Rowhouse Logic - Breathtaking Inanity

“There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.”
The Art of War, Chapter II, Verse 6

Okay. I’m gonna make a confession.

I used to think that maybe this little Iraqi excursion wasn’t a bad idea.

Now, before you flay me in a flame war, hear me out.

I’m not a big fan of extended police actions, no-fly zones, and long-term troop commitments.

When I heard that we were going back to Iraq, I thought it might be a step in the right direction. After all, we were doing this embargo/sanctions/no-fly zone crap that wasn’t working, and Saddam is a bad dude, yadda yadda yadda and truth be told, we should have taken him out the first time. Don’t tell me about some coalition that woulda gotten spooked — they would have gotten over it.

Problem is, we did it wrong. And that’s wrong as in the past tense. And now, it doesn’t look as though we will get the chance to get it right.

We didn’t get world opinion on our side this time. We didn’t give the inspectors time to report back (and who knows what they might have found.) And now we’re in a good ol’ fashioned Texas-sized boondoggle.

Our political capitol is spent. Our military is overextended. And all indications show that we’re going to be doing this for awhile. Truth be told, if we had gotten in and won the peace, Bush and co. would look like geniuses, and we’d be celebrating.

If nothing else, our generals should know better than to allow themselves to get involved in protracted, prolonged warfare. They should tell the politicians (including the commander in chief) that this kind of exercise is a bad idea — by resigning if necessary, instead of carrying out policies that are doomed to failure.

Because of this, we are overextended and vulnerable. At the risk of giving aid to our enemies, please allow me to state the obvious:

This is a great time for North Korea (or any other country, like Iran) to kick-start it’s nuclear program. Maybe they could even mass troops on the border of the demilitarized zone. I imagine that they would be willing to back down if we shipped them boatloads of USDA overstock that should be feeding starving kids in America.

If I were India and Pakistan, I would be going at it toe-to-toe in Kashmir. Who’s going to stop them?

If I were Iran or Syria, I would be stirring up all sorts of anti-American rhetoric (and worse) and would be willing to stop only for all sorts of concessions.

What could we do? Send the marines? Which marines? The ones that aren’t in Iraq? Not many of those left.

Meanwhile, Europe is hanging us out to dry while the neo-cons are renaming French Fries in protest (my, how effective!)

Maybe we should start a draft. I hear that our commander-in-chief has two daughters of draft age. If they are willing to be the first two to go, I’m all for it. They can drive some of our non-up-armored Humvees up and down the road to the Baghdad airport.

History is always written by the victors, and at the moment, it looks as though the history of the Iraq conflict is going to be written by a bunch of rag-tag Islamic militants who are currently planting roadside bombs and beheading international aid workers on satellite TV.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 18th, 2004 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Iraq. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.