Kill Another Day
That’s a strategy that seems to have taken hold with President Bush, the military, and the realist crowd.
Bush’s energetic squirming to avoid kowtowing to the Baker Hamilton ISG is just that: a piece of sordid face-saving.
We’ve got to get out of Iraq. Bush knows it, the Pentagon knows it, and Congress knows it.
Not for humanitarian or strategic reasons, but simply because the US armed forces can’t handle it. We just can’t do prolonged armed occupation, especially bloody, under-strength, failed, escalating chaos and violence occupation.
The brass wants to get out of the nation-building business and back into something they’re much better at: the nation destroying business.
The priority right now is to disengage from Iraq and limit the damage to American credibility as a bad-ass hyperpower and maintain our last remaining geopolitical advantage in the 21st century: not ideas, ideals, or economics, but the political and military ability to wage war on an unprecedented and utterly intimidating scale.
The big ideas emanating from Washington seem to be last surge, Shi’ite tilt, and taking out Sadr.
None of these ideas make much sense, strategically or tactically.
Let’s face it, by calling it a “last” surge, we’re pretty much telegraphing our intention to bug out. Must have something to do with that word: “last”.
In the past, the military has eschewed deadlines, for good reason.
If the insurgency knows it can get us out of Iraq if it holds on a little longer—and can even accelerate our departure by ramping up the violence to make the futility of our presence there even more apparent—its resolve will be stiffened and its activities intensified.
An overt Shi’ite tilt only makes sense if our plans for Iraq include regional war, with the Saudis openly siding with the Sunni insurgency (it certainly is a sign of how wonderful things are in the Middle East now that factions in the Saudi government are pushing a bomb-Iran strategy in cooperation with Israel and the United States, presumably as the yummy carrot that will distract our policymakers from their clever plan to let the Iraqi Shi’ites solve their Sunni problem with a bout of ethnic cleansing).
As for going after Sadr, Geez Louise!
When I read the LA Times article on doubling down I thought to myself, of course, things are going so well in Iraq we might as well foment a another internecine war between the Shi'ites. After all, if you haven't won the first war yet, it's surely time to start fighting the second. Isn't that right, Adolf? Jawohl! To the Eastern Front!
The seductiveness of this plan to the military is the idea that we get to destroy Sadr, a powerful anti-American force.
But even if we do — and I agree with Steve Gilliard, it looks impossible, the whole plan is a recipe for military disaster — we've removed the independent Iraqi populist, Sadr, in favor of the Hakim, the pro-Iranian stooge.
From a strategic point of view it's nuts.
But strategy isn't the objective here.
It's appearances.
Bottom line: the US military — and not just Bush — is appalled by the idea of limping out of Iraq, publicly humiliated by a series of miscalculations and defeats.
The US military wants to say it left Iraq bloody and proud after it kicked Sadr's ass.
In other words, it wants to claim a victory to sugarcoat the withdrawal and buttress US national and military prestige.
And if genuine victory looks out of reach, we can Fallujah a chunk of Sadr City with airpower to show that Uncle Sam, the idiot superpower that trips over its own dick, must always be feared and never mocked.
When Macbeth is contemplating the murder of Duncan, he reflects:
If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well
It were done quickly. If th’ assassination
Could trammel up the consequence and catch
With his surcease success—that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all!—here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come.
In plain English:
Gosh, this would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to worry about any consequences!
So we’ve decided not to worry.
As to what comes after for Iraq after our dramatic fighting redeployment, with open war between the Sadr and Hakim factions added to the deadly mix, I don't think the government and the military have any serious expectation that Iraq is going anywhere but straight to hell.
Additional collateral damage will be the failure of the United States to openly repudiate Bush, the Bush doctrine, or the Iraq war.
But the Baker plan, Bush’s petulant resistance, and the military’s cynical posturing have always been about survival: extracting the troops, the military doctrine, and the power structure from Iraq so Republicans can win elections, the Pentagon can fight the wars it likes, and Bush can live out his last two years in office basking in the grudging admiration of his betters for having, once again, dodged accountability for a colossal failure.
And don’t be surprised if bombing Iran—tactically unsound and strategically nuts—gets pushed to the top of the agenda in the post-Iraq world, just to show the world that America’s Back! (just like Grenada showed we were Back! from Vietnam) and ready to dish out state violence as irresponsibly and gratuitously as we used to.
All that matters to America is that we go forward and never look back.
And we live to kill another day.
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
