End is Nigh
by Jane Smiley
The Huffington Post
February 13, 2007"If we step back a moment from the inhumane and criminal debacle that is the Iraq war and look at it as a logic problem, we can see that the aspirations of its architects are, well, absurd, and if there is something to be grateful for with regard to the Iraq war, then perhaps it is that the absurdity of nearly everything Bush, Cheney, Feith, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Bolton, et al.
represent is now apparent to almost everyone besides themselves.
1. Modern war is pointless. Since the end of the Second World War, the US has put a lot of its economic eggs in the war machine basket, and bet on the idea that wars can be fought with more and more sophisticated technology. The basic principle of this technology is that of the gun--I can stand farther and farther away from you, but kill you anyway with some sort of explosion (bomb, rocket attack, nuclear weapon, maybe some sort of star wars rain of death from space if only the American taxpayer will pay for it). The attack on Iraq was premised on this idea--Shock and Awe. The first plan the Pentagon geniuses came up with was to intimidate the Iraqis into submission by demonstrating our invincible might, kind of like a huge fireworks display in which only very narrowly targeted, and deserving, victims would be killed--presumably the bombs would serve as judge, jury, and executioner only for resolute followers of Saddam, and if we could label other victims as "collateral damage", we could get away with the inevitable mistakes. What the geniuses were aiming for was some sort of veneration by the Iraqis, as if the US were God-like in its power. But the Pentagon could not pull off the plan because technological war is by nature vast and messy. Technological war could not help killing, wounding, and alienating civilians, missing the well-protected ruling class and Saddam himself, and being the first demonstration for the Iraqis and the rest of the world, of who the Americans were--heartless, careless, murderous, robotic aliens intent on interfering in a country that was not generally agreed to be the Americans' business, no matter what the Americans themselves asserted. Shock and Awe did not work. The natural plan B of modern war is more modern war--more death, more injuries, more devastation. But we were supposed to be the Iraqis' friends, and so--
Technological war from the air was followed by technological war on the ground. But from the beginning, American soldiers might as well have been wearing signs on their backs saying "shoot me". In their desert camo uniforms, boots, and helmets with goggles, carrying all sorts of equipment, including weapons, of course, and driving in armored, but not sufficiently armored, vehicles, everything about their appearance showed that they did not fit into the local culture; every aspect of their appearance suggested to the local culture that they were alien. The geniuses at the Pentagon would have said, probably, that the army needs to retain its identity as a "fighting force", but that identity only served to focus the concentration of the Iraqi resisters more and more on resistance. Soldiers who were so markedly different from the local culture would have had to do everything perfectly in order to avoid arousing hostility, and we know that they didn't. They acted as the geniuses at the Pentagon ordered them to act--aggressively. Even apart from war crimes and other crimes that the American soldiers committed, their demeanor has been warlike, which is not perceived by the occupied populace as reassuring or secure, but as frightening and dangerous. At the same time, the US has several different "armies" in Iraq--the regular US army and the mercenaries run by Blackwater and Halliburton. The geniuses at the Pentagon who thought of "outsourcing " military operations for fun and profit didn't reckon with how the subject population would experience whole different sets of Americans doing lots of different and contradictory things, creating chaos and sowing more and more fear. What do people do when those who claim superiority over them don't act in a morally superior way and then show vulnerability? They attack. It's human nature. Iraq may be a multi-front civil war between groups with old enmities, but one thing they have shown themselves (and said themselves) to agree on is that the Americans ought to be attacked. Newly converted former neo-cons who now oppose the war and want to get out because it isn't our business should remember that even if we can't finish it, we did start it.
As a result of the Iraq war, we should thank the Bush administration for demonstrating the futility and cruelty of war as the Pentagon and its contractors have designed it. The Pentagon could have looked around in the fifties and seen that insurgencies were the wave of the future, but they didn't--they invested in something more expensive and more risky, and now we and our children are once again paying the price. Vietnam was fair warning more than anything else, but Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, and the contractors didn't heed that warming.
.........SNIP"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/the-end-is-nigh_b_41126.html
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