Last week, President Bush told reporters that the attacks on US soldiers in Iraq were limited to a very small area of Iraq. His reasoning was that since the area of unrest was so small that an allout assault was unnecessary. However, an attack on US soil on 5 acres of land was reason enough to invade and destroy two entire countries.
Yes, there are mitigating factors such as the innocent lives lost versus the lives of soldiers. I doubt that distinction matters much to the families who are meeting caskets at Army bases around the US. What we have is a lethal double standard that is being constantly danced around by the Bush administration.
It seems that this week, with several major assaults in Baghdad and Tikrit, the Bush administration and its minions have realized that they will not be able to kid glove the Iraqis into whatever vision the administration holds for them. Any illusion you may have that the administration is not behind every move in Iraq is certainly understandable considering the amount of opinion that “the Iraqi people” seem to be able to voice in the press.
We keep hearing about how excited they all are and how much they are looking forward to democracy. Yet, that opinion is really only held by the people who are in the provisional government. A government installed by the Bush administration, not elected by the Iraqi people. So, who really knows how the Iraqi people feel about the occupation.
I would be all smiles and hugs when faced with scared, pissed, and tired Marines bristling with armament. I might also be smiles and hugs when I met with my fellow saboteurs later that night under cover of darkness. I am not accusing all the Iraqi people of being resistance fighters who often kill innocent bystanders. However, I can certainly understand how they might go about fooling the Army and its soldiers into thinking I was helping while with my other hand, I would be throwing grenades.
What the administration has done is to dump the US Army into an impossible situation. Not a difficult one, but an impossible one. There are cultural differences between the soldiers and the population that simply cannot be overcome. 3000 years of history bears that out. Look at the befuddlement our forces saw in Vietnam with the enemy hiding in tunnels and doing suicide charges against withering fire. The American forces simply could not understand how or why the enemy were doing what they were doing.
While the comparison to Vietnam is certainly valid and powerful, I think it’s far too loaded an analogy to be useful. Instead, compare the Iraqi War with our most famous, and honorable war, World War II. We were fighting for all the right reasons. We won, not with superior techonology or numbers or smart tacticians, but with sheer determination. That’s precisely what we lack in Iraq. We have superior technology, greater numbers, better tactics and every other advantage, but we are fighting for nothing. How can any soldier or really any American possibly see Iraq or its people as a threat. There are no WMD there. Saddam has disappeared. All we seem to have done is to create a climate where our soldiers can be picked off by resistance fighters. We cannot expect the men and women who are there to be both saviors and executioners at the same time, especially when they see no purpose to either course of action.
I have this image of our soldiers just sitting around guarding palaces and eyeing each passing truck as their trigger finger itches. This has become less of a war and more of a test of the national patience. I simply cannot conceive that anyone in this country thinks that we have anything to gain, morally, financially, or globally, by pursuing our current plan, or lack thereof, in Iraq.