“I have complete faith that the US military, along with the help our allies are providing, will wind up dislodging Saddam Hussein from power, hopefully sooner rather than later. When that happens, the aspirants to American empire who have sunk their claws into the current administration will no doubt crow about their general brilliance. Before it’s too late, let’s be sure to remember that they’re the same people who thought that no ground invasion was needed to overthrow Iraq’s government — that we could just send a few guns over and provide air support and the Iraqi opposition would take care of these things themselves. It was the military that demanded that the invasion be an all out effort involving lots of troops on the ground. Of all the things the Bush administration has gotten wrong, listening to the military on this one is one thing they got right.” rc3
Colburn, whose levelheaded clarity I usually appreciate, goes on to make a ‘lesser of evils’ argument I find insidious. Bringing down the Iraqi regime with a proxy war or airstrikes would be far worse for the Iraqi people than the status quo invasion scenario, he suggests, since the ground forces are taking such measures to prevent civilian casualties. Is this war a lesser of evils? Only if you buy into many questionable assumptions about inevitability or necessity. And then there’s the one about how long we are going to be able to afford the luxury of preventing civilian casualties. Although we’re denying that we targeted them (which isn’t really the point, is it?) and suggesting that it might have been an Iraqi missile rather than one of ours (will we go on to say they did it deliberately to frame the US and reap the propaganda benefits?), at least fifteen were killed in an errant missile strike today on a Baghdad marketplace. CNN
It also may be a fiction to assume that the efforts to avoid civilian casualties come from our commanders’ humanitarian scruples. I think the policy is more likely to be a function of our efforts to preserve the last tattered vestiges of the goodwill of the civilized world we used to have as our allies. In other words, a function of the Bush administration’s utter failure at diplomacy leaving the military in the untenable position of not being able to defend themselves adequately because of stringent PR restraints. As such, our calculation of the profit-risk balance of maintaining that effort may be very volatile. Prepare yourself to see the Pentagon quietly ignoring such constraints when it is expedient or necessary; and, of course, taking no responsibility for the consequences to the Iraqi populace.
Not Our Fight: William Saletan enters a plea that we continue to fight a different war than the Iraqis in this sense. This would be a morally determinative choice to differentiate us from the terrorists, he feels. He is not so naive as to believe the unsubstantiated (and ludicrous) claims of direct links between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, but follow his logic. I’m not sure, however, we haven’t definitively lost the battle to be any better than the terrorists we claim to oppose already.
(I)n 1991 we and the Iraqis were waging the same war: They were trying to destroy us, and we were trying to destroy them. Now we’re waging two different wars: Saddam Hussein wants a war of destruction while we want a war of decapitation that leaves Iraq intact. The current “war” is really a struggle between those two wars. If we fight a war of destruction — even if we “win” it — we lose.
Remember this as you’re reading the latest news or watching the latest video from Iraq. Many developments that look like gains are really losses, and many that look like losses are really gains. When U.S. or British troops go into Basra, Umm Qasr, or Nasiriyah to finish off Fedayeen fighters, that’s a loss, not a gain. Every shot we fire in a city, and every bomb we drop, increases the probability of civilian casualties, which in turn raise the level of civilian anger against us and make it harder to separate Saddam from his people. Every day we spend hunting snipers in outlying cities, even if we kill them all, is a day in which we’re stalled on the way to Baghdad while U.S.-friendly regimes in the Muslim world grow more unstable
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The killers of Sept. 11 exploited the fact that they were willing to shed the blood of civilians and we weren’t. The killers of Basra, An Nasiriyah, and Baghdad are exploiting the same difference. While ruthlessness in attack is worse than ruthlessness in defense, the logic of asymmetry binds them together. I don’t know whether Saddam’s henchmen should go to The Hague for sponsoring terrorism. But they certainly ought to go there for using human shields.. Slate
