Eshin Direct

I’d hate to be George W. Bush at the moment. Actually, it’s probably more along the lines that I hate George W. Bush. Although, despite my animosity to the guy, I can’t help but almost feel sorry for him. Almost. I’m sure that all those potshots that I and other people have taken at him during his term in office have given him a hard skin.

In light of the continuing revelations of Iraqi prisoner abuse, potential cracks in the US-UK alliance, skirmishes within a mosque no less, and Michael Moore winning the top accolades at Cannes, I wouldn’t blame the guy for needing a shoulder to cry on. And blame seems to be what this game is all about. The world needs someone to blame and the village idiot seems to be the likely candidate.

But one wonders whether he should bear the entire load on his shoulders. Sure, he remains hugely at fault about his policies on Iraq and being in the steering seat, both on a civil and military level, he deserves that blame. But essentially we are all to blame as most of us stood by and let the US do what it wanted to do in the world. It’s not surprising either since for many of us our cultural empathy has been slowly molded to be closer with the US as we’ve indulged in their culture. Their food, their films, their TV shows all have a strong appeal to us while at the same time most of us have happily sold our own cultural identity down the drain. For this alone, we can’t blame the US but our own happy, fat selves.

The biggest sell job and illusion we’ve sold to ourselves and have had sold to us is that this little war in Iraq would be pretty. War in Iraq is bad, we’ve all heard. A lot of those do-good tree huggers were perhaps more aware of this than most, but I don’t think they realised quite how bad it will be. For the arrogantly righteous pro-War citizen, I don’t think they even realised the extent of the trouble it would be to be in Iraq. It seems everyone, everywhere got a little squeamish over some disturbing pictures and beheadings (one physically and some potentially politically).

What exactly did you folks not understand about war? It’s messy, it’s bloody, and when one side hates the other side, and vice versa, then it’s going to go on for a long time.

Some naively believed that the relative ease with which the US won the “conventional” war ushered in a new era of technological might and US dominance. Donald Rumsfeld is certainly guilty of this mistake and UK military planners are also in serious danger of following in the tracks of believing a “smaller, more technologically capable” force is better.

The point is the rules of engagement and the political expediency that goes on behind these wars. Democracies are ill-suited to wage wars on other people. When their own lands and liberty are threatened, war could be waged indefinitely. But when they take the fight to other nations, military action will be shortlived or a long term blunder.

The US has proved this twice. Once in Vietnam and now in Iraq. Troops sent to Vietnam were initially sent in as US military “observers”. Formal declaration of war happened much later until it was politically expedient to do so. The combined social pressure and the inferiorty of the US troops on the ground eventually led to the withdrawing of US troops.

Iraq is playing out the same way but in a much shorter time frame. The reasons for going in were positioned as politically friendly – “security of the nation”, “WMD”, “hell, we’re liberating these people”. Sure, the US told the Vietnamese they were there for their own good. Now they seem to be under fire for some of the heavy-handed tactics they are using in Iraq. Which is wrong under the context of a peace and a platform of lofty ideals and principles. Judging the conflict from afar, or from the hindsight of peace, is a luxury.

Essentially, Iraq needs to be subjugated to US will. The US is a force of occupation, even if it hates the imperial connotations that brings. After invading a country with force of arms, with relatively little blood to show for it, you are going to have prove to the occupied why exactly you are in power.

Schoolyard rules. I have a fight with you and I’m considered the winner after humiliating you. Unless I’ve beaten the crap out of you completely and utterly, you’ll continue to be convinced that you have a chance to beat me. I need to beat the crap out of you completely to ensure that you fear me enough to reduce those chances of “revolt” to nil. This isn’t going to happen if I’ve got an audience imposing rules of behaviour on me. It gives you a reason to start questioning whether, under different circumstances, you may have succeeded. One on one, till you are in a bloody pulp. Or I am. The hope that fear might be the basis for never “revolting” is justified. The whole scenario is based on physical aggression. If I wanted to use reason for you never to harm me, then maybe I shouldn’t have had a fight with you and chose another method of resolving our differences.

Of course, chances are you beat the person to such levels of hatred, they resort to even more drastic measures. The best policy is not to start the fight at all if you can help it.

The Iraq war is no different. The US needs to do what it needs to do much that I despise them for it. But they won’t. The US public is squeamish about it. Fine, they proved not to be squeamish about body bags coming home but this furore about the military prison abuses is much ado about nothing. The US public is perhaps just realising that they aren’t as ideologically superior than the rest of the world. These atrocities follow an army wherever they go, much like prostitution. It happens people and you aren’t going to win a war by coming out of the end of it shiny and clean. As Bruce Willis’ character in The Seige states – “The military is a blunt weapon”.

Which is a problem, because the democractic system places an emphasis on human rights and the freedoms of people. The American public wants to feel that it’s better than everyone else. People will be held accountable for this. The fuel for a US withdrawal from Iraq is being stockpiled. This, for US interests, is a bad thing because long term, and with their hands tied with accountability, the conflict will go on for much longer. If there is a withdrawal, US forces will be back in Iraq in the next ten or twenty years. If they stay, they will be there for the next ten years fixing problems if they continue with this go-lightly approach.

The US and its citizens might be strong. They might have the best weapons. They might be backed up by more technology than the whole of Iraq has running its country. But it’s becoming increasingly clear, that the average US citizen might not have the stomach for a real war, where bad things happen.

I dislike war since I know the horror of it albeit only as a student of such things. But at least I know that when you wage war, you have to do it properly, with all the horror and trauma it brings.

And the rest of the world needs to reflect upon that. By letting the US go into Iraq, they essentially condoned it. In part, these atrocities are being committed because the international community, when it failed to reign in US aggression, allowed the US to believe that there was no higher authority to answer to.

Tags: Political Rants