The War We Can't Win

Horror glimpsed from inside a Humvee - washingtonpost.com Highlights - MSNBC.com

The story above tells a simple story of one US patrol in a dangerous area that lost an American due to an IED and small arms fire. The circumstances surrounding the incident were nothing special - there are at least 1500 other similar stories floating around. What is remarkable is that this type of incident is still happening - the product of what appears to be an increasingly volatile and violent Iraq.

It's been almost three months since the Purple Finger Army cast their votes. For many of the naive and foolish in this country, the Iraqi election closed the book on the war. People voted, insurgents ran... The grateful Iraqi woman hugged the mother of a dead US serviceman during the State of the Union address and hell, now that we've cleaned up Iraq it's time to set Iran and Syria straight, right?

But not so fast... I'm not a military analyst and I can already envision the conservative response to my message here. I want to believe that we've turned the proverbial corner in Iraq towards peace and stability, but in the face of an ever-increasing body of evidence to the contrary, I can't.

They just fished 50+ bodies out of the Tigris river and found another 19 dead soldiers shot to death in a stadium in Haditha. A helicopter carrying 9 people was shot down yesterday killing 8 of them instantly followed by the assassins sado-masochistically executing the lone survivor - an act they videotaped and promptly made available on the internet.

The bodies continue to stack up and for the most part, as this is a guerrilla war conducted by pseudo-civilians using a stockpile of hidden weapons so vast as to be effectively inexhaustible, they do so with impunity.

We have been in Iraq for two years. We emerged victorious from the initial thrust of the war within a couple of weeks, but since then, we've been under constant siege. The offensive war against the insurgents doesn't exist - it is a fantasy. As long as the endless supply of hidden weapons exists, we're caught in a game of reacting to guerrilla violence against which the only defense is safety in numbers. They're going to keep on blowing up Humvees, so we've got to make sure we've got plenty of them. Two years in and the country is more dangerous than it was in the weeks immediately following the collapse of Hussein's government.

No, Iraq isn't Vietnam, but those who look at Iraq with unflagging optimism about our military capability - we're the biggest and baddest army on the face of the earth - are ignoring Vietnam's most important and relevant lesson: The biggest and baddest army on the face of the earth spent 10 years fighting a guerrilla war in Vietnam, killed 2+ million Vietnamese and lost 58,000 of our own, and we still lost.

We will continue to be ineffective against the overall insurgency. No clearer example of this exists than Fallujah where we destroyed an entire city and killed several thousand guerrillas (and an unknown number of civilians) in order to "break the back of the insurgency" and the insurgency dutifully raged on without skipping a beat. If we were wholly unable to affect the insurgency at the cost of an entire city, what are our prospects for the future?

Iraqis will continue to be targetted by the guerrillas and thousands more will die pointlessly. The guerrillas will continue to attack coalition assets and we'll continue to burn through people (more than one million American servicemen and women have been rotated through Iraq already) and equipment (Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Blackhawk Helicopters, etc., don't last forever, particularly in the face of constant bombings). It is far less "costly" for the guerrillas to replace a fallen comrade than it is for coalition. The prospect of a never-ending supply of suicide bombers deployed against a very finite supply of American National Guardsmen is horrifying in of itself.

How does this play out politically over the next couple of years?

Coalition members like Italy, Ukraine and Poland will continue to withdraw their troops and support creating increased reliance on the US to maintain the status quo, such that it is. The sunshine and rainbow talk about US troops starting to withdraw at the end of this year because Iraqi forces will be able to begin to take over is pure fantasy. The only circumstances we would be able to leave under would be if we chose to cut our losses and flee, and unfortunately that isn't likely to happen.

Bush Administration hubris will keep us there amidst an ever-increasing assault of happy-talk about the progress we are making despite all evidence to the contrary. As has been the trend to date, American popular support for the mission will continue to wane while a core of jingoist super-patriots will blindly keep the faith, regardless. The relationship between the supporters of Bush and his war and his detractors, already contentious, will further polarize with more and more vitriol from both sides. Expect the rhetoric conflating anti-war with treason, treachery, America-hating and godlessness to increase sharply.

We will create a landscape domestically like that during the Vietnam War where there is no apathy or common ground on this issue with everyone either in absolute support of or against the war.

Furthermore, every day that we maintain the state of continuous warfare in Iraq increases the chance of either some sort of atrocity happening, either by guerrillas in Iraq against civilians or coalition forces, by terrorists against coalition assets elsewhere in the world (including possibly right at home here in the US) or by coalition forces (intentionally or accidentally) against Iraqis.

Atrocities committed by guerrillas and terrorists will be cited by war supporters as conclusive justification for our war efforts. They will, of course, be missing the fundamental point that it is the war itself that is causing these atrocities to be committed and that absent the war, the atrocities would not exist.

Despite the hype to the contrary, we are at the lowest point we have been since the beginning of the war and it is only going to get lower.

As citizens concerned with these continuing tragic events, we mustn't allow ourselves to get distracted from what should be our primary mission: keeping the horror of this war at the forefront of American discourse. We must continue to demand accountability for every misstep and we must continue to reward those people in power who work for peace.

These are grim times and the immediate future promises to be bleak. Change for the better will not simply happen by itself. It is our responsibility to maintain a voice demanding change.

This is my job. This is your job. Don't forget it.

---