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Posted on 04/06/2003 5:38:14 PM PDT by Nebullis
In a number of ways, the war in Iraq is over. The ultra-right coalition in the United States has effectively lost the battle. The evolution of the military conflict in Iraq will have diminishing significance as compared with the political struggles arising from the conflict, particularly within the United States.
The omens predicting the political defeat and potential break- down of the right-wing coalition currently in power in the United States are many. The most crucial sign of political defeat is the dismal failure of all of the premises on which the theory of war was formulated by right-wing Zionists and neo-conservative circles inside and outside the administration.
The Bush administration won approval for the war from Congress by arguing that such a measure was necessary to pressure Iraq to dislodge Saddam, thereby enabling the US to control Iraq without having to actually wage a war. This premise proved to be wrong. Popular revolutions did not topple Saddam Hussein.
Congress was also cheated by the Bush administration when it argued that the sweeping powers granted to the president to launch a war against Iraq would be enough to pressure the UN Security Council to produce a resolution blessing the war against Iraq. Ultra- right political theorists argued that France, Russia, Germany and China would eventually join the pro-war bandwagon because they would have no other alternative once Bush showed the determination to go to war with or without the consent of the United Nations. This argument as well proved to be a fallacy.
The American people were told that the war would be seen by Iraqis as a liberation rather than an invasion. When the war broke out, the resistance shown by the Iraqis to coalition forces made this argument absolutely ridiculous.
The American people were also told that the war would be a quick and simple victory without great human and political costs. Without a doubt, the performance of the American military against a small country that was embargoed for some 13 years has been far from honourable, brief or simple.
We may now turn to the three most fundamental reasons why I believe that the Bush administration has already lost this war.
The first reason is that the war has been lost on moral grounds. The failure of the United States to gain adequate votes within the UN Security Council made this war an illegitimate aggression against a small nation.
Worse still is the fact that Iraq is seen to have been systematically brutalised by the United States and its allies before the war even began. The 1991 Gulf War destroyed Iraq far beyond what was necessary militarily. Every respectable institution, including Harvard University and the United Nations, have testified to this fact. Then came the rigid implementation of the harshest and longest-running sanctions ever implemented by the international community. The sanctions resulted in extraordinary human suffering. A new, brutal war against Iraq that is unprovoked and unjustified is by no means rational.
For pragmatists in the United States who may have accepted the notion of imposing US global dominance, the second aspect of failure is probably more persuasive. The theory of US global dominance was strategically predicated on the assumption that the United States had the military capability to win two separate wars in different regions. The real strategic shock, which I am confident that US military planners will contemplate for years to come, is that the US was forced to deploy reserve forces in Iraq in order to win this single war against a small and obsolete military power. In theory, the United States could be defeated if a middle-sized nation such as Iran were to engage in fighting with US troops while they are bogged down in combat with Iraq. In fact, this is the moment for any other nation, big or small, to rebel against US dominance without fearing a quick military reprisal. And, if the US, with a defence budget close to half a trillion dollars, fails to win a quick war against a small nation with an out-of-date weapons systems such as that of Iraq, a number of nations coming together to engage US troops in several distant locations, or in only one region, may succeed in exhausting the American military potential. Global dominance will then become merely an illusion.
This and other scenarios may not be practical at this point in time. However, the long-term significance cannot be over-stated at the strategic level, particularly if the US continues to exert the same level of arrogance and aggression.
Excerpted. Click here for full article.
Look, Al-Ahram found a nice new word to play with. I wonder where they got it?
He needs to go back for a refresher course.
The lesson that should be learned from this and clearly is not, is that Arab threats, hostility, and gassy rhetoric don't amount to a popcorn fart in a force 10 gale, and that statement applies to self-righteous anti-U.S. posturing on the part of certain governments as well.
No stronger than the New York Times or Boston Globe. Heck, not as strong as the San Francisco Chronicle or Z Magazine.
The significance of the Iraqi resistance, even if it is vanquished, is that it is only fear that defeats people. Liberating oneself from that fear is a necessary ingredient for effective opposition and emancipation.
That is a true statement and should be heard loudly among the freedom seeking Muslims living in dictatorships and the "guest" slave laborers that also live in these oil rich oligarchies.
Once again, the Arabs take the exactly wrong lesson from events. They never, ever learn.
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You really are a special kind of moron.
Well, now there's a matched set of bookends if I ever saw one.
I thought crack was illegal over there.
It really is true -- De Nile isn't just a river in Egypt. It never was, I suppose.
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So in other words, we're going to have to do this again.