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When luck runs out
Two years ago I commented on the extraordinary luck of George W.Bush until then. Of course, a man's character is tested when luck begins to run out. Bush had not proved much of a leader until then - he had managed to make a void around himself, not only by his own actions but by the gratuituous rudeness of some of the people around him, and he had placed America in a very risky situation because of his serious overestimate of American strength. (I had something to say once or twice about the ridiculous superstition of the "only remaining superpower".) But everything up to the Iraqi general election had gone well, in spite of the evidence of a troubling lack of foresight, and it was his opponents who had always ended up looking carping and negative.
Now we see him when luck has run out; and frankly it ain't a pretty sight. The announcement that there are going to be talks with Syria and Iran - countries that have fought a proxy war against the USA without even troubling to disguise it very carefully - is a disaster. Nobody seeks talks with one's war enemies unless they are practically admitting defeat; and to seek it in the middle of a long-announced "surge" that was meant to reduce the pressure not only on the US but on the civilian Iraqi population is to send the message that victory against the mass-murdering, child-killing terrorist enemies is no longer expected. Of course, a few days earlier Tony Blair had announced the beginning of British withdrawal, stabbing Bush in the back (and recognizing implicitly the disastrous effect of his own leadership on the British armed forces, now no longer able to maintain two operations in Iraq and Afghanistan both). That had already sent the same message.
I am not a pacifist, and I originally supported both the wars against the Taliban and that against Saddam Hussein. I hated both regimes with a passion, and I wanted to see them gone so badly that I had even hoped in an Iranian invasion: even the Iranian mullahocracy seemed to me preferable to the obscene tyrannies of Mullah Omar and Saddam. But everything but the actual fighting was mismanaged from the beginning. I well remember saying, shortly after the conquest of Iraq (and long before I started this blog) that the invasion will only succeed in the long run if the Americans and their allies leave Iraq as fast as possible, because if they stay they will simply become the biggest set of hostages in the world - pure targets for enemy action. Well, they stayed; and in order to justify their staying - which was largely due to the complete collapse of any authority in Iraq, which in turn was due to the failure of the Americans to plan for after the victory - they came up with the idea of bringing US-style democracy to Iraq. Well, guess what: there was no government in Iraq - and there was none for a long time after - but there was an enemy left, powerful, subtle and ruthless. And as someone who knew a thing or two about war once said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
George W.Bush was lucky. He rode his luck for all it was worth. But in the end luck cannot make up for lack of judgment - everything from lowering taxes in wartime to honking off former friends with public insults. And when luck runs out, then we can measure the man.
Now we see him when luck has run out; and frankly it ain't a pretty sight. The announcement that there are going to be talks with Syria and Iran - countries that have fought a proxy war against the USA without even troubling to disguise it very carefully - is a disaster. Nobody seeks talks with one's war enemies unless they are practically admitting defeat; and to seek it in the middle of a long-announced "surge" that was meant to reduce the pressure not only on the US but on the civilian Iraqi population is to send the message that victory against the mass-murdering, child-killing terrorist enemies is no longer expected. Of course, a few days earlier Tony Blair had announced the beginning of British withdrawal, stabbing Bush in the back (and recognizing implicitly the disastrous effect of his own leadership on the British armed forces, now no longer able to maintain two operations in Iraq and Afghanistan both). That had already sent the same message.
I am not a pacifist, and I originally supported both the wars against the Taliban and that against Saddam Hussein. I hated both regimes with a passion, and I wanted to see them gone so badly that I had even hoped in an Iranian invasion: even the Iranian mullahocracy seemed to me preferable to the obscene tyrannies of Mullah Omar and Saddam. But everything but the actual fighting was mismanaged from the beginning. I well remember saying, shortly after the conquest of Iraq (and long before I started this blog) that the invasion will only succeed in the long run if the Americans and their allies leave Iraq as fast as possible, because if they stay they will simply become the biggest set of hostages in the world - pure targets for enemy action. Well, they stayed; and in order to justify their staying - which was largely due to the complete collapse of any authority in Iraq, which in turn was due to the failure of the Americans to plan for after the victory - they came up with the idea of bringing US-style democracy to Iraq. Well, guess what: there was no government in Iraq - and there was none for a long time after - but there was an enemy left, powerful, subtle and ruthless. And as someone who knew a thing or two about war once said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
George W.Bush was lucky. He rode his luck for all it was worth. But in the end luck cannot make up for lack of judgment - everything from lowering taxes in wartime to honking off former friends with public insults. And when luck runs out, then we can measure the man.
Re: splitting Iraq
And given the assumption of our president and the rest of his crowd that Of Course we are the Good Guys in this war, simply because the other side is so shockingly violent, it's a wonder we're not in a worse mess. When you know that you're on the side of the angels, you don't feel the need to examine your actions and assumptions.
I'd argue that we are the Good Guys, but it was dangerously naive overconfidence on the part of both President and people that the Good Guys always win. History is full of Good Guys who failed, for a variety of reasons ranging from insufficient resources to poorly chosen strategies.
What's worse, the American assumption that the Good Guys always win has a dark side -- it leads to us assuming that whoever won must have been Good Guys (leading to an inability to understand wars in which both sides are Bad Guys, such as the Russo-German War of 1941-45), and that whoever lost must have been a Bad Guy (leading to our self-flagellation after the fall of South Vietnam).
In the specific case, George W. Bush seems to have selected his military strategies based on the assumption that he had an infinite amount of political support and thus time for this war, so therefore our superior resources would inevitably prevail. I don't think that invading Iraq in 2003 was a mistake; I do think that failing to invade Iran in 2005 was a very serious mistake. By letting America be bogged down in Iraq he dissipated his momentum.
We are now in a situation where the only way we can win is if either (1) Bush is willing to go to strategic bombardment of Iran in response to the Iranian attacks into Iraq, which seems too ruthless for Bush, or (2) Iran makes the monumental era of committing a 9/11 scale atrocity against the American homeland, which means making a big mistake.
The cost of losing this war will be severe. In the short run, it will mean a rise of anti-Semitism and misogyny around the world. In the middle run, it will mean a Second Terrorist War, which will probably be nuclear. And in the long run, it means a greater chance of the decline of the Republic into an Empire, because of the cruel things we shall have to do in the Second war.
So I hope that we win.