VirusHead

hmmmmm…a piece of work! thx

Here we see things differently. To me, Iraq is not a war – it is a battlefront in a larger war: The War of Facism-with-an-Islamic-face against Liberal Democracy. It is indeed a world war, which started with the Iranian Revolution and finally caught our attention with the 9/11 attacks.

It is true that the US chose to initiate Iraq as a battlefront, and also true that it was a bad idea to do so (as we can all see in retrospect). But even if we pull out of Iraq, the war will go on against us.

We keep thinking of war in terms of our own culture – jump into a war, fight it full time, get it over with and then get back to normal. Our way of war decends from ancient Greece, in which the soldier-citizens were farmers, and had to get the war over with in time to get back to their fields to avoid starvation.

The horse-riding nomads of the Eurasian steppe thought of war differently. For them, war was something you did part time. You could spend part of any day fighting, and the rest of the time you grazed your horses. There was no “getting it over with,” because if there was no more war, then there was no more honor to be won. The Islamofacist style of war descends from that of the horse peoples of the steppe – you work at your job, spend time with your family, and help place a bomb when you have a spare evening.

In other words, there is no Greco-Western ending to this conflict. This is just a phase of Globalization. The Islamofacists fear that their women will become liberated by the influx of Western values, and are fighting it with everything they’ve got. Ergo, the war will be over when women everywhere actually become liberated. There will be no surrender, just nothing to fight over anymore.

Women are the key to victory. Weapons can at best perform holding actions.

So here is the Democratic strategy. Pull out the troops from Iraq as soon as possible, being careful to give the Islamofacists a written timetable for our surrender on that battlefront. Then de-fund the Iraqi government, arguing that it is a hopeless waste of money, and let Iraq plummet into the chaos of simultaneous civil wars (Shia v Sunni, Kurd v Sunni, al-Qaeda v the homeboys, Iran-supporting Shia v Iran-opposing Shia …). It reminds me of the time the Democrats voted to stop funding the South Vietnamese government, which had been holding its own after the American troop withdrawal. Without US economic aid, the South Vietnamese couldn’t even buy spare parts for their American-made weapons. So the North Vietnamese waited until the South Vietnamese equipment was no longer working, and then easily overran the South. Pol Pot, emboldened by the knowledge that no matter what happened in Southeast Asia, America would no longer respond, initiated the “Killing Fields” in Kampuchea (Cambodia).

The Republican strategy is “stay the course,” without articulating (and probably without knowing) where the course leads.

I think we all need to take a more global and more long term perspective, before precipitously acting – either to fight more or to fight less. We need to choose our battles more carefully, and fight them less intensively – with more emphasis on social relations than on firefights.

But above all, we need to commit to the long term. Unless of course, we wish to surrender women’s rights everywhere, including here at home.

There’s quite a lot to respond to in what you’ve said. I agree with you about differing cultures of war and expectations about war.

But I think we’re the ones who have become naive. If we’re thinking long-term, there has to be dialogue, coalitions, slightly cyborgian alliances. We have a very simplistic view.

Without a dictator in place, regional and ethnic and religious differences have become more important. Yes, it’s bad, but I don’t remember us stepping in to “save” Tibet. There will be war – and it can go on without us. I think we have to rethink our role, and to some extent that is what (some of) the Democrats have been saying for some time.

On the woman question… our liberation is under attack here as well, and refusing to discuss any of the issues in the public sphere is contributing to the problem. We have to develop a toleration for ambiguity and a capacity to navigate complexity.

Remember that the fight for global capitalism and against radical religious ideology (I think that’s closer to the reality) interpenetrates through most countries, including our own. If fascism is the penetration of corporations into government, we’re one of the most fascist countries on the planet. Anyway, I don’t think what we’re seeing is only about women’s liberation – I don’t believe you do either…

Participatory democratic structures are intended to let each to their own within the confines of the common public good. That’s a separate issue than the economic structures. I’d love to pick the best bits from several different systems. All in all, though, America has a decent bit to work with if we could restore some of the checks and balances.

I’m not “going there” on Vietnam today – except that I would point out that I really truly doubt that Iraq will welcome Americans when this is all over, the way the South Vietnamese do today.

You can look at the statistics for yourself, but the strategic actions against terrorism in many of its forms has been deprioritized and even derailed as a direct result of our wasted resources in Iraq. We are not liberators.

No-one even has the balls to make the argument about why we are there.

“I thought, ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”
His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness….

“In 2003, 2004, 100 percent of the soldiers wanted to be here, to fight this war,” said Sergeant First Class David Moore, a self-described “conservative Texas Republican” and platoon sergeant who strongly advocates an American withdrawal. “Now, 95 percent of my platoon agrees with me.”

while it should never stop you when you do not see it, it is always nice to see someone else thinking along similar lines.

thank you.