Why We Fight

With the grave and gathering threat of images of torn bodies of women, children, and the old removed, the world is made safe for blinkered, embed wartime reporting glorifying the ruthless heroism of our troopers in Iraq.

Here’s a quick rundown of what the Fallujah campaign is and is not.

It’s not liberation.

It’s not occupation.

It’s not a heavy-handed police action.

It’s not urban counterinsurgency.

It’s not just another botched Iraq pacification operation, forced on our noble, long-suffering armed forces by the weakness of the Allawi regime and the enforced timetable of the January elections.

It’s the use of unrestricted urban warfare to intimidate residents of other Sunni cities who might otherwise shelter or simply sympathize with the insurgents.

It’s warfare against civilians and collective punishment against an urban population.

It’s our Hama.

It’s our Guernica.

It’s a war crime.

It’s a war crime of choice.

It’s terror by design, a counterinsurgency strategy that exploits the local military superiority of our dug-in military force as our only asset after we’ve squandered most of our political capital.

It’s meant to be inflicted on Sunni towns that have yet to show a Najaf-like willingness to throw their insurgent fellow countrymen to the American wolves.

Call it Operation Rolling Massacre, flattening offending cities one after another to terrify and polarize the population into denying shelter to the insurgents.

And of course it has that seductive “just one more salted peanut” attraction for our escalation-prone military.

Now we’ve flattened Fallujah. If that example doesn’t inspire Mosul to evict the insurgents, it’s their turn. Then surely Ramadi will be the last one. If not…

As the de facto occupying power, we have a moral obligation to supply security to the Iraqi people.

Instead, we’re killing them in order to execute a counter-insurgency strategy on behalf of a weak and illegitimate pro-American regime.

And there’s no evidence that we are killing Iraqis any more efficiently or humanely than the Iraqis themselves will, once we leave and let the country erupt in the civil war everyone’s preparing for.

Something the Shi’ites are no doubt thinking about as they count the greenbacks and political advantage they claimed in return for standing aside as the U.S. military fights total war against their Sunni rivals.

Unity in blood under the Shi’ite banner after the Sunni opposition, the Allawi regime, and the U.S. occupation are swept aside is a more likely outcome than neutralization of the Shi’ite majority through another hamfisted exercise in divide and conquer orchestrated by the US and the rump regime in Baghad, this time with Sistani and al Sadr as its object.

If this is the only avenue to “success” Cheney, Rice, and our military geniuses in the Pentagon can come up with, then why stay in Iraq?

No vital U.S. interest is at stake here. It’s not a fight for our national survival or, God help us, our “freedom”.

So let’s just get out.

Of course, there’s more to our billion dollar bloodbath in Iraq than the Administration’s ludicrous and discredited laundry list of stated aims.

There’s the usual smoke and mirrors inside the fog of war.

We’re fighting, killing, and dying so that the Bush administration can refuse to admit that the Iraq war was not just unnecessary and mistaken, but a failure; so our “Prime Minister” Allawi can try to finesse a political future between the bullets and the bodies littering this small, brutalized country; and so that Pentagon strategists can take advantage of a rare opportunity to conduct a massive, in situ trial of a crucial, high-risk doctrine.

Fallujah represents a no-holds-barred effort by the military to shake that tenacious Vietnam monkey from its back for good, and prove that a combination of overwhelming military might, neutered political opposition within the country and at home, and a total absence of scruples can defeat a popular insurgency.

That’s something the Bush Administration needs nowadays.

When it comes to interfering in the domestic affairs of other countries, we’ve proven ourselves unable to lead a true coalition; get ourselves welcomed as liberators; administer a competent and humane occupation; or install an effective, popular puppet regime.

So there’s a search on for the military Holy Grail — or a Silver Bullet for absolute military and political ineptitude.

If we can show that we can invade a country, botch the occupation, turn significant sections of the population against us, but still find the diplomatic, legal, and military space needed to successfully crush a widespread insurgency with superior firepower, well Oh Baby!

Then we can invade anywhere, anytime, and damn the consequences!

In other words, Hello Teheran!

Another reason why we fight may have a lot to do with the botching of the strategy that won us our initial victory in 2003.

Comparing the fierce resistance one little crummy town gave us this year with the cakewalk through Iraq last year by an American force that was disorganized, undersized, and dangerously overextended, one has to start paying more attention to the theory that we bought our way into Baghdad by bribing Saddam’s officers.

Then, in an act of idiocy that may simply be the Bush Administration’s time-honored middle finger salute strategy for dealing with allies of convenience, we disbanded the Iraq Army and reneged on our deal to give the Iraq Army officers a place of honor in New Iraq.

They are now leading the resistance.

We’re fighting the guys we asked for help and then betrayed.

So think about the Fallujah campaign as more than another step deeper into the Iraq morass, as we hide our essential political weakness behind star spangled military bluster reported by a cowed and credulous American press.

Think of it as a giant cover-up, the attempt to bury a cynical political betrayal beneath rubble and Iraqi and American corpses.

So it’s not just stupidity and cruelty we’re dealing with; it’s incompetence and deception, those overworked Doppelgangers of the Bush administration.

Any way you slice it, Iraq is a bad war.

Bad for Iraq, bad for our soldiers, bad for America.

Maybe bad wars make good soldiers do bad things. Or maybe it’s just that war makes ordinary people do bad things. Let’s leave that question to the philosophers.

And to the “I lost a buddy to an IED in a corpse and I got wounded in the face so I shot the wounded haji in the head” apologists.

The bottome line is: our guys are doing some bad shit in Iraq.

Shooting wounded. Machine-gunning fleeing families from helicopters. Flattening neighborhoods with so-called “precision” munitions.

Now is not the time to tell our troops we appreciate what they’re doing over there.

It only increases the odds they’re either coming back in a transit tube, through Landstuhle, or living the rest of their lives as with the uneasy conscience of unindicted war criminals.

The only way to Support Our Troops:

Stop the War.

Bring Them Home.

While they still have a chance of returning physically sound and morally whole.

They can’t do it themselves.

Not while the brass, the media and the public mindless parrot the brave warrior, noble intentions, and “trust us, we’re figuring out a way to get it right” nonsense that keeps us trapped in Iraq.

There’s no right over there now, if there ever was.

It’s obvious that the Bush administration postponed the Fallujah assault until after the election, counting on post-election fatigue, the demoralization and distraction of the left, and the return of the press to its traditional servile posture to mute outrage over the horror.

It’s up to us to show that Bush has No Mandate for Massacre.

To convince our nation that immediate withdrawal from Iraq is now the only victory that the American people could be proud of.

That’s why we fight.

Copyright 2004 Peter Lee

Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.