Tet Offensive II. Ralph Peters, the New York Post's bloodthirsty-pscyhopath military columnist, claims that the war in Iraq is going just fine, and all evidence to the contrary is partisan, Democratic lies. So an average of what? 15 or 20 Iraqis a day are being killed in terrorist incidents, so what? Well, if that were happening here, a country with 12 times Iraq's population, would we think our war on terror was going swimmingly? Or would we be frantic? — desperately insistent that something has got to be done!?! We had one terrorist incident, three years ago. Iraq has terrorist incidents every day. But things are going just fine.
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Peters echoes the claims of both Presidents Bush, the Younger and Elder, that Iraq, and we, are "better off today" because of our invasion and military occupation. Oh? Were 59 Iraqis killed by a suicide bomber while waiting to apply for jobs on a Baghdad street under Saddam? Did scarcely a day go by when Iraqis weren't killed by terrorists drawn into their country from abroad, and allowed by an incompetent government that has no control over much of the country to infiltrate Iraq's borders, under Saddam? Or did Saddam know what was going on in Iraq and keep things like that from happening?
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Saddam may have been a very bad man, but aside from enemies of his regime, the typical Iraqi had almost absolute safety of his person on the streets. That passed for good government in a country as explosive as Iraq.
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They didn't have democracy, and various forms of political expression could be dangerous. But they had freedom of religion, which forces now wreaking havoc in Iraq — thanks to us, because Saddam would have suppressed them — want to take away from them. Political freedom isn't very important to people who have never known it. Religious freedom and personal autonomy, over things like the way one dresses, the occupation one takes, the television programs and other entertainments one watches, and the foods and beverages one drinks, are important.
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Saddam was a political tyrant, not a busybody imam or ideologically fanatical dictator adamant that Iraqis must live pious lives or die.
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How important, for that matter, is political freedom to us who have known it for a long time? Americans have consented to see their civil liberties eroded and their lives made much more difficult because everyone is treated like a criminal if they have to travel by air. We have consented to imprison people, including U.S. citizens, for years at a time without a single charge being levied, and have guards torture and humiliate them as 'legitimate interrogation techniques'.
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What of the other sacrifices this Iraq war is causing us? We have a skyrocketing national debt, half of which is directly attributable to the Iraq war. We suffer usurious consumer interest rates and oppressive fees, for lateness and ATM use and overlimit oversights, that our government isn't doing a damned thing about, in part (but only small part) because it is preoccupied with war and terrorism and, more to the point, can get away with having their rich friends inflict upon people because the body politic is obsessed with terrorism.
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The price of gasoline has gone to record highs, oppressing poor people who have always had trouble affording the fuel that takes them to work. Airline fuel costs have risen so high that US Air just re-entered bankruptcy, and the parent company of American Airlines remains in bankruptcy. A turnaround in the air travel industry, which was impacted disastrously by fear of flying, has been crushed by the cost of aviation fuel.
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The Bush Administration daily tries to worry us about terrorist attacks, even tho we haven't had a single one in the "homeland" in three years, and the last one before that, also an attack upon the World Trade Center, was 10 years earlier. Endless "alerts" and announcements of special measures and the need for vigilance have turned Americans against each other in suspicion, all for the sake of "security". And tho most of us do feel secure, the Bush Administration keeps trying to worry us, to win re-election.
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Saddam gave Iraqis security. We didn't seem to think that was a good thing. So we invaded, overthrew Saddam, and gave Iraqis insecurity and chaos on the streets.
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Ralph Peters says "Despite the lurid media reports, more good things than bad are happening in Iraq. Progress is slow and painful. But it's still progress." Oh, progress from what, to what? Progress repairing the devastation our "shock and awe" air campaign and followup ground invasion did to their electrical systems, water systems, sewage treatment plants, broadcast stations, bridges, roads, aiports — in short, recovering from devastation we caused and, absent our attack, they would never have suffered? Sure, they're making progress there, but the Iraqi people are still, in absolute terms, behind where they were before the Bush Administration attacked them for no damned reason!
