Stoopid Stuff

...I do not think it means what you think it does

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the neocon lunatic fringe and the cheetoh-stained cheering section all keep using the term "Victory" to describe the desired outcome in Iraq. I don't get it. By mid-summer 2003, you had your victory. The nation was conquered, the Hussein regime deposed, the army disbanded, the Baathists scattered. What else could you expect your military forces to do? Bush himself, in the runup to his presidential campaign decried "nation building" as an unrealistic goal, impossible to accomplish with military forces.

So we stayed, and we stayed, and now we have all the different albeit intertwined conflicts swirling around us in Iraq and in the Gulf region. And yet, still they speak of victory. Victory over what, I ask? Is this like the mindless sloganeering represented by "the war on terror"? You cannot defeat a tactic. A methodology is always available to those who would choose to use it. Victory over the insurgency? As we've learned so painfully, time and again since Vietnam, a regular army force with soldiers and tanks and artillery and air power cannot defeat an insurgency with local support. There is no army to fight, no pitched battles to win, no ground to take and hold. The insurgents are the people in the cities, towns and villiages. By day they sell you CDs. By night they plant IEDs, assasinate collaberators, fire mortars. The more you fight them, the more they do not lose, and more they don't lose, the closer they are to winning. You must eventually bring your army home - they have nowhere else to go.

Looked at in another way, in order to have a "victory", you have to defeat something. Who or what is it we're going to defeat in Iraq? What force is holding us there, fighting us for supremacy? Shiites fight Sunnis. Shiites fight each other. Tribes engage in combat over historical slights or for economic advantage. Criminal gangs fight to protect their concessions. Can you defeat religious strife? Or how about tribal hatred? Can you blow that off the face of the earth? Criminals! Surely you can defeat them. Err, no, there have always been criminals, and in the midst of chaos, in a place awash with cash and weapons, criminals may well be on the ascendency. Are you going to defeat "the terrorists"? That's beyond stupid. Terrorists are nothing more than political activists sociopathic or ideological enough to murder to advance their cause. They are not a population, a community, a constituency that can be identified or isolated. And as such, they cannot be "defeated".

It seems to me that if you cannot define clearly who or what you are going to defeat, you cannot aspire to "victory". Victory is not a marketing buzzword. It is an indisputable condition. And it is clearly not available to the US in Iraq. It is time for our leadership to stop hiding behind the hackneyed term victory and start embracing an exit strategy.

posted by mikey @ 9:00 AM