©2008, UrbisMedia
15 July 2008. In a speech today in New Mexico John McCain said, ” I know how to win wars, I know how to win wars. I will turn around the war in Afghanistan the way we have turned around the war in Iraq.” This man got shot down in the last war he was in! Shot down! He’s a flop! He spent five years in prison! He only knows how to lose wars!
And, he wants to succeed a chronic loser. In any case, “the war on terror,” George Bush style, is, in many respects, over. In part, it cannot be won because there is no definition of what winning means. Is it the surrender of Al Qaeda, or the Taliban, they way Germany and Japan surrendered? Not a chance. All they have to do is wait us out, pretend that our actions are leading toward what we can—politically—call “victory,” and then crank it up again. Afghanistan is a good example. We thought it was all over when we ran off the Taliban. They waited in the hills and in Pakistan (our putative ally) and now they are back in control of much of the country. They also knew that given a fair amount of time the new government would become corrupt and the people would withdraw their support. They knew they could set up situations in which the Americans would overreact and kill civilians, and the government would have to answer for it.
The same is true of the “enemy” in Iraq. They know we can’t sustain our presence there. They know we are waiting around only for some solid oil deal, but we would have to protect that with military bases. Moqtada al Sadr, and/or other Shiite interests know they have the upper hand, the numbers, to prevail; that was “in the cards” the day Saddam Hussein went to ground. They know that they are already “home,” and that the Americans have to go home, that we can’t afford $10 Billion a month to stay around looking for a way to have our cake (oil) and eat it, too (our “victory”). They know that every congressional approval of another $100 Billion weakens the Americans over the long run and well into the future. They read the polls. They know this is not a conventional war, but a war of attrition, just as Afghanistan is. They know that the Americans think they are smarter than they are because the Americans equate scientific and technological superiority with greater political acumen. They know we live longer to play golf and spend huge amounts on health care, and that young Americans would rather play with their video games and iPhones than fight. They know our politics is phony politics, public relations puff that doesn’t deal with the real issues. They know realpolitik, they have lived it for generations. They will play us the way a small fisherman plays a big strong fish—keep the line just taut enough, slackening and then tightening again, until we are too tired to continue the fight.
The other reason that the “enemy” has won is because they knew the “fish” they had on the line. They at least knew they were and are smarter than the fish—George W. Bush. He became their greatest asset, and America’s greatest weakness. Perhaps they were surprised how easily it would be to terrorize Bush. Had they studied that he was really a coward who shirked his military duty, who had been and drunk and a business failure, that he was they type who would send other men to fight and would see that as his bravery. For years they had seen his type of American comes into their bazaars and souks, acting like they were superior, like big deals, and they would “take them for a ride.” They might have been surprised at how stupidly Americans would react after 9-11, running off to churches to pray, driving frantically around in their gas-guzzling SUVs festooned with flags as though their silly patriotic posturing meant anything. They knew then that the fish was hooked; the terror had been driven into the marrow of America. Perhaps they could scarcely believe the gift they were handed with George Bush, and then his ludicrous mistake of invading Iraq.
It does not matter now whether they knew beforehand that America would tear itself apart after 9-11—they, and the world, know it now. They might not have known that in our frenzy and fear we would shred our own beloved Constitution, that America would build a gulag in Cuba, and would take photos of our own torture activities in Abu Ghraib, supplying Al Jeezera and the Middle East the best terrorist recruitment instrument they could wish for. They must have laughed at the firings of generals and the political attacks on anyone who dared to tell the truth to the American people, and that, when it came time for those people to elect a new president, they seemed to care more about whether homosexuals could marry than whether Bush’s war on the will ‘o the wisp terror was destroying the economy of the richest country in the world. They must have laughed when every time it could have faced the truth American’s succumbed to its color codes for terror, continued to believe the falsehood that Iraqis flew the 9-11 planes, that Bush put idiots and sycophants into the top positions at the State Department, Homeland Security, and the Justice Department. They must have laughed when Bush and Cheney wanted to see “raw intelligence” which resulted in the CIA giving them every possible rumor of impending terror along with more reliable intelligence. They fed that rumor mill that in turn fed the terror and the Bush/Cheney propaganda machine for the war. They ignored the truth, even when their own CIA knew the truth, and became themselves terrorized by a process that was full of doom. In turn, they terrorized their country. They must have been surprised, like the rest of the world, at the callous ineptitude of the American president when one of its cities was inundated by a hurricane. What better example of what to expect if hey ever decided to unleash a nuclear or biological weapon on an American city.
Now they know that their victory is assured. The beloved American dollar has been badly weakened by the mountain of debt the war cost. That, in turn, has helped drastically inflate the price of oil, and Americans are now in a panic to sell those SUVs and trucks that were once festooned with their flags. They watch as American banks and financial institutions are failing in a housing crisis brought about by the same greedy, self-deluded policies that let them be hooked by the war on terror. They see that the war might not be quite won, but the fish is tired, it has lost much blood, and as it nears the boat and is about t be landed, its eyes still look terrified. They can see that look in McCain’s eyes, like they looked the day he was shot down—the look of a loser.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 7.17.2008)