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They had never attacked us, but we attacked them, and we are supposed to feel good about the favor we did them in "liberating" them from Saddam. Oh, so we killed literally uncounted numbers of them, not just civilians but also their sons in the armed forces, so what?. American mothers and fathers grieve the loss of little more than 1,000 dead American soldiers, and the fact that they were in the military does not make their deaths any easier. But somehow we're not supposed to count Iraqi military deaths — tens of thousands of Iraqis — killed by our "heroes". And we aren't even told how many civilians died. Why not?
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How can we tell if Iraqis are "better off today" for our invasion if we aren't told how many Iraqis we killed?
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We are just to take President Bush's word. He insists, with the imitation sincerity he exudes so well, that "Iraq is better off today". Has a nice, hollow, echo-chambery sound, doesn't it?
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Ralph Peters says that various subversive forces are, ominously, undermining the work of the military. Were it not for "lurid media reports", "our presidential elections and the policy distortions they create", "our intelligence community ... show[ing] its weakness by covering its backside, instead of finding terrorists", "the U.N. ... warning that security conditions may prevent voting — giving the terrorists hope", "the frantic efforts of the Arab media to stop our destruction of the terrorists and insurgents", those damned Democrats "declar[ing] our efforts a disaster, [and] ... encourag[ing] our enemies to believe they're winning [which virtually constitutes] ... a pending declaration of surrender", and even the "Bush administration want[ing] to avoid serious combat until after our elections", the military could win this war!
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That is the mentality that the military has always held: their failures are always somebody else's fault. And that's why over and over thru history military men have seized control of governments, supposedly to win wars and make society "safe" by removing the conditions that 'made winning impossible'.
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And what about when they still can't win? Then whom do they blame? Themselves? Never.
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Ferdinand Marcos imposed a military dictatorship on the Philippines to win wars against two simultaneous "insurgencies". He stayed in power 20 years. The insurgencies are still with us. One has allied with Usama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.
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In the Vietnam era, the Tet Offensive was, the military railed, nearly universally reported as a disaster for the U.S. military, whereas the U.S. actually won that long and difficult battle, and it is only because the media and then the people sold out the military that the U.S. lost in Vietnam.
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As infoplease.com puts it:

"Although the offensive was not militarily successful for the Vietnamese Communists, it was a political and psychological victory for them. It dramatically contradicted optimistic claims by the U.S. government that the war had already been won." [Or what President Bush has termed, in the Iraq context, "Mission Accomplished".]

Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. Secretary of Defense, in June of this year himself "likened the surge of kidnapping and violence in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive, a psychological turning point in the Vietnam War. But he said it would not succeed." Oh?
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It might not succeed if we had set modest goals for this war: the overthrow of Saddam and destruction of his (nonexistent) Weapons of Mass Destruction. Had we done that, we could have withdrawn and said, "The hell with Iraq. Whatever happens after we leave is their problem."
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But we pretended to be deeply committed to democracy in Iraq and then in the rest of the Arab world. That's not working out so well.
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Much of war is psychological. Military reality — or is it mere perception? self-delusion? — sometimes clashes with public perception. Who is right?
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At end, in a democracy, the people have to decide how much death and destruction a given end is worth. When the stakes were risking imminent attack by Weapons of Mass Destruction, a misled American majority was willing to attack a country that had never attacked us. But no Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found. No attack was ever imminent. No link has ever been established between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, even tho Bush and his evil cabal of liar-murderers keep repeating that lie even after a blue-ribbon, bipartisan panel found not one shred of credible evidence of any such connection.
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Now the people of this country feel trapped between the rock of patriotic refusal to accept that we could have done a terrible, terrible, HORRIBLE thing for no good reason and the hard place of not knowing how to get out of this mess without making everything even worse than before the invasion.
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It's not everybody else's fault that the military is unable to bring peace to Iraq. Sometimes the military just can't succeed.
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Militaries are good at destroying. They are very bad at building. And when it is a nation that must be built, or rebuilt after destruction we caused, and democracy that must be created out of the clear blue sky for a culture that has never known it, the military has no answers and must not be heeded.
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Society must make very plain that we don't need excuses from the military — what ever happened to the West Point training slogan, "No excuses, SIR!" — and won't take orders from generals, much less colonels, captains, or retired officers writing columns for the New York Post. (Responsive to "The Muddle in Iraq" by Ralph Peters, New York Post, September 17, 2004)
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(This is my 150th post to this blog. Just thought I'd mention this little milestone.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:56 PM