Some thoughts on the ugly facts

I've been thinking about Iraq.

We don't have a clear mission. Support the new democracy? Okay, how? We haven't disarmed the militias. Until that happens, they don't have a democracy. It's too dangerous, you say. Well, I think that's where we come to the rub. Yep, we would take a lot of casualties for a few weeks as we disarmed the neighborhoods. Lots of casualties. Unacceptable to the American people numbers. Or so says the conventional wisdom.

We would also have to re-introduce the draft because we would have to send another 750,000 troops to Iraq to pacify the countryside. What's that you say? It didn't work in Vietnam? Sure it did. You're buying into anti-war propaganda. After the Tet offensive, there was no Viet Cong and the countryside was pacified. We still took casualties but they were along the Cambodian and Laotian borders and up near the DMZ where we were in contact with NV regulars. We quit when America lost the will to continue.

Should we have stayed? Well, that depends on where you fall on the nationalism spectrum. We promised the South Vietnamese that we would protect them from the North. We didn't. I'm of the opinion that we failed several thousand Vietnamese who were executed by the North. Should we have been there in the first place? Hmm. Way different question.

Communist dictatorships are defined, in American politics, as bad. Stalin, sure. Krushchev, much less so. Brezhnev, went a long way back to the bad old days. Pol Pot, of course. Murderers are bad. The domino theory had a lot of geopolitical truth but it was premised on a falsehood: the Soviet Union would bankroll world-wide revolution. They did until they couldn't afford it anymore. We would probably have hastened their collapse by letting them run riot for a few years. Of course, that would have resulted in a lot of deaths. Containment resulted in a lot of deaths, too.

Isolationism? Let the world go the way it will? We can't do that until we get off the oil tit. Oh, and the Japanese electronics tit. And the Latin American and Southeast Asian textiles tit. And the Japanese car tit. And the Chinese "whatever else we buy because we don't make anything in the US" tit. So isolationism isn't an option and we have to play international politics and that means we have to put the interests of the US ahead of the interests of other nations because if we don't there's no reason to play.

Now game theory says that cooperation is always better than competition in a zero sum game. And when veiwed in a large enough context, we've been in a zero sum game since we came down out of the trees. So, by cooperating with other nations we improve our chances of success, satisfying our requirement that US interests be addressed.

Now, as I said, I've been thinking about Iraq.

If we "cut and run," Iraq goes to shit. Three regions: Kurds in the north, with oil. Shi'a in the south, with oil. Sunni in the middle with nothing but desert, no oil, no farms, no olive trees, no water, no nothing. Sunnis don't like the sound of that "no nothing" talk. Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Syria don't like that "Kurds with money" part because it is the avowed goal of these people to create a Greater Kurdistan. Saudi Arabia and Egypt don't like the sound of "Shi'a with anything" because it strengthens Iran's hand. What are the US interests in this? Get the oil flowing but keep our allies happy in case we need to use them as a base to invade something. Hmm. Who are our allies? Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.

"Stay the course doesn't work." We're bleeding to death for nothing. No oil, no way out, no increase in national prestige.

National prestige in this instance doesn't just mean that everybody hates us because we're a terrible, wicked, imperialist aggressor. We don't care about that because we're putting our interests first, remember? What we care about is the fact that we have committed the national treasure and the national army to Iraq. And therefore cannot rattle a fucking sabre anywhere else? Iran and North Korea have decided to go nuclear and there's fuckall we can do about it because every manjack of us is in Iraq. Not that invading either of those countries is really an option but we could at least have blustered seven or eight years ago and we would have been taken seriously. Now? Kyrgyzistan and Burkin Faso could imprison our ambassadors and we'd have to ask them kindly to let them go because we don't have Marines to spare for a parachute drop. THAT'S what's really wrong with this adventure in empire building. You can't do it without conscripts.

And in order to get the Iraq we want, we have to have more boots on the ground. Lots more boots. Enough that we can walk into Sadr City and announce that we expect all the weapons and explosives to be deposited in the square in front of the main mosque by dark and have it mean something. Sure, when we start something like this there will be a lot of people flee into the desert. Let them. We just need to hold the cities and the roads between them and the pipelines. And we can do that if we're willing to let the world see us doing what the Israelis have done in the West Bank and Gaza: bulldoze neighborhoods that contain people we don't like.

Empire is dirty work. But necessary when you manufacture nothing but weapons and you owe more than the gross national product to foreign govenments. And when the lifeblood of the world's economy can mainly be found "over there."

There is another way to do this. We could flat out hire a few other countries to do the occupying for us. That's what the Romans did when it got to the point that they couldn't go it alone anymore. An army of Mexicans would solve a couple of the problems that the GOP would like us to think are vital to the national interests. Six years of service in the Iraq Occupation Force and you get to be a voting US citizen.

Not a very progressive position I've taken, is it? Suppose that you fall on the other end of the nationalism spectrum and consider yourself a human ahead of being an American. We can't cut and run because the Sunni region is not viable. And the Turks would start killing Kurds. We can't stay the course because it's stupid. What's left? A real occupation with a disarmament of the militias. This is a very unpleasant situation.

It doesn't do us any good to holler that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. We shouldn't have but there's nothing we can do about that now. Oh, we can, and should impeach Dear Leader and the Lesser Leader but that's domestic politics and doesn't cast any light on the current discussion.

A solution is needed and I don't see one other that what I've described above. Anybody else got a magic wand they want to wave?