The Nation: The Next War

[marmar]

The Next War
posted by Tom Engelhardt on 05/07/2008 @ 10:09am

May 7, 2008



Remember when the globe's imperial policeman, its New Rome, was going to wield its unsurpassed military power by moving from country to country, using lightning strikes and shock-and-awe tactics? We're talking about the now-unimaginably distant past of perhaps 2002-2003. Afghanistan had been "liberated" in a matter of weeks; "regime change" in Iraq was going to be a "cakewalk," and it would be followed by the reordering of what the neoconservatives liked to refer to as "the Greater Middle East." No one who mattered was talking about protracted guerrilla warfare; nor was there anything being said about counterinsurgency (nor, as in the Powell Doctrine, about exits either). The U.S. military was going to go into Iraq fast and hard, be victorious in short order, and then, of course, we would stay. We would, in fact, be welcomed with open arms by natives so eternally grateful that they would practically beg us to garrison their countries.

Every one of those assumptions about the new American way of war was absurd, even then. At the very least, the problem should have been obvious once American generals reached Baghdad and sat down at a marble table in one of Saddam Hussein's overwrought palaces, grinning for a victory snapshot -- without any evidence of a defeated enemy on the other side of the table to sign a set of surrender documents. If this were a normal campaign and an obvious imperial triumph, then where was the other side? Where were those we had defeated? The next thing you knew, the Americans were printing up packs of cards with the faces of most of Saddam's missing cronies on them.

Well, that was then. By now, fierce versions of guerrilla war have migrated to the narrow streets of the poorest districts of Baghdad and, in Afghanistan, are moving ever closer to the Afghan capital, Kabul. U.S. troops are, at present, in block by block fighting in Baghdad's vast Shiite Sadr City slum and they're wheeling in the Abrams tanks and calling in helicopters, Hellfire-missile-armed drones, and jets for help in brutal urban warfare as the bodies pile higher. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/318779/the_next_war

[cliss]

1. Why are we doing so poorly?

Someone really needs to ask that question. We are losing, in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Why is that?

We are supposed the world's most powerful country. We spend more on the military than all other countries combined. And yet we can't win against a small, dedicated, rag-tag insurgency.

I think one of the problems is that we have not defined war, or warfare, or occupations as such. The US ended up using the military for things they were never designed for. For example, the military is not very good at guerrilla warfare. Viet Nam taught us that. The US military was designed to fight in large-scale combat, such as fighting against large standing armies. That's where we have excelled. Or dropping bombs, or very short-term conflict. But in terms of long, drawn-out conflicts, or occupations, we've failed miserably.

I believe the Bush administration (and others before it) did not have a clear understanding of what the military's abilities were. They asked them to do things they were not designed for, like occupying a country, or acting as mediators in a country which is now locked in a civil war. There' no way we can win, no way.

[nealmhughes]

2. The answer is simple: we are not prepared to annihilate the Afghanis or Iraqis in order to force a

complete capitulation and leave the states in ruins -- to do so would be the most major coup for anti-Americanism the world had ever seen -- from Toronto to Beijing.

I think that the people at the State Dept. and the DOD needed to have read a bit of recent inter-ethnic strife such as the Irish Troubles and how the UK was never able to quell the uprisings, and could not destroy Dublin and make the Liffey run with blood to have the viceroy safe. Then we have the problem of intra-ethnic stife within the Free State/Republic with Sinn Fein opposing the IRA.

Iraq and Afghanistan are both in a real sense "artificial" countries, as is Saudi Arabia, Russia, etc. with various historic regions hobbled together through warfare or else outside diplomacy. How wed is someone to the idea of Iraq when their traditional loyalty has been to their family, their tribe, and their city or region and where Baghdad is as foreign as is Damascus or Teheran to them? The Iran-Iraq Wars had a chance to forge unity for each group, and it did for the Iranians, who see themselves as a distinct ethnos and united in their hatred of the Shah, Western influence over a great nation and their Shia-Persian identity in a Sunni-Arab and Sunni-Pakistani sea with China, Russia, and India to the north and the USA still nursing a grudge for their humiliation at the Pahlavi dictator's removal and the little embassy incident.

There are two places where one does not wish to get bogged down historically, the Balkans and Southwest Asia! Russia and Turkey washed their hands of them gratefully after the First World War until Russia again sought their cordon sanitaire in the Second. I recommend that we follow Russia and Turkey's examples as well as that of the UK in India: wash our hands, trade and cultural ties and no military intervention unless they attack us or a NATO ally.

One notes to date that no Muslim nation has ever declared war upon the United States of America, except for Tripoli at the turn of the Nineteenth Century. . . yet we have intervened in Lebanon, Iran and Iraq!

[cliss]

3. Very nice post,

you obviously know your history.
Thanks.

[nealmhughes]

5. I studied under my friend John Beeler at UA and Harold Selesky at UA for

my MA in history up to 2003 in Tuscaloosa. . . Harold taught me how to read and John on how the artificiality and recent coinage of many national identities actually are.

Thank them, not me!

[bemildred]

4. Well said.

You're never done unless you kill them all, and if you kill them all, then that's who you are.

[happydreams]

6. Maybe it's war for its own sake. Just look at how much dough they are making.