The article proves that indeed defeatism works.
Enough defeatism in the struggle, and the 'will to win' evaporates. As SunTzu says in "The Art of War" that is the matter of winning it. Our greatest enemy is the political forces that want to destroy our will to effect positive change. Mainly those forces dont WANT freedom.
My take on the big picture in Iraq, written April 9, 2004. Short-term things are looking bad, but actually most of these matters bode well for longer term.
http://freedomstruth.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_freedomstruth_archive.html#108140233888652252 Iraq - One Year After Liberation, waiting for Liberation
Past, present and future are always 3 different windows on each single event we experience. A prediction is different from a diary is different from a memoire. I am reminded of that on this the one year anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. The moment on April 9th was one of exhileration, at least for me. A long anticipated battle and the nervous reporting from the media did much to excite but little to inform. It was eerie how we went from fierce fighting to one sunday morning watching Greg Kelley march into Baghdad on an A-1 tank. The 24 hour cable news is always in the now, chewing through events until all details are exhausted. Always in the tree-level but never seeing the forest. The glimpse of liberation - the scenes of Iraqis beating saddam's head with a shoe - got quickly overtaken by looting, then this issue, then that, the political process. Events have rushed forward headlong in the past 12 months - history on steroids for Iraq. So the fall of Saddam statues becomes a bit forgotten in the rush of the "now".
From today's vantage, though, it is a different sense I look at last April, although we may discount the events of April 9 2003 a bit too much. For right now we are still in the tornado of events in the evolution of Iraq. We are still in the labor pains of a new Iraq, anticipating the outcome and hoping for success. Some who didnt want America to invade Iraq are wishing the project would fail, or expressing pessimism that shakes faith in the effort. Too many troops, too few; too soon with handover, too slow. Any decision made is second guessed to the n-th degree. Clearly, the Bush administration will not lose resolve or withdraw, but the nitpicking adds to confusion to the people watching events, so one loses perpective on what has been accomplished.
And with fighters willing to battle hardened US soldiers, one has to wonder what will happen next. As I learned from my stock trading days, the common error of most humans is straight line extrapolation. So it is bad now, they imagine it will stay bad. Wrong thinking. There are forces at play, like billiard balls on a table, and they are colliding and mixing in with other forces to shape events. I've explained the resistence in the previous post: It is real, it is a danger, but is wholly expected in the current environment. The only question is guaging its strength and how much it can derail the overall project, and based on that, how events will play out.
I was quite optimistic until recently that Iraq was going well and that there was no significant danger to the democratization of Iraq. But now, the dangers flushed out in the open, I have a different take. The long-term prospects are better for Iraq with the challenges being faced now, but the short-term dangers have heightened. The enemy has decided to take a stand now, and make a dice wrong. They have "called for division" - saying in effect "on our side or your side". The miscalculation is when you think you have everyone on your side but you really dont. It is almost certain that the miscalculation is on the part of Sadr and those wanting to oppose the coalition and occupation.
The majority of Iraqis are NOT on the side of the enemy, that is for sure. But if they are passive enough or intimidated enough, it can shake us off the path of political development, if events "spiral out of control". The good news - the best news - from this week has been those cases of Iraqis helping coalition. Civilians lending their cars to drive coalition soldiers to safety or carry injured to hospitals; Peshmerga helping fight some battles, Iraqi police helping in others. The worst news of course are the mob actions in Fallujah, a sign of the bad elements in control of the streets. The Marines promise that will soon change.
But of the current danger? This too shall pass, certainly. The smarter military analysts are talking about a 2-4 week period of clamping down on this. After that, further political evolution and jockeying. The bottom line is that the current threats of Sadr and Fallujah are not fundamental roadblocks, they are merely security issues (as long as they dont metasticize into something larger). The fundamental test and question is whether "the center will hold". That enough Iraqis will want a real western-style democracy enough to fend off a breaking up of the political stabilization. This current test may shock the political democrats in Iraq into stronger action to save their country from falling into the abyss. So the current danger of attacks is like a fever. Once it breaks the healing may be faster.
I dont believe the cries from idiots like Kennedy that this is Vietnam. He and his ilk are locked in the past and ignorant, willfully so, of the current situation. They want to believe the worst about America and build up tiny enemies like Sadr to be bigger than he is. Kennedy only emboldens the forces of violence in the mideast with his overheated and wholly inappropriate rhetoric. Kennedy promised thousands of body bags in the gulf war I, saying saddam's army was formidable, etc. He is wrong about almost everything.
So past, present and future collide in this anniversary. To look back and contemplate what was really gained last April, we have to look forward to the completion of this project of democracy in Iraq. Yes, Iraq was liberated from Saddam last April, and that alone is a great change. But the full libeation of Iraq will require the building of a new civil society, a free and democratic Iraq to replace the tyranny of Saddam. It hasnt happened yet; and it wont have any definite start date as it is an evolution. In the end, the makers of the legacy of Saddam's overthrow and the ones who will truly judge and live under the judgement will be the Iraqis themselves.
Here is my hope and my prediction: We will look back on the fall of Saddam on April 9 2003 as a very significant event. The beginning of the end of dictatorships in the Muslim world, and the beginning of a true democratic state of Iraq. A legacy and a gift from our fallen coalition soldiers. I am looking forward to future anniversaries.
You should go take a look at the Falluja thread. There is a whole lot of defeatism over there. And of few of them are even on this thread. I see the propaganda machine is beginning to win.
The majority of Iraqis are NOT on the side of the enemy, that is for sure. But if they are passive enough or intimidated enough, it can shake us off the path of political development, if events "spiral out of control".But the numbers of insurgents never seems to go down, nor their effectiveness to be diminished. This indicates that the only real constraint they suffer is in materiel, never willing recruits to replace casualties. The very fact that the Iraqi Civil Defense batallion that was brought to Fallujah at the start of this operation promptly evaporated due to desertion speaks volumes.
Granted that the Kurds for their own reasons support us (they are surrounded by enemies and need us to keep the Turkish Army from barrelling into Kirkuk as they would deeply like to do). Granted most Iraqis do not want to see their country become another lawless jehadi staging area run by gangs of foreigners and teenage boys with guns. But to assume that Muslims will ever regard a military occupation by "infidels" and "crusaders" as a good thing is dead wrong. Muslims viscerally hate and resent rule by non-Muslims. In nearly a half century of occupation Israel has been totally unable to create anything like a Palestinian client political leadership in the West Bank or Gaza.
What is the policy ? To create a new Iraqi political leadership ? "Infidels" and "crusaders" cannot create leaders whom Muslims will ever accept as legitimate.
Some have talked of "fighting them here or fighting them there". Where is it better to fight a shark, from a boat or in the ocean ? An "infidel" occupation army in an Arab country is a shark on dry land, totally out of its environment and dependent upon uncertain "allies". With jehadis flowing in from across the Arab world, melting in with the a population that obviously gives them sustenance and shelter it is we who are the fish out of water. Men like Mohammed Atta stick out in America. We just weren't looking for them before. Now we are.
The insurgents have a recruiting base in the millions. We simply do not have the manpower to seal the borders of Iraq. They can keep up this steady drip, drip of casualties forever on their own turf among their own people. And that is the problem here. They can keep this up forever.