Date:   4/7/2003 9:36:24 AM ( 21 y ago)
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Peter Lee: 'War without end, amen'
Posted on Monday, April 07 @ 10:00:38 EDT
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By Peter Lee

One lesson America's future adversaries would be well advised to study is how to manage and dominate the 24-hour news cycle.

Whether it is an unopposed advance or a bloody incursion, the White House knows how to keep the world's attention riveted on its agenda.

With consummate skill, the focus of war reporting has been shifted away from the dead as a doornail cakewalk liberation scenario with its unlikely "hearts and minds" overlay to "our brave boys in uniform" doing, however nobly and regretfully, what has to be done, whether it's dropping a precision munition on Baghdad with loving care or blowing away an Iraqi family at a checkpoint more in sorrow than in anger.



The Iraqis, still fighting the propaganda wars of the 20th century, are harping on the mounting atrocities, which simply elicit yawns from the American public no matter how much they inflame opinion elsewhere in the world. Doesn't the Information Ministry realize dozens of civilians dead in a single bombing raid in Hilla is soooo Week 2?

Week 3 is about desperate Iraqi soldiers and civilians dying anonymously like cockroaches beneath the boots of our imperial exterminators. As one letterwriter to the LA Times so aptly put it, anyone who is "willing to fight for sovereignty instead of freedom deserves neither". Take that, you ungrateful Iraqis!

In a weekend poll, the LA Times reported that 70% think the war with Iraq is a good thing, and around 50% are eager go into Iran and Syria to drain the swamp. My favorite grace note was the assertion by well over half of the respondents that it would be irrelevant to the justice of the war if no WMDs were found.

This will, of course, cause a lot of eyerolling in progressive circles about the idiocy of the American people and the mendacity of the corporate media. But I prefer the nuanced view that the American people, who have every right to feel insecure about the justice and morality of our actions and how the world views us, want reassurance that we are doing, if not the right thing, something right. Certainly our skills in the arts of democracy, diplomacy, prosperity, peace, and civil rights are not objects of admiration, even to ourselves. But we can do a good job of conquering overmatched countries in a high-tech sort of way. So let's keep doing it, and let's feel good about it!

Someone who lived under the real Hitler likened our current mood to the guiltily giddy Anschluss period--let's go to Austria for lunch! Unfortunately, it didn't last long.

The most interesting concept to drive the news cycle over the weekend was the un-victory, by which we declare victory without Baghdad and without Saddam. This ploy brought to mind so many memories of the Bush crowd's pre-emptive tactics in Florida in 2000 I could almost see Tom Delay's aides kicking on the doors of one of Saddam's palaces and yelling, "Get out of Jay Garner's house!".

"Rolling victory" is certainly not Donald Rumsfeld's military preference. For the Pentagon's civilian leadership, the focus is on getting into Baghdad and ending this unpleasant and unpopular war before the Iraqis, the logistics, the heat, and the Russians and French and Iranians make everything unravel.

The aspect of rolling victory that attracts Rumsfeld is getting America's Vichy on the Euphrates rump regime up and running before his most determined and resourceful enemies--not the Iraqis, but Colin Powell, the UN, and the Russians and French--can interfere with what looks to be a 100% Pentagon-run operation.

For students of history, Rummy's plans for Iraq remind us of a certain expansionist regime's activities in the 1930s. No, not Nazi Germany but Imperial Japan--in Manchuria. After the army seized power in China's three northeastern provinces using the pretext of the Manchurian Incident, Manchuria was essentially run as a private subsidiary of Japan's Kwantung Army, with the cowed acquiescence of the homeland civilian government and the eager participation of Japan's military-industrial complex.

Manchuko, as it was renamed, served as a welcoming haven for disgruntled military officers, imperial ideologues, opportunists, and sadists who chafed at the confines of civilian laws and mores. Japanese military tactics and ideology; best practices in occupation, exploitation, and economic development; and even war crimes including horrific chemical and biological weapons experimentation on human beings were all pioneered in this congenial environment.

Beyond the reach of Tokyo's civilian government, the Kwantung Army went on to fabricate a string of incidents and provocations in North China that culminated in the Marco Polo Bridge incident outside Beijing and plunged Japan in the Asian war that became WWII. By this time, its extremist militarism had infected the Japanese homeland and put an end to Japan's civilian government for the duration of the war until the emperor intervened after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

When I think of Rummy's emerging satrapy in Iraq, I also think of something like Ollie North's Iran-Contra boondoggle. But instead of just a covert operation, an entire country would be run off the books. It would be a private playground for right-wing psychotics like ex-CIA chief James Woolsey, tapped to head the Information Ministry, who is on record defining "WW IV"--against the Arab states, fundamentalist Islam, and al Qaeda,--as a career, not a catastrophe. We have much more to look forward to from this regime than enriching our deserving national security contractors and ending the inefficient outsourcing of our Middle East black ops and torture to tyrannies whose enthusiasm and reliability are suspect.

"Free Iraq", economically independent with its access to Iraqi oil revenues, militarily invincible with American power on tap from the network of bases we will establish there, and armed with a hunting license to pursue hostile and paranoid regimes in Syria and Iran, is not Saddamism destroyed--it is Saddamism super-sized.

This emerging vision of America as Godzilla in the Middle East is certainly giving the rest of the world conniptions. The Arab world, Old Europe, and Russia would all like to see an end to the war mediated by the UN in a rebuff to the United States. Recently, the Russian foreign minister was in Peking "to talk about Iraq". Presumably, he was trying to get the open or sub voce support of the cautious Celestials for whatever peace gambit is going to be sprung on Bush. Maybe the "accidental" attack on the Russian ambassador's convoy leaving Baghdad was a not-to-subtle signal that Moscow's efforts are neither unknown to America nor appreciated.

If Saddam does have poison gas, our troops can thank Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin for the fact that it hasn't been used yet. As long as Saddam hopes that Franco-Russian intervention can end or mitigate the war, he is not going to foreclose that prospect by dooming Iraq to pariah status with a WMD attack. But this may change as he observes Rumsfeld's reckless, headlong rush to end the war on America's terms and preclude any outside interference.

Baghdad is probably not going to be easy, but sitting outside the city and waiting for reinforcements, no matter how sound a military strategy--and no matter how fervently it may be desired by officers and troops on the ground--just doesn't seem to be in Rumsfeld's diplomatic and political playbook. And the powers arraying against America will prepare for the contingency that we will somehow find a way to reduce the city and occupy it quickly with minimum damage to U.S. forces, our military prestige, Iraqi lives, sensibilities, and infrastructure, and our international moral and diplomatic standing.

How best to contain American forces in Iraq, where and how to do it, whether the time is now, during the battle for Baghdad, or afterward is probably a matter of serious calculation in Teheran, Damascus, and Moscow. Perforce, they may decide that the abrupt fall of Baghdad is more likely than stalemate, siege, or a politically and militarily costly assault and their best hope is to bog America down in a nationwide quagmire. If so, now is the time for their proxies to take hostilities in the border regions and the rear area to the next level, before Baghdad falls and U.S. reinforcements arrive and the diplomatic and military advantage is irretrievably lost.

If this is a case, the TV-friendly, spin-silly war that is the product and projection of George W. Bush's imperial fantasies is over. The real war against the Middle East that Rumsfeld expects, provokes, and welcomes is about to begin.

Copyright 2003 Peter Lee

 

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