December 24, 2004

Americans, and especially the American corporate media, just don’t get it. Iraqis resent the United States invading and occupying their country and they will resist for as long as it takes to put an end to the occupation. Stupid Americans apparently have a problem grasping this very simple concept. For instance, consider the following posted on the Christian Science Monitor site:
( http://csmonitor.com/2004/1224/p01s03-woiq.html )

The ICG [International Crisis Group] and others don’t expect the insurgents to fade away after Iraq’s January 30 election. The best scenarios say it will take years to defeat them. But the game plan so far—including the November assault on Fallujah that killed over 1,000 alleged fighters—has failed to stop the bombings and attacks around the country.

In Bushzarro world, bombing large cities, killing innocent civilians, targeting hospitals and medical staff is considered a "best scenario" and for some unexplained reason—contrary to common sense—so-called "experts" believe such wanton mass murder and savagery will defeat the "insurgency" when, in fact, it does the exact opposite.

Thursday, Iraqis began trickling back on into Fallujah. More than 200,000 people sought shelter in nearby villages ahead of the Nov. 8 attack. Iraq’s interim government said families would be paid up to $10,000 if their homes were damaged in the assault. It warned those returning that the city is without power or water. Reuters reported Thursday that US forces shelled the south and northwest of the city, where they clashed with gunmen. Some returning refugees retreated upon hearing the explosions and seeing columns of smoke.

Interesting how the forced evacuation of Fallujah—forced through bombardment—and the subsequent homelessness of thousands of people are characterized by the propaganda scribes at the Christian Science Monitor as people seeking "shelter in nearby villages." Left unmentioned is the resultant humanitarian crisis. In Bushzarro world, the resistance consists of "gunmen," a word usually used when describing criminals (the U.S. military is never called "gunmen," even though they have more guns than anybody in the world).

"The lack of highly visible Iraqi forces… [has] also reinforced the image of a nation where fighting is done by foreigners, non-Muslims, and occupiers. The end result has been that many Coalition and Iraqi Interim Government tactical victories produce a costly political and military backlash. Even successful military engagements can lead to the creation of as many new insurgents as they do kill or capture," writes [Anthony] Cordesman [a "security analyst" at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former senior Defense Department official].

In fact, "image" is reality, although Bush and Crew don’t do reality. There would be a "costly political and military backlash" in Iraq no matter who the U.S. installed to run the country, or rather take orders from the Bushcons. Cordesman and other such "analysts" obviously believe the average Iraqi is an idiot, possibly as stupid and clueless as the average American who believes the United States is the "good guy" and the Iraqi resistance the "bad guys," as if the invasion and occupation is little more than some sort of Manichean morality play. So-called "successful military engagements" —bombing cities, kicking in doors at three in the morning, rounding up "military age males" and torturing them—of course creates "new insurgents," a fact that should have dawned on these "experts" well before Bush invaded Iraq.

[Marine Col. Thomas] Hammes says the most important change to be made now is in the way that American leaders talk to the people about what’s going on in Iraq. He says history shows that most insurgencies, whether the Vietnamese against the French and later the US, or the Afghans against the Soviets, last from 10 to 30 years.

He says he sees no reason why Iraq is any different, but worries the American public was ill-prepared for this by the rosy Administration pronouncements for most of the war.

"This isn’t pessimistic, but realistic,'’ says Hammes. The type of insurgency the US is fighting "is about directly attacking the will of our decision makers, and in America that’s the voters."

Both the Vietnamese and the Afghans prevailed in their "insurgencies," kicking out the French (and the United States) and the Soviets. Of course the American public is "ill-prepared," since they are expected to donate their kids and themselves (and the precious treasure of their country) to unwinnable and immoral wars. If American "voters" had any sense they would realize that such invasions are not only unwinnable—they are criminal. Instead, they obviate reality with such platitudes as "support our troops" or "stay the course," a message asserted continually by the corporate media, as the "liberal" New York Times did earlier this week in response to the resistance attack in Mosul. ( http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.nytimes.com
/2004/12/22/national/22react.html )

