WB: A Strategy for Victory – Moon of Alabama

September 11, 2006

WB: A Strategy for Victory

Billmon:

When Shrub is finished wallowing in his 9/11 nostalgia trip, maybe he’ll have to time to contemplate the strategic disaster he’s created in Iraq. For Al Qaeda, trading Afghanistan (and they may get it back yet) for a sanctuary on the borders of Saudia Arabia, Jordan and Syria is definitely trading up.

A Strategy for Victory

Posted by b on September 11, 2006 at 16:17 UTC | Permalink

Comments

Why do I feel so warm and gleeful when I read pieces like this? Perversity and small-mindedness, that’s what it is. I just can’t seem to get the BIG PICTURE…..

Posted by: alabama | Sep 11 2006 16:44 utc | 1

Coca-Cola is returning to Afghanistan after a 15-year absence with the opening of a $25 million bottling plant on the outskirts of Kabul, according to an FT report.
Real Mission accomplished. The taste of freedom is coming to a corner shop near you. Just like in India:

The largest Coca-Cola plant in India is being accused of putting thousands of farmers out of work by draining the water that feeds their wells, and poisoning the land with waste sludge that the company claims is fertiliser.

Who needs water if one’s got Coca Cola?

Posted by: Feelgood | Sep 11 2006 16:47 utc | 2

Thank you Billmon,
The events you discribe buttress uour point that it is better that the Cheney Administration remain in control of the House and Senate. The looming foreign policy disaster should be theirs and theirs alone even if they got Dem help along the way. Also, Looking at the map, it’s hard to believe that the Iran-Iraq boarder is the only source of ‘distablization’ of Iraq. And viewing the situation as a whole, I feel utter comtempt for the US that went into a poor defenseless country and ripped it all to shreds. Although, it will be the lower classes in the US that will suffer the consequences of this misguided actions of the Cheney Administration, it sure is difficult to feel sorry for them.

Posted by: Iron Butterfly | Sep 11 2006 17:08 utc | 3

Dahr Jamail
Fallujah Under Threat Yet Again

following the heavy assaults, resistance fighters have continued to launch attacks against U.S. and official Iraqi forces in the city. Fallujah remains under tight security, with the U.S. military using biometric identification, full body searches and bar-coded ID’s for residents to enter and leave their city.
“The Iraqi resistance has not stopped for a single day despite the huge U.S. army activities”
“The wise men of the city explained to U.S. officials that it is impossible to stop the resistance by military operations, but it seems the Americans prefer to do it the hard way.”
“There are so many arrests and killings, and collective punishments such as random shootings, violent inspection raids, repeated curfews and deliberate cutting of water and electricity,” Mohammed al-Darraji, head of an Iraqi human rights group in Fallujah called The Iraqi Centre for Human Rights Observation told IPS.
“What is going on in this city requires international intervention to protect civilians and to punish those who seriously damaged Fallujah society and committed serious crimes against humanity,” al-Darraji added. His group has been monitoring breaches of the Geneva Conventions in the city since the April 2004 siege.
“There is a long list of collective punishments that have turned the city into a frightful detention camp,” he said.
Another human rights campaigner in Fallujah who asked to be referred to as Khalid said human rights activists in Iraq felt betrayed by the United Nations.
The UN had played ignorant “by leaving U.S. troops to act alone in the city,” Khalid, who works with Raya Human Rights, a non-governmental organisation in the city told IPS. “This was after the media exposed the enormity of the violence and human rights violations during the last three years.”

Posted by: annie | Sep 11 2006 18:06 utc | 4

Now despite the Pentagon propaganda is it really AQ in Iraq leading the insurgents or the Baathists? It would seem to me the Baathists have the money, organization, leadership structures and motivation to get back to their Saddam era privileges. AQ on the hand seems to be a rag-tag bunch of jihadists from all over that are being used as cannon fodder by the more shrewd Baathists. Of course AQ is better for US domestic propaganda purposes.
Iron Butterfly, even if the Dems win a majority in the House they can’t create policy. Bush would still run the executive branch. On the other hand if they have some smarts and cojones they can run investigations across the board into every nook & cranny and make each day a day of propaganda pointing up a pattern of abuse of power on Bush and the Repubs. That could really be of value when shit hits the fan. Otherwise, the Repubs can spin their way out since no information would be out there in the public realm and they would have further classified and rendered moot any legal strictures.

Posted by: ab initio | Sep 11 2006 18:21 utc | 5

Looks like Disney will have to crank out another docu-drama showing how the Bush administrations efforts to bring order and democracy to Iraq — have been hampered and undermined by the international community, the Geneva conventions, the Democrats in Washington, the press, and Kofi Anon. The president then, is at least is willing to martyr himself on the exceptionalist ideal of what could’ve been — an american success.

Posted by: anna missed | Sep 11 2006 18:37 utc | 6

ab initio,
Good point! Based on the idea that perceptions rule US politics, can’t the Repub spin their way out of the investigations anyway in the sense that the investigations themselves are morphed into the ‘problem’?

Posted by: Iron Butterfly | Sep 11 2006 19:46 utc | 7

The most depressing thing is that in one sense, what actually happens in Iraq doesn’t matter. The American Right has adopted the following definition of Truth: “Whatever it is necessary to believe at the moment in order to keep hating liberals.”
They don’t even really care what happens in the physical world any more. The universe, in all its manifestations, ia simply raw material, and the final product is always the same: hatred of liberals.

