George Bush’s Human Shields
Of course we’re not talking about Saddam Hussein. The moustachio’d one has plenty of options left.
If the weather and his luck holds, Saddam might catch our over-extended and under-supplied spearhead in a Dien Bien Oops! 60 miles from Baghdad.
If we are able to preserve the tenuous 300 mile supply line and chew up the Republican Guard with a combination of air and tank power, then it’s Welcome to Stalingrad! as Saddam withdraws into Baghdad for a nightmarish season of urban warfare.
When Baghdad falls, Saddam can pull a Chairman Mao and exit the city to orchestrate a campaign of guerilla harassment against our vulnerable, paranoid occupying force.
Or he might scootch out of Iraq altogether and enter retirement in some cozy central-Asian stan as the Arab world’s 21st century Saladin.
But the jerk in the President’s chair who has run out of options is the same guy who is hiding behind our brave, miserable soldiers. Yes, it’s George.
The cakewalk has not, of course, materialized. A student of American history might have told us that. After all, we expelled the invading hyperpower of the 18th century — Great Britain — from our shores through the determined action of a small, motivated, opportunistic, and militant faction, even though a majority of the population was indifferent or hostile to the guerillas and their ambitions.
With Bush botching the diplomatic endgame, perhaps intentionally, at the UN, ejecting Saddam Hussein is not the gag reflex of the civilized world, with America bravely acting as the provoking finger. With American forces shooting and bombing their way through a suspicious and angry Iraq, it is not the ecstatic liberation we promised to millions of Arabs supposedly yearning to embrace Yankee democracy and freedom. With our brave embedded journalists reporting military snafus in real time while it takes the Pentagon three days to sort out its ass from its elbow, it isn’t even an awe-inspiring display of invincible, unanswerable might by the world’s only superpower.
It’s just a bad, stupid war.
So what does Bush do when his promises of a just, urgent, humane, swift, and welcome invasion are revealed as a hypocritical fraud?
Fight like a cornered rat. Which is to say, pave the way for extreme and indiscriminate exercise of force by demonizing Iraqi soldiers as murderous, human-shield brandishing, chemical-weapon spewing terrorists. Wave the bloody shirt of atrocities against our PoWs. Hint darkly about “Mrs. Germ”. Play the al-Qaeda card. Lean on the media to make sure only U.S.-approved war images reach the American people.
And bring out his human shields, our soldiers. Those soldiers whose courage and contributions we would supposedly be mocking by continuing to oppose this war and the third-rate fool who spawned it.
Support our troops! When we have nothing else to fight for — not security, not justice, not law, not democracy, not liberation, not even for a juicy piece of low-hanging imperial fruit to be plucked by our praetorians and savored by our caesars--let’s just keep fighting because we don’t want to admit we sent our children to the wrong war for the wrong reasons.
There is something obscene about manipulating America’s anxiety about its sons and daughters fighting overseas in a dangerous and senseless war in order to delay the day of reckoning for a policy that was totally irresponsible in its conception, dishonest in its presentation, and disastrous in its execution.
The best way to support our troops is getting them out of Iraq and a situation they are totally incapable of dealing with.
The combination of fear, ignorance, and contempt shown by our fighting men and women for Iraq and its people does not bode well for the hearts and minds mission.
In hindsight, teaching high school graduates to rely on overwhelming technical and material superiority in committing violence to achieve their goals doesn’t quite qualify them as good will ambassadors. Especially when they are deposited in an alien and unattractive land and menaced by thousands of irregulars in civilian clothes who are trying to shoot and bomb them to bits.
For the time being Bush can rely on the determination, training, and equipment of our troops, and the desperate hope of their flag-waving families that their loved ones are not risking their lives under awful conditions just to share in a war-crime rap with our feckless and irresponsible Commander-in-Chief.
But the mission is starting to change and the troops can feel the ground shifting beneath their feet. Now we’re talking about years of bloody occupation and suppression and pacification. If Vietnam’s too old and far away, look down the road at what the IDF is doing on the West Bank and imagine laying that on 22 million people.
I don’t think any American signed up to live in a camp in the Iraqi desert for two years and only get to go to town when he has to brave a crowd of rock-throwing kids to bulldoze some carbomber’s house.
And while Bush and Blair resolutely insist from the comfort of their air-conditioned offices that everything is going as planned, we all know in our hearts that it isn’t. Everything they have told us about the war to date has been either a lie or a mistake.
“Support our troops” is starting to ring pretty hollow when it’s “Support an extra 100,000 troops for months to years more than we led America to expect when we bait-and-switched it into signing on for the war”.
As Bush desperately attempts to evade the consequences for his bankrupt Middle East policy through reckless escalation, he risks losing the hearts and minds of the troops and their families — and the human shield he needs to hide his crimes against law, good sense, and the Constitution.
The worst way to “support our troops” is to hope blindly that the war will be over before conscience and reason are engaged, and fast-forward to “winning the peace”. This war is going to drag on indefinitely while Bush exploits American patriotism and loyalty to frantically feather the nest of his right-wing oligarchy and bury his catastrophic Iraq mistake under a pile of bodies and rubble and Halliburton concrete.
The best way to support our troops is to take a clear, hard look at the feckless, alleged draft-dodging, alleged AWOL warmongering idiot who put them in harm’s way.
The best way to support our troops?
A humiliating cease-fire brokered by the UN and a swift withdrawal.
How to feel good about it?
Impeach Bush.
