Libya, Morroco, Algeria, Italy, and Germany, (most liberated in just 10 months between June 1944
and April 1945) against an enemy that fielded an opposing army of over a million men in the Western fronts, many hardened and skilled war veterans with equivalent arms and training to anything the US had
, at least in quality. That is real leadership and decisive application of national power.
By contrast, Bush inherited a strongest economy in the world, a treasury surplus,
and the world’s preeminent Army, Navy and Air Force, unmatched in power and efficiency. He had strong European allies, no major power rivals after the fall of the
Soviet Union, and after 9/11 he was only matched against a few thousand “terrorists.” After chasing the Taliban into the high country of Afghanistan, he
decided to take on Iraq’s defeated and third rate military to begin transforming the Middle East for US corporations. But look what resulted! Rumsfeld brought just
three divisions to Iraq, and after a two week romp, the US has been unable to defeat a lightly armed group of “dead enders, ex-Ba’athists and terrorists” that
probably numbered no more than 5000 men at the outset, and were perceived to be in their last throes two years ago, at least in the mind of Vice President Cheney.
We’ve been fighting there over four years, with no victory in sight. The vaunted US Army is now badly over stretched, bogged down, and barely able to keep up recruitment quotas. Instead of Roosevelt’s amazing national effort, Bush merely asked Americans to “keep shopping”-- no pain, no sacrifice, and
no results. (And many on the political right have the enormously deluded opinion that Bush is a strong leader, “tough” and determined, and one who will get the job done. They, too, know nothing of history,
and they must be completely blind to what has been happening to this country under conservative rule these last six years.)