Posted by: ch | Sep 11 2006 20:44 utc | 8

Well if this marine colonel’s report is accurate and not just another piece of agitprop designed to justify continued US presence in Iraq (Rummy saying “lets make this loss a win”), then Amerika has succeeded in providing AQ with their first real political territorial base to operate from.
Despite all the US propaganda to the contrary, AQ influence in Afghanistan was quite limited, but the Taleban leadership misjudged the situation by thinking that everyone else could seee as clearly as they that having Osama and the gang hangin around was preferable to having Afghanistan pump smack out to the world again. I mean if everyone had hung back and waited for a while they would have got Bin-Laden and the whole crew without too much violence at all. But of course Omar inexperienced in the devious ways of democracy had a poor understanding of the US electoral cycle.
He would have been diverted by the flexibility that AQ dollars gave Afghanistan, to quote the Nancy-hag, the power to “Just say no to drugs”.
So ineptitude has got the the Afghani smack business on the front foot again and if Colonel Devlin is to be believed, ineptitude is providing al Quaeda with a large swathe of territory and population, being the first ever over which they can ‘fly their flag’.
It won’t be long now before the old hacks of has-been generals and pentagon 2%ers get on Fox and CNN to explain the up-side to all this. How this was in fact a very canny move that they had been working toward since 9/11/01.
Now that AQ has some physical territory; an actual sovereign presense somewhere, any idea of ‘4th generation warfare’ goes out the window. Now amerika has some ‘real’ targets to level and hammer and smash.
The only problem is that they already have levelled and hammered and smashed the citizens of Fallujah, Ramadi and Haditha. So what do they do? Do they make smithereens of the smithereens?
Actually that last town gives the game away, because as the Guardian says,Colonel Devlin is nothing if not a company man. Being a good company man is exactly the name of the game here.
He is protecting the ‘good name’ of his company, the US Marine Corps.
Amerikans are going to be fed a line of bullshit about the whole area being just a mob of al-Quaeda assholes, and in that way provide a justification for the slaughter of civilians in the area.
Judging by the response so far it’s gonna work. Those who oppose the war will jump at the chance to paint the politicians who started it it even more incompetent than believed and those who still support it will use this report as a justification for ‘staying on’. The people of Anbar are gonna get the shit shot outta them once again and this time it is to be hoped they have learned not to tell on their oppressors.
And of course the Marine Corps lives to fight another day or in more realistic terms gobble up more appropriations to enable the massacre and rape of evem more 3rd world people cluttering up the joint wailing at allah and wasting oxygen.
A real win win.
I just did a search on google for “haditha marine”
At least the first two pages were devoted to what a bunch of assholes the townspeople of Haditha are, how they use children to shelter behind (now where have we heard that one before) and how Murtha was gonna get his ass sued.
You’d have to rate Devlin as being a good bet for chairman of the joints chiefs of staff, if the amerikan empire lasts that long.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Sep 11 2006 20:55 utc | 9

I’m with Debs. The idea that AQ is running the show in Anbar is laughable horseshit, like everything else out of the Pentagon’s/Shrubco’s mouth.
But is does neatly tie in with the meme of fightin’ the terrists ovair, so we don’t hafta ovhear.
And it does justify (to the mouthbreathing base, anyway) destroying the province in order to save it.

Posted by: ran | Sep 11 2006 21:20 utc | 10

Iron Butterfly
The Dems will always get the raw end of the stick when it comes to perception management. The Repubs just do a better job. However, if the Dems have a House majority at least they can have a show – some propaganda material to counter with. Imagine every day on TV (at least C-SPAN) testimony under oath. If enough shit is thrown up something may stick. Question is will they be able to get out from under the fear skirt.
Sure the people may get sick and say pox on both houses but the Repubs can’t hide under new laws to shield all the malfeasance. Why provide the Repubs a free pass if you are anyway going to be attacked and blamed? Take them down too! Who knows something good may come out of that.

Posted by: ab initio | Sep 11 2006 21:57 utc | 11

If the Dems do actually obtain a majority in either the House or Senate in November, their very first hymn will be a paen to bipartisan polity and progress; their second hymn will be “Kumbaya,” and the chorus will be that grand old gospel glockenspiel, “Let Us All Look Forward, Not Back.”
Better to leave the GOP in place until the whole goddamned place burns down.
A halfway fix won’t fix things this time.

Posted by: Antifa | Sep 12 2006 2:47 utc | 12

The pro-Dem argument: The Dems will open investigations into Repug crimes, laying the groundwork for a day of reckoning.
Anti-Dem argument: Are you kidding? They will keep doing what they have BEEN doing. Nothing.
Hope argues the former, logic the latter.
It is not that there is nothing at stake: There is everything at stake. But the spread of actual possibilities is narrowing to almost nothing.
The ticket is bought; the ride will be taken. Don’t expect to like it.

Posted by: Gaianne | Sep 12 2006 21:44 utc | 13

Bingo! Antifa #12
The old saying, “shot with a 44 or a 357 is just a matter of degress of fucked or dead.”

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Sep 13 2006 4:44 utc | 14

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