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Another Perspective

(Page 2 of 5)

Instead of facing the uncomfortable realities, Barnes quickly falls back on press-briefing jargon:

The most encouraging trend in Iraq is solid economic growth, sure to be followed by torrid growth. Already GDP for 2004 is expected to reach $24 billion or $25 billion and joblessness has dipped below 30 percent, according to Bill Block, a Princeton-educated economist for the Treasury Department now working for the CPA. Bremer thinks unemployment may have already fallen to less than 20 percent."

Close your eyes and you're back in Saigon in 1966 listening to Robert McNamara rhapsodize about the future of Vietnam. All that's missing is the body counts.

AND NOW WE'VE GOT them as well. Perhaps it was unavoidable, but the simple act of closing down a newspaper has led to a Shi'ite uprising that is probably going to turn the whole country against us. It is almost inevitable. Now that the liberation is over, America is perceived as an occupying army -- which in fact we are. That can only attract people's hatred. It is the same as American ghettoes, where people kill each other every day almost without anyone noticing, but when the police finally kill someone it is remembered and resented for years to come.

Everyone from Donald Rumsfeld on down is insisting that this is only a "contest of wills." The way to deal with rebel mullah Moqdata Al-Sadr is to "arrest him and put him on trial." Do they think this is all happening in downtown Inglewood? Would it be possible to hold one day of trial in Iraq without somebody blowing up the courthouse? The constant illusion here is that we will do something and they will interpret it the way it is described in our newspapers.

"Yesterday's televised images of U.S. and coalition forces battling Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq give the appearance of a conflict spiraling out of control," writes the New York Daily News in a "News Analysis." "The truth is that Iraq is not falling apart and none of the groups behind the current mayhem are strong enough to dislodge American forces.…What is needed is a prompt, strong and measured response that demonstrates we will not be intimidated, but that we will not strike out blindly and create new enemies among the Iraqi people."

Unfortunately, on the very next page comes this report from Fallujah:

U.S. Forces called out a weapon rarely used against the Iraqi guerrillas: the AC-130 gunship, a war plane that circles over a target, laying down a devastating barrage of heavy machine gun fire. Fallujah hospital officials said they received 16 Iraqi dead and more than 20 wounded, including women and children."

How long before we resort to napalm?

All this is drearily familiar. The entire Vietnam War was fought on the premise that we were creating a little "island of freedom" in Southeast Asia, that we could surgically distinguish between guerrillas and civilians, that we were winning the "hearts and minds of the people," that the war could be "Vietnamized" by propping up a local constabulary (which is only hated all the more for collaborating with the enemy), and that putting in just another 100,000 to 250,000 troops would finish do the job.

Many conservatives still live with the fond illusion that if we had only "put everything we had" into Vietnam, we could have "won the war." What is this supposed to mean? Sure we could have leveled the country and everything in it, but "pacifying" it? That would have meant staying another 30 years.

The Vietnam War was fought to stop the spread of Communism to other Southeast Asian countries -- Thailand, Burma, Indonesia. We won that war. Nearly all of Southeast Asia -- and even China -- have now embraced market economies and given up trying to subvert each others' governments. Meanwhile "winning" Vietnam has remained the most backward nation in the region, precisely because they fought us and the French for so long. So who was the loser there?

Unfortunately, the analogy ends there. Southeast Asia proved capable of adopting a market economy -- and even rudimentary forms of democracy -- because it had the social infrastructure to support it. Moslem countries do not. As I shall explain in a moment, there is a fatal flaw in Islam that makes social peace virtually impossible.

SO WHAT ARE THE STAKES in Iraq right now? We have eliminated Saddam Hussein and his pathological regime. Fine and good. What happens next? Do we really think Iraq is going to adopt a Federal Communications Commission? Is it conceivable they can hold a successful election? Maybe it's time to go back and read one of Rudyard Kipling's most famous poems (I'll substitute the word "American" here for the other term, just so there won't be any confusion):

topics:
Religion, Islam, Law, Military, Iraq, Iran, Russia, Israel, Pakistan, Africa, Communism, Nuclear Weapons