Washington’s war

[ProSense]

Washington’s war

BY COL. DOUGLAS MACGREGOR (RET.).

The human and material cost of America’s occupation of Iraq is reaching a climax. The ongoing “surge” of ground combat troops into Baghdad and its surroundings is producing higher U.S. casualties, exacerbating intersectarian violence and draining the last reserves of American patience.

Like the French Army in Algeria and the British Army in Ireland, the generals in Baghdad are discovering that soldiers and Marines in Iraq control only what they stand on, and when they no longer stand on it, they don’t control it. Meanwhile, the Army grinds itself to pieces while the national military leader¬ship stands by watching, clinging to the promise of more troops for a larger ground force in the future — a promise that is irrelevant to the challenge we now face: getting out of Iraq.

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With the passage of time, politicians imbued military action to destroy Islamist terrorism with a meaning it never had, equating the unnecessary and destructive American military occupation of Muslim-Arab Iraq with America’s special mis¬sion to spread freedom throughout the world. Worse, Iraq’s forced democratization unleashed reactionary forces Americans did not anticipate. These forces strengthened Iranian regional power and influence, precipitating a danger¬ous anti-American backlash abroad and creating economic vulnerability at home. We cannot easily reverse the outcome in Iraq, but we can avoid repeating the pattern of behavior that made the Iraqi quagmire inevitable.

In the xenophobic, tribal and desperately poor populations of the Middle East and much of Africa, occupying Christian armies from the U.S., United Kingdom and other European states are unlikely to win significant numbers of hearts and minds. Moreover, the kind of secular democracy the Bush administration sought to export to Iraq through military occu¬pation is synonymous in most of the Muslim Arab world with massive corruption, widening gaps between rich and poor, and moral decadence as seen inside Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf emirates. Where democracy does prevail, Islamism tends to govern. And, where Islamism governs, as seen in Iran — a state that is, in practice, the most democratic in the Islamic world — democracy is subjugated to Islamic Shariah law. This outcome is hardly in the interest of U.S. national security.

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CIRCLING THE WAGONS

If we do not abandon the current strate¬gy of intervention, destruction and occupation to spread democracy, America will end up like the circled wagon trains of the Old West — sur¬rounded by hostile Indian tribes, but with no U.S. cavalry riding to the rescue, because they’re also behind the wagons. Fortunately, there is another way.

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[damntexdem]

1. It's not Washington's war. Not the U.S.'s war. Not my war. It's the WH's war.

All of the rest of us (Washington, U.S., all of us) are the lucky victims of the WH's crimes -- the unlucky victims are in Iraq.

[ProSense]

2. Bush's War!

I can agree with that.