Shock and Jaw
Talk is cheap on Iraq
As I write this, approximately 3,800 American soldiers have been killed in the Iraq war. Any questions?
Some people were gullible enough to believe that September would be a month of reckoning on the Iraq war. General David Petraeus would come before the congress and the country to report on the success of the so-called ‘surge’ and finally, we would have those slippery bastards. The people could look the Bush administration in the eye and say, “Fine, you had your ‘one last chance.’ Now can we please start cleaning up the dirt you dropped?” If you were one of the sorry fools who entertained this fantasy, I pity you. But I’ll get back to that.
If you listen to the orgy of chattering idiots making the rounds on all the favorite media outlets, you’d think we’ve finally turned the corner in Iraq. The Sunnis have turned. Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia is on the run. Security is improving. Without fail, these are the accomplishments flaunted for the American people. We are again being told to hold on, almost there, just a little while longer and we can win this thing—all that tired bullshit. The truth is the “success” is a cheap ploy, and its purpose is to fool just enough people to keep this mess going a while longer. To paraphrase Dead Prez, You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, but if you fool the right ones then the rest will fall into line.
Over 28,000 soldiers serving in Iraq have been disabled or severely wounded. These men and women along with many more will return home suffering from some of the worst post-traumatic stress disorder imaginable, stuff you and I couldn’t fathom even in the depths of our worst nightmares. Again, any questions?
Let’s examine this success and all of its consequences. Allow me to quote a truly smart, insightful, and not at all sexually-inadequate individual, who back in February said this about the newly proposed troop surge: “Even if the surge works initially, and the U.S. military can bring some vague sense of sanity and stability to the capital city with tactics like military policing and endless roadblocks, what then?”
I wrote that for a column six months ago, and unfortunately the question still stands. What the surge highlighted was that there has never been an adequate number of ground forces in the country. With the additional troops, the Army and Marines did manage to temper violence slightly, with the most success coming in the previously explosive Anbar province, but now administration officials act as if Iraqis are grilling out and playing touch football in their front yards. The surge allowed for a period of increased patrols that lowered the overall number of attacks.
Fantastic. Break out the goddamn cigars
Now those surge troops are slated to leave. President Bush ties this drawdown to the “success” of the surge, which is like a man date-raping a woman and attributing his luck with the ladies to his new can of Axe body spray. The reason those troops are leaving is because there’s no one left to replace them. The military has essentially taxed its ground forces to the breaking point and even if Petraeus and Bush wanted to extend the surge for another year (which, if it’s such a flaming success, you’d think they would), they couldn’t because you need bodies to fill uniforms and index fingers attached to those bodies to pull triggers.
The cost of the Iraq war for the U.S. taxpayer is fast approaching $500 billion and will likely top a trillion before all is said and done. A chunk of this money has simply vanished, some of it into the pockets of Benedict Arnold corporations like Titan, CACI, Blackwater and Halliburton subsidiary KBR—companies responsible for some of the most brazen war-profiteering in American history. Any questions?
What worries me more about our recent “success” in Iraq, however, is our newfound alliance with the Sunni tribes that were just a few months ago trying to kill our soldiers. Essentially, these Sunnis that made up a good chunk of the amorphous insurgency decided they did not want to live under psychotic Islamic law that is the goal of al-Qaeda and joined with American forces in hunting them. This marriage of convenience is disturbing from two perspectives. First of all, we essentially bought the support of these people, and I have a feeling that as soon as our marriage gets a little messy, the divorce might get downright nasty. The Sunnis have no allegiance to the United States, they share none of our long-term goals, and they still want to return to minority rule over their hated Shiite brethren. Secondly, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is a foreign policy designed by assholes who’ve never read a history book. We courted Joseph Stalin to defeat Hitler and ended up with our thumb on the button of a nuclear holocaust for forty years. Later we recruited Osama bin Laden to battle that same empire. Anyone remember how all of that worked out?
Finally, the idea of the surge was to provide “breathing room” for Iraqi political factions to resolve their differences. “Breathing room” is one of those utterly retarded catch phrases that people throw around to sound smart and political but that essentially means absolutely dick. If you hear anyone using this phrase unironically, feel free to slap them in the face and call them some kind of childish, derogatory name involving pigs and sodomy. The idea that the Sunnis and Shiites are going to resolve a conflict that runs deeper than the blood that pumps in their veins is a Bushian fantasy of epic proportions. Hell, the Shiites themselves are split into warring factions grappling for supremacy, and there’s a pretty scary guy named Moqtada al-Sadr just waiting for his chance to consolidate power. None of these groups have any interest in stabilizing Iraq, only in positioning themselves before it starts to burn. These are dangerous men, and they’re playing for keeps.
Finding an accurate measure of Iraqi deaths has been nearly impossible. During this conflict anywhere from between 72,000 to 600,000 Iraqi civilians have lost their lives, depending on which study you want to believe. The U.S. military has shown no interest in keeping count. Any questions?
The surge, in the end, was never meant to win the war in Iraq. It was meant to buy time, and this brings me back to this whimsical left-wing fantasy that this firestorming clusterfuck is coming to an end anytime soon. I know that it’s really chic to take the Kucinich line and say, “All the Democrats have to do is stop funding the war,” but while we’re at it why can’t the Democrats save the ice caps, feed the poor, and add six inches to my penis? (Yeah, yeah, bringing it to a grand total of eight, ha ha). In the Senate they essentially need 60 votes to even talk about it, let alone the 67 needed to overcome a presidential veto. Even if all 51 of them voted to cut funding tomorrow, the war would still continue as is with the only damage being to their individual political fortunes for not “supporting the troops” (as if stranding a bunch of kids in a blast-furnace desert in the middle of a civil war is the grandest, most noble gesture of “support”).
The course of this war will change only one way, and that’s from the executive branch. Likely, Bush will make a token withdrawal of troops sometime in October of 2008 to boost the prospects of the Republican candidate, but any real change will have to wait for the next administration. That’s something we’ll all just have to accept.
The Iraq war is on its fourth rational. From WMDs to ties to al-Qaeda to democracy for Iraqis to “it will be too messy if we leave.” For five years we have been consistently misled, told that we’re making progress, that we’re finally turning a corner, that patriots fight and cowards run. And here we are, once again being asked to buy the same defective product from the same used-car salesman: Perpetual war for eventual peace.
Now, do you have any questions?
Send all correspondence to hatemail@stephenmarkley.com. If you wish to join the listserv and be notified of each new column, simply e-mail the request. Our staff will process it within 24-48 hours, depending on what's on TV that night.
NEW: Waste your day reading an excerpt from "A Land I Saw in My Dreams": "Tales from Vancouver"
Home Biography Work