Timing

Fallujah shows clearly how absurd our present approach in Iraq has become. Toughness is no excuse for strategic stupidity.

The “Vulcans” as the neo-cons who seized control of our country (and the conservative movement) call themselves. They had their shot, made their case. And they have blown it.

As the bodies of well-intentioned U.S. soldiers and contractors stack up in the process of their hopeless struggle to feed, pacify and win over desperate (and, yes, brutally racist and anti-American) Iraqis, the ideologues’ failed geopolitical strategy unravels. And all-but-the-neo-con terrorism and war experts know it and have said it.

In the words of the immortal comic Buddy Hackett, the secret of comedy is…timing. Well, it’s the secret of democracy, too. And the timing is way, way off.

A long list of insiders and experts (more expert than I am) agree. They have come forward, offered genuine criticism and had their characters assassinated and their careers ended. There is now Richard Clarke, but before him was Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill(Former Bush aide: US plotted Iraq invasion long before 9/11 - [Sunday Herald]), and other experts in matters of policy, geopolitics and war.

And not one of these critics is “Liberal.” So forget the character assassination. And please stop trying to hook them all into some ridiculous “vast left-wing conspiracy.” These folks have nothing to do with the Left. Few, if any, are even Democrats. They don’t even like Democrats.

What is the root failure of the neo-con folly? You can’t, repeat, cannot, pacify and democratize a people through moderate force. Never happens, never will.

You have a couple of choices when it comes to force. Don’t use it. Or get Roman with it. The two degrees of force that do appear to work, courtesy of that most successful of Western Empires, Rome, are as follows:

1-Get Carthage on them. Carthage gave the Romans a lot of trouble a while back. So the Romans sent their troops, beat the Carthegians, sold them all into slavery, razed their city and sowed the ground with salt so nothing would even grow there again and no trace would ever remain. Worked like a charm. In other words, you can use overwhelming force and eradicate the indigenous population. The most extreme form of this is genocide.

2- You can punish hard and fast as a warning, then leave. The Romans also pioneered this approach, although they used it on their own troops, not on subjugated peoples, when they showed cowardice under “fire.” They called it decimation. The word is invariably used incorrectly these days to refer to option 1). What the Romans did was line up everyone in some loser platoon and then kill every tenth person. This left 90 percent of the soldiers intact. After this polite warning the rest tended to make a much more sincere effort. I am not a huge fan of this approach, either, though I prefer it to number 1).

That said, what is a guaranteed failure is the unholy combination we now practice. Namely, we go in, kill as few people as possible so as not to make the rest afraid of us. Then we stick around, as if we had earned their fear, if not respect, until there is retaliation against our people. Then we look powerless and are on the defensive—or must employ option 1) or 2).

This is truly the worst strategy imaginable. It is Vietnam redux. And it is precisely what our military has spent the last 30 years figuring out how never to do again. Yet here we are, militarily naïve political leaders dragging our military, the best in the world, true warriors for freedom, back into that tunnel with no light at the end of it, once again.

If we don’t leave in June, we leave in a year, or three or ten. But the minute we do leave, Iraq falls into totalitarianism, chaos or a civil war, and nothing we can do will stop it.

The outcome? Eventually, the region will calm down, run, most likely, by a brutal undemocratic government, just like every country in the Middle East, except, of course, for Israel.

Much as we may not like these forms of government, much as we may not like this outcome, there are laws of physics in the geopolitics of world events. Hope as we might, ideological as our aspirations may be, there is nothing we can do to hurry the march of democracy, or speed the end of tyranny.

It’s a matter of…timing. And, clearly as the horrible desecration of the bodies in Fallujah demonstrate, now is not that time. ¶ 2:36 PM