Democracy In Iraq--BOOM!

Was it five car bombs—or was it seven—that went off in Baghdad the other day? I guess it depends on whether you count in Arabic or English. The locals say one thing; what’s left of the American military presence says the other.
We sponsored an election. It was apparently a reasonably fair election; it was also a dreadfully close election. We take close elections to the Supreme Court or the loser simply quits and lets the other guy have it. In simpler societies, recounts can get bloody.
So far, just in April, 100 Iraqi’s have died in the process. This comes just as we are preparing to cut the 96,000 GIs remaining in Iraq down to under 50,000. That should be completed by September; everybody is scheduled to leave by next year.
Why does this remind me of 1921?
What happened then, you ask. Read on—and see if it sounds familiar. There was a once a province of the brutal Turkish Empire that was maintained by force of arms, not by democratic mandate or agreement of the mutually hostile tribal and religious groups.
The Turkish Empire went away in a cloud of gun smoke back in 1918 and the British decided to take this province over. Mesopotamia, as it was then called, had NEVER been a unified country. Already by the end of World War I, people were beginning to sense just how much oil this piece of earth contained. Britain was quite willing to take on that burden.
Britain, however, was short on cash, and there was not a lot of political sentiment back in England for another foreign war—even for oil. In fact there was none. World War I had left England broke and sick of war—she wanted her boys home.
So young Winston Churchill, who was Colonial Secretary in 1921, held a meeting in Cairo where he came up with what seemed like a brilliant idea—to him. He would 1) combine three hostile tribal areas in Mesopotamia—that of the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunni’s into one brand new country, called Iraq.
Two, he installed one of the characters out of “Lawrence of Arabia” as king—thus creating a unified national government. (This chap, by the way was from Arabia and had already been tossed out of Syria for trying to make himself king there.) Then, 3) Churchill decided to create an Iraqi national army under this new government so that the British troops could go home.
Cheaper, fewer British casualties, instead of three areas to pacify—one nation state with its own army. Absolutely brilliant plan. Rather like the plan Churchill had as a boy when he sought to gain entrance to a “haunted house” by blowing up a home-made bomb in the outside well. He blew himself high in the air and never found the “secret passage” into the house.
His plan for Iraq didn’t work either. The three Mesopotamian tribes went right on hating each other. The new government was powerless to stop them from killing each other. Without sufficient British troops on the ground to pacify things, everything just go worse.
In 1930, Britain quit and went home. They left Iraq to its new king (whose entire family was finally wiped out in 1958—by a group that included Saddam Hussein). Churchill’s grand design exists today only in the name on the map—where the three groups that still hate each other live to this day.
Now it’s America’s turn to try to create a nation state out of these three groups. (Like the British, we’ve already given up on the oil.) Like the British we are only too willing to pull our own troops out and leave the mess to the Iraqi national army.
One can almost see Mr. Churchill, sitting on a back bench in heaven, shaking his head as he looks down and murmurs, “Good luck”.

Iraq, Afghanistan--Are We Winning?

Once again the question is upon us: when is a won war a lost war? When is a lost war a won war? Or when is a won war really a won war; when is a lost war really, really a lost war? They’re even trotting out the old “Mission Accomplished” banner that Bush had the Navy fly seven years ago when he proclaimed Iraq a won war.
Are we winning in Afghanistan? Are we winning in Iraq? Do you remember how people wanted to know if we won in Korea and Vietnam? What constitutes actually winning a war?
Let’s get something straight. Many of know the old saying, “War is diplomacy by other means”. That is partially true—certainly coming out with a diplomatic advantage goes some of the way toward deciding who a won and who lost.
But more importantly—war is an INVESTMENT like any other investment. You invest money, materiel, human lives—and you look for a return. You “win” by getting a decent to good return on your investment. Ghoulish sounding—but true.
Let’s go back over an instance in which the winners and losers are very clearly indicated—World War II. When the shooting stopped, British, French, Russian and American troops were all waving bottles of vodka, German beer and Saki, cheering madly, and the Germans and Japanese were standing around looking very dejected. Obviously the first four won, right?
Wrong. Let’s look at how it actually played out.
There was one big winner—the United States. For us the war was like walking into a casino, putting a dollar in the slot and finding ourselves up to our shoulders in money. We’ve lived off the proceeds of the Japanese, British, French, Belgium and Dutch empires ever since. Nobody in history ever won a war like we did in 1945.
There were two nations for whom the war was essentially a wash—Japan and Germany. In the end, they rebuilt their factories and are possibly better off today than they would have been if the war had never been fought. In the category of “winners”, they may come in a decent second to the United States.
There were two participants who really didn’t do all that well for several decades after the war and may or may not possibly be coming out of their economic funk today. Maybe. Russia and China.
Then come the major losers. Britain, France, Holland and Belgium. The biggest loser of all was, of course, Britain. Immediately after that comes France. They ruled most of the globe in 1939. Twenty years later they had about the international clout of Portugal or Rwanda. Their economies were far behind Japan’s or Germany’s.
Skip the flag waving and the cheering. Who really won is whoever got a decent return on the investment.