As the Christian Science Monitor views it, opposition—or at least reservations—about the occupation and the murderous cruelty inflicted on the Iraqi people (100,000 dead and counting) is the result of an "attack" by the "insurgency" on the "will of our decision makers," i.e., the "voters" (that the "voters" in America decide anything is a fantasy, but that’s grist for another blog entry). During the Vietnam War, the same was said of the Vietnamese. It was also said that the anti-war movement was duped by the crafty Vietnamese "communists," a paranoid assertion that arose during the "election" when it was claimed there was "documentary evidence" that "Vietnamese communists were directly steering John Kerry’s group Vietnam Veterans Against the War." (See Discovered papers: Hanoi directed Kerry: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=411
06 .) Far right ideologues, such as David Horowitz, make likewise claims now about the incipient and wholly ineffective antiwar movement (they are useful idiots for Osama). Never mind that the antiwar movement is completely irrelevant and ineffectual.

As Hammes views it, reality—the "war" against the Iraqi resistance cannot be won because the will of millions of people cannot be defeated, that is unless they are killed or somehow converted into Stepford humans—can be circumvented if the Bushcons simply "lay out all the costs and get [Americans] to stay in and commit." In other words, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame—won’t get fooled again. Unfortunately, this works all too well on clueless Americans, as history has a funny way of repeating itself, especially with inattentive and distracted consumers who believe all too easily the nonsense spoon-fed to them through the corporate mass media. Hollywood, it would seem, has prepared the average American well for a Manichean, good-guy, bad-guy, white hat-black hat view of the world with its no so easily digestible realities.

"Part of the effort has to be to redefine what success means,'’ says Malley at ICG. "The original notion that Iraq was going to be a model for the region, of open government, of a liberal, free-market economy, isn’t an achievable goal anymore."

Of course, this never was the "achievable goal" in Iraq. Initially, we were told Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, he was a threat to America, and then when that was exposed as an absurdity the focus became "democracy," we invaded Iraq—after more than a decade of barbaric sanctions killing possibly a million or more innocent Iraqis—to benevolently deliver American-style democracy, that is bestow an Arab culture with the dubious benefits of consumerism (and neoliberal "investment," otherwise know as theft), since Americans no longer understand what freedom is, as elucidated by our defining document, the Constitution, a document now considered subversive by many Americans, a document consisting of principles currently under attack by the Bushcons. It is not Jeffersonian liberty the United States wants to give Iraqis—it is to render all resistance to the corporate and Israeli Borg Hive futile.

In fact, the "achievable goal" is to render Iraq (and Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, etc.) impotent and essentially convert the Arab and Persian Middle East into a series of ethnic and tribal Bantustans, as envisioned by Zionists in Israel and the United States (a perfectly acceptable scenario for neoliberal carpetbaggers as well). Fallujah and Gaza are the model—police states and open-air concentration camps—lorded over by Hashemite princes and pliable dictators with CIA-trained paramilitary death squads. Of course, the American people, who are now told the occupation of Iraq will last decades, know nothing of this and simply accept the Bushzarro version of events, a version now in the process of desperate modification for public consumption (i.e., Americans have to show some backbone and stay the course, as the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor indicate, if circuitously). Americans are not quitters, or so we are told, ad nauseam.

America will "lose" Iraq the same way it "lost" Vietnam. Helicopters will be ferrying stooges and "U.S. dependents" from the Green Zone in much the same way the U.S. evacuated people from the embassy in Saigon (i.e., "Operation Frequent Wind": http://www.fallofsaigon.org/woods.htm ) in 1975. Allawi or his successor will, as did South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh nearly a quarter century ago, unconditionally surrender to the Iraqi resistance. Reality will dictate, the illusions of Bushzarro world will crumble, and the United States will retreat with tail tucked between its legs, as it did in Vietnam.

It is said comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam are improper, even untoward, and since the devil is in the details this is most certainly true, however ultimately the result will be the same: America will be defeated, it will retreat, although not admit defeat, and this aversion to face the music, to fess up and change its disastrous foreign policy, will set the stage for future blunders, future carnage and mass murder, further war crimes on a horrific and, dare I say, Nazi scale. If anything, this inability—or unwillingness on the part of the ruling elite in America—to stop its plunder will bankrupt the nation and force staggering privation on the American public. More than likely, if "opinion polls" are conducted after this occurs, no doubt many Americans will place the blame elsewhere, as they continue to do, suckers for multinational corporations, Israel policy hucksters, war criminals, neoliberal schemers, and presidents hailing from crime families.