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Don’t Do It At All
You really have to appreciate what Scott Ritter says in this recent interview with the San Diego Citybeat. Though I have to say, it is not only the Americans who have these reflexes.
Q: You’ve said Americans aren’t against the war in Iraq because it’s wrong; you say they’re against it because we’re losing. Is it just that Americans don’t like getting their asses kicked?
RITTER: I’m saying Americans don’t know enough about anything to have a well-informed opinion; this is all superficial. At the end of the day, yeah, we don’t like to get our asses kicked. We have a lot of national pride that’s based around the notion that we can kick anybody’s ass—we’re the biggest, baddest boys on the block. And in Iraq, we’re not winning, so a lot of Americans have their ruffles up. I guarantee you, had we invaded Iraq, had it gone easily—let’s say it went as easily as it appeared to go; we got rid of Saddam, we bring down the statue and peace and prosperity breaks out—there’d be a small, little element in the so-called anti-war movement; they’d be screaming about violation of law, etc. They’d be shouted down by the vast majority of Americans who would thump their chests with national pride and say, “No, we did the right thing. To hell with international law. We got rid of Saddam. We’ve instilled democracy. And it’s a good thing we did.”
Of course, things have gone sour, and now a lot of Americans are jumping on the bandwagon of “Hey, we shouldn’t have gone there.” But, again, at what point in time, I ask these newfound converts to the anti-war movement, did this become a bad war?
Like Ritter, this (pdf) study from the Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, suggests, the mistakes were not troop sizes, or the dissemblance of the Iraqi army. The mistake was the idea of war itself.
Though the critics have made a number of telling points against the conduct of the war and the occupation, the basic problems faced by the United States flowed from the enterprise itself, and not primarily from mistakes in execution along the way. The most serious problems facing Iraq and its American occupiers– "endemic violence, a shattered state, a nonfunctioning economy, and a decimated society"–were virtually inevitable consequences that flowed from the breakage of the Iraqi state.
[…]
Rather than "do it better next time," a better lesson is "don’t do it at all."
I am not very optimistic, that this lesson has been, or will be learned. I would also suggest, that the War On Iraq is only part of a much bigger strategy, that includes Iran and Syria and finally, as explained her, the perceived arch rival China.
A real needless "Long War" that will be fought with even more kick-ass mentality and will be lost with a lot more whining than we are hearing now.
i need to update those numbers i threw out earlier wrt the invasion of grenada after having time to access better references. william blum, in his book killing hope, cites the figures as “135 Americans killed or wounded, 84 Cubans, 400 Grenadians, more or less…”. i’ll retract my stmt that most of the US killed were via friendly fire. the percentage of friendly fire casualties that i can find varies from 13% to 33%.
and the number killed in the hospital bombing is a bit higher. in his book Grenada: Revolution in Reverse, james ferguson writes
The invasion, claimed President Reagan, was conducted with ‘surgical precision’. In reality, it was a clumsy display of incompetence, poor intelligence and what military strategists call ‘overkill’. Not only did the invading forces meet with unexpectedly fierce resistance from a small number of Grenadians, but it was also engaged in wholly avoidable conflict with Cuban construction workers at the site of the new airport. In one of the many bombing raids which were intended to destroy specific targets, a psychiatric hospital was apparently mistaken for a military base when a number of Grenadian troops fled into it, and some thirty patients were killed. Much property was destroyed, while high military and civilian casualties were incurred due to inadeduate communications, lethal ‘friendly fire’ and an emphasis on aerial attacks. … Like the Falklands war the previous year, the Grenada invasion was an important exercise in official misinformation and media control. Just as the extent of US casualties was underestimated, so the numbers of Cuban personnel – and their military status – was deliberately exaggerated in order to explain the difficulties encountered.
while some of that is SOP for all war, operation urgent fury did mark a new paradigm for pentagon control of the media, building on lessons learned in the Falklands war & indeed in many ways a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the today’s state.
In the late 1970s, Pentagon officials began searching for a new model for dealing with the press. They found one in Great Britain, where the Thatcher government had strictly controlled the media during the 1982 war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. … One article written for a U.S. Naval War College publication outlined the lessons that the Pentagon could learn from the Falklands model. To maintain public support for a war, the article said, a government should sanitize the visual images of war; control media access to military theaters; censor information that could upset readers or viewers; and exclude journalists who would not write favorable stories. The Pentagon used all these techniques to one extent or another during subsequent wars.
The 1983 invasion of Grenada gave the Pentagon its first opportunity to try these news-management techniques. Pentagon personnel, with the knowledge and approval of the White House, barred journalists during the first two days of fighting. Reporters who tried to reach the island by boat were detained by U.S. forces and held incommunicado. Journalists who tried to fly in were “buzzed” by a Navy jet and turned back for fear of being shot down. Nearly all the news that the American people received during the first two days was from U.S. government sources. White House and Pentagon personnel reported that the conflict had been enormously successful and, in the words of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, “extremely skillfully done.” In fact, the operation had been planned in great haste, and the first day’s fighting had been a near-disaster for U.S. troops and a potential embarrassment for Pentagon leaders. For example, military officers did not know the location of many of the U.S. medical students they supposedly had come to save; U.S. troops were confused about the actual identity of the enemy and were supplied with tourist maps instead of strategic military maps; and more than a dozen innocent people were killed when U.S. forces accidentally bombed a mental hospital after mistaking it for a military installation. [source]
on the unpopularity of the illegal aggression against grenada, here’s blum again w/ another deja vu example of executive arrogance
The invasion was almost universally condemned in Latin America, only the military dictatorships of Chile, Guatemala and Uruguay expressing support. The United Nations voted its disapproval overwhelmingly. To this President Reagan responded: “One hundred nations in the UN have not agreed with us on just about everything that’s come before them where we’re involved, and it didn’t upset my breakfast at all.”
the ferguson books goes on to document the after effects of the invasion, which was seen by the right as an
opportunity to score an important ideological point by proving the superiority of the US-endorsed economic model for development. Washington hoped to … demonstrate the advantages of the US model by turning Grenada into its showcase. The island would become a laboratory for an experiment in … free-market capitalism … based on one central expectation: that foreign private investment, notably from the US, would be the engine for growth and development.
despite pouring more than $120 million into the island, outside of usual influx of corrupt capitalist entreprenuers, there was little to show anyone. according to ferguson,
…a mere seven percent of USAID expenditure in Grenada has been directed towards education, health, agricultural research and community-based projects. The overwhelming majority of USAID funds have instead gone towards dismantling the state sector, encouraging private enterprise and wooing foreign capital – with negligible success.
for the grenadians, compared to the current situation of the iraqis, their turn as lab rats for free market democracy was not as thoroughly devastating in the final analysis, no thanks to their liberators. as ferguson concludes,
The final irony of post-invasion Grenada is that despite great promises and high expectations, the island has merely returned to the economic stagnation and political disenchantment which led to revolution in the first place.
if only the iraqis were to be so fortunate.
Posted by: b real | Apr 22 2006 6:26 utc | 21
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