Friday, May 25, 2007
The war is lost: What next?
This excerpt from a CBC documentary, The Battle For Baghdad, makes matters crystal clear. The Iraqi forces despise their commanders, are despised by their people, distrust and are distrusted by the Americans. The administration asks our soldiers to rely on an unreliable local military viewed as quislings by their own fellow countrymen.
This strategy cannot work. No strategy can work.
What will happen after America pulls out? I have no illusions about what will occur once our forces have left. Iraq will plunge into an even grimmer level of hell. In this country, a conservative media will miss no opportunity to blame anti-war Americans for the chaos.
Democrats will properly blame Bush for initiating the debacle, but selective memory and sheer drumbeat repetition of the conservative message will force most Americans to adopt some variant of the "stabbed in the back" theory of the war. Over time that theory will prove particularly popular among the soldiers themselves -- even among many current members of Iraq Veterans Against the War.
That's what occurred after Vietnam: Vets who attended and applauded anti-war rallies featuring Jane Fonda "re-adjusted" their memories and decided that they had always hated her. The pundits predicting a more liberal political landscape are fools. How many years passed between the evacuation of Saigon and the ascent of Ronald Reagan?
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4 comments:
joe, your reflections are important warnings, but i think it just as important to note the differences between now and nam.
the groundswell against this war was huge, even before it started. it has now solidly captured over 2/3 of the public, and that is not going to shift in favor of the war unless one of bush and cheney's miracles happens. fat chance.
frankly, i don't even think this public would believe it if there were one of those 'another pearl harbors' folks keep expecting; the public has become pretty cynical about this administration's every propaganda peep, and they're so sick of it they aren't even giving the dems much slack when they roll over.
all that said, i do agree too, though, that the past informs us of our very crucial charge to make sure these things do not happen twice.
dylan's question: what's the price you have to pay?
diligence, at the very least.
Perspective on that may depend on a regional culture. I live in a red area, where I can very well see Joe's point of view as prescient.
When we see reality so clearly, it's hard to understand why others can't. But most people don't want to think hard, don't have time to analyze facts. They just listen to the simplest message from people within their in-groups and adopt those views as their own. The ideas don't need to make sense for them. They have no time for analysis. They just go along with their crowd. They may not be answering the telephone at mealtime for those polls, either.
In my eyes, this post fails to ask perhaps the most important question about the future of Iraq and the mess we created there--how will the right (continue to) blame Clinton?
I think the cultural changes evident now are huge and importantly, beginning to significantly erode away the power of the right's principle cultural memes (which are not about war, particularly-- unfortunately, (a critical core of) Democrats have always had a pro-war bent). I refer to their anti-gay, anti-feminist, and racist agendas, and there have been mighty sea changes in American attitudes along those lines.
Similarly, the anti-government theory of the right, that we'd be better off relying on the rugged individualism that myth has it our country was founded on, has been on the canvas, and may not finish the round.
Now, it is true that the fear-driven neo-fascist position that we need to be hyper-aggressive and engage in preventative wars of choice, against the whole world's contrary opinion if necessary, is a more recent development in history, and has perhaps longer to go in its life cycle as a theory before the American people consign it to the trashheap of history. BUT, I'd argue, it has surely already hit a high water mark, and is receding substantially.
sofla
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