Wednesday, April 09, 2003

Take Two Aspirin and Call me in Six Months             Pictures don’t lie.  The Iraqi jubilation at the demise of Saddam Hussein is real, and the ending of his brutal repression has called forth a wave of popular relief from some Iraqi’s.               No one on the left can argue that the demise of Saddam is not some kind of benefit.  It is a real benefit to the Iraqi’s, but it is not a benefit to us.               The U.S. corporate media is doing our country a tremendous disservice by reporting their ideological wet dream rather than actual reality.               By taking over Iraq, I believe we have opened a can of worms. There will be tremendous fighting among the different Iraqi factions and interests to gain power after the fall of Saddam, and all parties will try and trick the Americans into making moves that help them.               Remember in Afghanistan, how rival war lords would tell the Americans that their enemies were Taliban, and like clockwork, the Americans would come in and bomb them, killing hundreds of civilians and non-combatants in the process.  Iraq will be ten times worse, because the oil wealth is something worth fighting over.               Having created a vacuum, the Americans may find it impossible to leave.  But the longer they stay, the more they become the target, and the vehicle around which Iraqi’s can unite against.               The majority of Iraqi’s support leaders like the late Ayatollah Khomeni.  Will America allow an Iranian Muslim cleric to come to power in Iraq?  I think it highly unlikely.  So, the stalemate begins.  The U.S. can’t leave, because if they do, an unacceptable power will emerge.  But the longer they stay, the more they unite the population against the infidel invader.               So, the pictures today of joy at Saddam’s fall are only part of a much larger war.  Our own dear Butcher has taken a huge gamble, and mightily raised the stakes, basically by thinking he can go in, and then get out.               Most of the difficulties in long guerrilla wars have been in how to leave, not how to get in.  We have come into Iraq with a bang.  Now how will we get out.               Afghanistan has been relatively easy because there never were large numbers of U.S. troops there in the first place, and there was never an attempt to uproot the war lords who dominate the countryside.  The Kabul government is just that, a government of Kabul.  This convenient fiction allows the U.S. to endure a low level of conflict and attrition at acceptable levels.               In Iraq, we will have 300,000 to 400,000 troops, and rather than allow local war lords to run the provinces, it appears that Americans will do it themselves.  If not, civil war would quickly follow between the Turks, the Kurds, and possibly the Sunni’s and Shiites.  So unlike Afghanistan, we have hundreds of thousands of troops pinned down in the Middle East for many years—just what several military commanders said before the White House silenced them.               I expect the next pictures of wild jubilation we will see will be the day American troops are finally forced out of Iraq.  That’s why I feel like saying take two aspirin and call me in six months.  I know I will have a real headache then. 10:58:02 PM   comment []

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