It’s all about the money. Just like your 401K. It’s about the money. If you made money, you won; if you lost money, you lost the war.
One of the reasons we lose sight of this reality is that—politically—you cannot say this to the people who go to the front to do the fighting and dying. So government propaganda—in all warring nations—has to obfuscate the actual causes and aims of the war.
Everybody’s national history books follow the national line on the war and reality gets lost. This is nice for the vets and the bereaved mothers—but it makes it all but impossible to take a dispassionate look at a prospective war (such as Iraq in early 2003) and weigh its pro’s and con’s as if it were any other investment. Which we should do.
Tomorrow let’s look at how we lose sight of reality when looking at the possibility of war.

Iraq--A War is a War is a War

They’re going to rename the Iraq War. Defense Secretary Gates insists this sends a “strong message” about what the war is all about. (I wish we’d known what it was all about back in 2003, don’t you?) Instead of calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (did you remember it was ever called that? I did not.), we’re going to call it “Operation New Dawn”.
This will make everything all better again? Is this like renaming the “Garbage Man” and calling him a “Sanitary Engineer”? Or is it like what the legislature did in Michigan? They felt it was unfair for kids to graduate from four year state colleges in Michigan and have to compete with “university” graduates from places like the University of Michigan or Harvard.
They renamed every government supported educational institution in the state a “university” by legislative fiat. Who cares if it gives a graduate degree or not? Who cares if it has various schools representing different disciplines? By law it’s a university.
See the awesome power in something so simple as a name change? By merely rearranging the name, you can make Podunk College the full equivalent of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Podunk University has a truly powerful ring to it, hasn’t it?
Ask any garbage man how much richer his life is now that he is a Sanitary Engineer. Merde’. That’s what he hauled before; that’s what he’s still hauling today. Our invasion of Iraq was a masterpiece of confusion under the old name; it remains as much so today.
Name it what you will, but a rose is a rose is a rose—and a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage. Legislate all you wish, you don’t change the smell or the behavior of anything. I really don’t know what Gates or anyone else was thinking.
All I CAN conclude is that candor has not replaced idiocy, hypocrisy, self delusion or fantasy in this administration. Bush or Obama, the beat goes on. Whether the administration considers a New Dawn to be an upgrade from Iraqi Freedom or a downgrade doesn’t matter a fig.
The new mission doesn’t matter. We didn’t know what we were getting into originally and we go right on limping because of all the times we shot ourselves in the foot. We didn’t send in enough troops to secure the place—or Saddam’s arsenals, and those munitions are blowing people up today. Yes, there are still nasty explosions in Iraq.
We were promised—by an administration that seemed to have no idea what a little ordinance can do to an oil field or a pipeline—that the war would pay for itself out of Iraqi oil revenues. By saying so out loud, Bush convinced the entire Muslim world we were merely after Iraq’s oil.
Iraqi militants learned fast that oil fields/pipelines are the easiest things in the world to blow up (we could have figured that out by reading the official postwar study of the affects of strategic bombing during World War II). As a result, we got zip.
And now the Chinese and the French are moving into those oil fields and can be expected to clean up big time. Do you suppose they see it as a “New Dawn”? I would imagine. We spent our blood and money and won’t be getting a dime or a drop back.
For us that’s scarcely a new dawn, just a slightly darker night. We demand that Tiger Woods call a philanderer a philanderer, no euphemisms, please. But we try to make a whole war go away by just coining a new name for it.
Was that another “boom” I heard coming from Iraq? It must have been the new dawn coming up like thunder. The new name certainly sends a strong message—that we haven’t stopped fooling ourselves yet.