©2007 UrbisMedia
On cable’s Military Channel, a scarcely-disguised promo-propaganda organ for the Pentagon and defense industry I am watching a former Navy Seal, handsome, fit and head shaved, like Vin Deisel in some silly action flick so that the kids out there will want to be “just like him.” He’s hosting a show on the latest in high tech weapons, and I must confess I am intrigued the way I used to be when I read Popular Mechanics as a kid.
I watch as he demos a gun that shoots around corners so that the shooter can use a camera rather than expose himself. Another sniper weapon will pick off an enemy hundreds of yards away. And then there are predator vehicles, pilot-less planes that spy in the sky and fire missiles at unsuspecting enemies, directed by our “pilots” sitting in front of monitors back in the good old US of A. “We don’t even have to risk a pilot anymore,” he says. Wow, I am genuinely impressed. o wonder we are the “most powerful military nation on the face of the earth.”
So why are we losing another war?
Well, If you are George Bush and arranging your own self-delusion by firing any general who might give you a negative opinion, who finds the glass half-full when it has already been drained, who likes to play “mission accomplished,” then you already know the answer—we’re just making the enemy use up all their explosives by blowing the limbs off our soldiers. When they run out we will have “won.” That’s the first step in why we are losing another war—thinking that you can shoot the truth.
Thinking that you can win wars with just superior technology, is another. Mind you, you can win battles with superior technology. It has been proven throughout history, from the longbow to the H-Bomb, but a whole war is another matter, particularly an ill-defined one like “the war of terror.” George’s father won the battle to liberate Kuwait with superior technology, but he didn’t try to conquer Iraq and turn it into a democracy. And he actually had the right enemy.
That’s another reason we’re losing another war—wrong enemy. It’s still news to people in Red States, but we weren’t attacked by Iraq and there were no Al Qaeda in Iraq before we lured them there. (Psssst, but they have oil!). So the world figures out quickly that you’re motivations aren’t so noble and you squander all the good will that you received after 9-11. Never mind, just bribe a few countries to join the laughable “Coalition of the Willing.” Meanwhile, Afghanistan, which already helped bring down the Soviet Union [1] gets short-changed and returns to the Taliban and Osama gets a free ride from our “ally,” Pakistan, and the real culprits in George’s “war on terror” get stronger by going to Iraq to practice on American troops. [2]
Which leads to another reason we are losing. Gen. Giap once said about American forces in Vietnam that he knew from the beginning America would lose. Why? Because it was a temporary job for our forces. Giap said (something like this). “The Americans come over for one year. The first four months they are ineffective because they are so new at it; the second four months they fight well; and the third four months they become cautious and ineffective because they are counting the days to go home.” In Iraq Americans are fighting in a country they couldn’t even find on a map—and it doesn’t do any good to count the days because they’ll probably be re-deployed. Not only that, they are already fighting a defensive war the day they arrive, looking over their shoulder at every trash can, box, car, or even person, that might conceal a bomb. The enemy is willing, maybe even eager, to die, and we are doing everything we can to stay alive. We will lose.
Which leads to another factor in the losing formula—not knowing thine enemy . State department types were unceremoniously dumped from Bush’s team, their intel dismissed. They tried to tell George that he was getting into something far more complex than his substance-compromised brain could comprehend. George didn’t know a Sunni from a Shia, or a Peshmurga from a Peach Melba, and what’s more, he didn’t care. And this guy thought he could make a democracy out of Iraq whose intended president (remember Ahmed Chalabi?) would sell us oil in exchange for our solid waste.
Which leads to another reason we are going to lose this war—the kill ‘em all and let God sort it out mentality (Notice I did not say Allah; I said God.) Hey, if you can’t tell one sect from another, or their soldiers from their civilians, just round ‘em all up toss ‘em in Ahu Ghraib or Guantanamo, have some fun torturing them. It’s good work for some of the dimwits and skinheads you now have to scrape up for recruits for your volunteer Armed forces, which used to be respected.
Some will say—again—we will lose because the pols want to, use the Bush spin, “micromanage” the war. Others’ will say because we don’t use our heavy-duty weapons, the nukes, to level whole countries. So-called “surges” won’t work because the enemy has learned to employ the “rope a dope” technique of fading and retreating from the pressure, relocated to where we are not, and then returning to fight another day. It’s not hard to outsmart a dope.
There are other explanations, closer to the truth of it. If we were really fighting in our own streets—the way these people are—then we would fight to the last and as long as it takes and we might even try some suicide bombing. But only dimwitted Republican committeewomen in Red States believe that they might be forced to wear burkas to the Wal Mart. They don’t know that we are fighting for oil and to make out defense contractors and mercenaries richer. But Bush—and hence America—will come away from this war with virtually nothing. He hangs on in hopes of the oil contracts for his energy friends, but the Shiites are unlikely to give him anything. We will only have indebted our own future generations.
But perhaps worst of all Bush will have trashed the reputation of the US Military as “the world’s more powerful.” We will have gone from a nation to be respected and feared, to one which is reviled and seen as able to smash other nations with our superior military technology, but cannot win wars against people who are willing to fight us down and dirty in the streets. Now they all know now that the way to beat us is to use the military tactic of the “rope a dope.” And what better dope to have exposed that weakness than the one who stole the White House.
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©2007, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 7.18.2007)
[1] You mean it wasn’t Ronald Reagan?
[2] The recent NIS report has stated that AQ rather than being diminished, as the Bushies say, has actually been strengthened and reconsitituted in Pakistan, a supposed alley of the USA that has received ten billion dollars from us—another colossal failure of the Bush administration. The Taliban, supposedly defeated by the US is back in Afghanistan is such force and with such control that Kabul is the equivalent of the Green Zone in Baghdad