Dissembling (and Disassembling). In a very peculiar speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, our imitation-'President', George W. Bush, who dodged service in the Vietnam War, dared to instruct us on the lessons of that other undeclared war. He said a number of odd things in that speech, which spoke to our involvement with three wars in the Far East, against Japan, North Korea and its Communist allies, and North Vietnam and its Communist allies. He called all of these ideological wars, and likened them to Al-Qaeda's war today.
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But Japan's war upon its neighbors, and against us to clear the way for annexation of its neighbors, had nothing to do with ideology. It was militarist, nationalist, tribalist, racist, but not ideological.
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There turns out to be an unhappy parallel in the Korean War to our experience in the Iraq war. According to Wikipedia, the CIA told President Truman that Chinese intervention was unlikely, and General MacArthur was confident both that there weren't a great many Chinese troops available in that area and that without an air force, Chinese forces would be easily decimated, and thus nothing to worry about. It is from things like this that we get the sad little joke that "military intelligence" is a contradiction in terms.
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In perhaps the most widely cited passage from the VFW speech, Bush said:

"Whatever your position in that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields.'"

See the oddity? No? Listen to this passage, which immediately followed that one:

There's another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle, those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001.

Now do you see it? "Citizens". Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Americans are all called "citizens", not "Cambodian citizens" nor "Vietnamese citizens" nor "U.S. citizens". Just "citizens".
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Bush also said that if we don't win in Iraq, Al-Qaeda will. That is certainly not a foregone conclusion. Already we see that Sunnis in Al-Anbar province have nearly destroyed Al-Qaeda there. That is touted as one of the great success stories of the war. But Bush doesn't want us to think that Iraqis, on their own, would crush Al-Qaeda, as Saddam crushed similar movements.
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And who is to say that forces from the Arab League, Pakistan, Indonesia, and other Moslem countries, or from the United Nations more generally, or Russia, or China, could not replace us, and train and support the Iraqi military and local governments more effectively, and with far less resentment, than we can? We are not the only force on Earth capable of exerting military force and bolstering the Iraqi government until it can stand without help.
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Bush's speech to the VFW went on:

Unlike in Vietnam, if we were to withdraw before the job was done, this enemy would follow us home, and that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America.

Oh? North Vietnamese Communists fought for decades against first France, then the U.S., but did not follow either France nor us home. North Korean Communists and their Communist Chinese allies fought us on the Korean Peninsula but did not follow us home. But if the United States were to withdraw from Iraq, Al-Qaeda would follow us home. Why would they, if all that the bulk of the people from whom Islamists recruit want, is merely to expel the United States and Israel from the Arabian homeland?
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Very few people really believe Islam can conquer the world. Moreover, devout Moslems know that it is forbidden to force conversion to Islam of "peoples of the Book" (that is, peoples of the faiths derived from the Bible (Jews and Christians), and, by extension, faiths derived from some other sacred scriptures, as those of Buddhism and Hinduism).
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Even fewer Moslems believe that a war by individual terrorists in a private organization could triumph over the United States on its own territory. It's one thing to fite an invader operating 7,000 miles and more from its homeland, with at least the passive connivance of local people, but quite another to defeat that same power in its own homeland.
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Bush claims that Usama Bin Laden (who, I suspect, has been dead for years) has said that the war in Iraq is for them or us to win, and that if they win, the U.S. will suffer "disgrace and defeat forever". Hm. Forever is a very long time.
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The U.S. retreated from the Yalu River after Communist China entered the Korean War. Surely that was a permanent disgrace and defeat, no? Apparently not. Then the U.S. ran out on South Vietnam, another permanent disgrace, no? Apparently not that either. Then the U.S., under the great hero of the Republican Right, Ronald Reagan, ran screaming like a little girl out of Lebanon after 241 Marines were killed in the bombing of a barracks outside Beirut, in the same region as Iraq. Surely that had to have been a "disgrace and defeat forever". Then the U.S. ran out of Somalia after the "Black Hawk Down" incident. Surely there is no way the world would ever take us seriously again, right? Oh, no, the world did not count us out even then, and that wasn't a "disgrace and defeat forever" either. How many "disgraces and defeats forever" can we bounce back from? When is "disgrace and defeat forever", ever going to happen?
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The reality is that everyone understands that "you win some, you lose some", and that what matters is that you pick your fites carefully, as to which really matter and which do not. The Taliban was complicit in the attacks upon us by Al-Qaeda. Afghanistan is involved in the growth, processing, and distribution of massive amounts of illegal drugs that poison the West. Afghanistan matters. Destroying the Taliban and keeping it from ever retaking Afghanistan matters. But rather than fite the real enemy, we have diverted attention and resources from the real war to this phony war, against a country that never attacked us.
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Iraq has within itself the seeds of its own reconstruction, as Sunni pacification of Al-Anbar demonstrates. The conclusion is, alas, inescapable that we aren't in Iraq to rebuild it but to keep it from rebuilding.
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That is, the sad fact is that the U.S. is in Iraq not to save it but to destroy it, by keeping it in chaos, divided against itself. This war, as all other U.S. wars and other efforts in the Middle East, is about one thing and one thing only: Israel. It was never about oil. Never about democracy. Never about anything but Israel. The United States attacked Iraq to destroy it, not save it, and we remain there to make sure it cannot rise again. The U.S. Government wants to keep Iraqis fiting among themselves, because if they unite, one of the things that will unite them is the will to destroy Israel. Foes of the war need to understand that, because only if you address the real motives behind U.S. policy can you change that policy.
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If Bush and the faceless cabal that is the Real President were honest, they would say aloud what really motivates them:

The United States is in Iraq to keep Iraq from attacking Israel. The United States wishes to destroy the governments of Syria and Iran because those governments threaten Israel. We will do anything we need to do to defend Israel. If that means perpetual war against the whole of the Moslem world, a billion people and more, we will wage that war, no matter how many trillions of dollars it may cost, no matter how many Americans must die in it. Because Israel is God's chosen land, the Jews are God's Chosen People, and it is our God-given duty to defend Israel, no matter the price in American lives and treasure. Anyone who says otherwise is an enemy of Israel, an enemy of the United States, and an enemy of God.

Oh. OK! Why didn't you say so? Alrity, then.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 3,722 — for Israel.)



- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:59 PM