Will America Learn Anything from the Iraq War Disaster?

A horrid graphic example of what was done in American's name

Ten years ago America went to war in Iraq based on the lies and fraudulent "data" put forth by the regime of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.  Thousands of needless deaths, billions and billions of dollars, and countless war crimes later, most Americans agree that the war was a disaster.  But was anything really learned?  Countless pundits and columnists are writing apology pieces for their participation in the war mongering or their failure to ask the serious questions that might have spared the nation from the debacle.  I for one never supported the war and recall feeling physically sick when the heinous Chimperator Bush announced in a televised press conference that he had sent America to war - something for which he should be criminally prosecuted in my opinion (as well as for war crimes).  A typical apology piece appears in the Washington Post.  Here are excerpts:

Ten years ago this week, I was covering the U.S. military as it began its assault on Iraq. As I read back now over my clips, I see a few useful warnings about the difficulties ahead. But I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense.

Invading Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein a decade ago was one of the biggest strategic errors in modern American history. We’ll never know whether the story might have been different if better planning had been done for “the day after,” or the Iraqi army hadn’t been disbanded, or several other “ifs.” But the abiding truth is that America shouldn’t have rolled the dice this way on a war of choice.

America’s military power, awesome as it was, turned out to be insufficient to impose a settlement in Iraq; and in a grinding war of occupation, all our might could not turn on the electricity in Baghdad or frighten Sunnis and Shiites into cooperating with each other. Rome was also weak at home, politically: The United States didn’t have the stomach for a protracted war that President George W. Bush couldn’t explain and the public didn’t understand. 

The second comment was from a Syrian friend who opposed the war. In 2002, when we first discussed the coming battle, he was reading “The March of Folly,” historian Barbara Tuchman’s account of epochal policy blunders through history. America was about to make another mistake of historic dimensions, my friend warned. 

My friend took me aside after the fighting had been raging for several months. I am still haunted by what he said: “I am sorry for America. You are stuck. You have become a country of the Middle East. America will never change Iraq, but Iraq will change America.”

In the political vacuum we created, Iraq tumbled into the past — pulling a lot of the Arab world with it. That’s part of why President Obama has been so careful recently in dealing with Syria: He doesn’t want America to make the same mistake twice. But history is cruel: You can try so hard to avoid an outcome that, in your very passivity, you make more likely.

Sadly, the writer still isn't able to admit that everything done in Iraq was a disaster  and clings to the myth that  the surge of U.S. troops led by Bush and Gen. David Petraeus was something positive.  More frightening is the fact that far too many in the U.S. military are only to eager to repeat the disaster in Iran or Syria.  American hubris just keeps getting in the way of common sense and cold, calculating long term analysis and recognition of objective reality.   Vietnam should have taught the nation and our military a lesson.  Sadly, the lesson wasn't learned or was forgotten and thousands of individuals lost their lives needlessly.   Andrew Sullivan at least seems to appreciate the magnitude of his error:

This feels like an academic debate. But it isn’t. I have blood on my hands. However many times I try to wash them, the blood will not come off.

Afghanistan: A Disaster That Cannot be Won

While Barack Obama has removed General McChrystal after his latest episode of diarrhea of the mouth, the move does nothing to solve the disaster that is Afghanistan. As Michael Hastings and others have noted, too little real reporting is coming out of Afghanistan - and Iraq too for that matter - because too many journalists fear that telling the truth will end their "access" to top military brass who continue to push the myth that Afghanistan is a winnable situation. Something that I have been saying from the get go and which the USA should have known after watching the former Soviet Union's 10 year debacle in that country. The sad truth is that since the time of Alexander the Great, no foreign power has been able to successfully control the wilds of Afghanistan. And even Alexander maintained ostensible control by retaining local satraps who swore loyalty to him after merciless assaults by Alexander's army. But unfortunately, the USA never seems to learn from experience and its military leaders seem to always think that they can somehow prevail where no one else ever has. The result? Needlessly lost American lives and squandered billions of dollars. On the reporting issue, Huffington Post has a piece where Hastings sums up what has been lost in today's American mainstream news media:
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Look, I went into journalism to do journalism, not advertising. My views are critical but that shouldn't be mistaken for hostile - I'm just not a stenographer. There is a body of work that shows how I view these issues but that was hard-earned through experience, not something I learned going to a cocktail party on fucking K Street. That's what reporters are supposed to do, report the story.
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As for what is really happening in Afghanistan, The Economist has a lengthy article that looks at the ongoing debacle (note how one has to read a foreign news source to get the sad truth rather than the spin the military is feeding to American reporters). Here are some highlights:
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Mr Obama once described the fighting in Afghanistan as “a war of necessity”. The president must now put necessity aside and pose two fundamental questions. Can the American-led coalition still win in Afghanistan? And if so, how?
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In June Afghanistan surpassed Vietnam to become, by some measures, the longest campaign in America’s history. More than 1,000 of its men and women have been killed and almost 6,000 injured. Yet the Taliban are rampant, assassinating tribal leaders and intimidating their people. A survey in 120 districts racked by insurgency, a third of Afghanistan’s total, found little popular support for Mr Karzai. Over a third of their inhabitants backed the insurgents.
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The real test will come in Kandahar. Worryingly, one of General McChrystal’s last acts was to postpone the operation there until the autumn, amid signs that local people were not yet ready to back it. Even so, Mr Obama owes it to the West and to the Afghan people to determine whether COIN can in fact succeed under his best general. The Afghan war may yet end in an ignominious retreat. But nobody should welcome such an outcome.
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As for the dishonesty of America's leadership on the issue of Afghanistan, Bob Herbert has a column in today's New York Times that calls a spade a spade. Here are highlights:
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No one in official Washington is leveling with the public about what is really going on. We hear a lot about counterinsurgency, the latest hot cocktail-hour topic among the BlackBerry-thumbing crowd. But there is no evidence at all that counterinsurgency will work in Afghanistan. It’s not working now. And even if we managed to put all the proper pieces together, the fiercest counterinsurgency advocates in the military will tell you that something on the order of 10 to 15 years of hard effort would be required for this strategy to bear significant fruit.
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We’ve been in Afghanistan for nearly a decade already. It’s one of the most corrupt places on the planet and the epicenter of global opium production. Our ostensible ally, President Hamid Karzai, is convinced that the U.S. cannot prevail in the war and is in hot pursuit of his own deal with the enemy Taliban.
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Those who are so fascinated with counterinsurgency, from its chief advocate, Gen. David Petraeus, all the way down to the cocktail-hour kibitzers inside the Beltway, seem to have lost sight of a fundamental aspect of warfare: You don’t go to war half-stepping. You go to war to crush the enemy. You do this ferociously and as quickly as possible. If you don’t want to do it, if you have qualms about it, or don’t know how to do it, don’t go to war.
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We’re like a compulsive gambler plunging ever more deeply into debt in order to wager on a rigged game. There is no victory to be had in Afghanistan, only grief. We’re bulldozing Detroit while at the same time trying to establish model metropolises in Kabul and Kandahar. We’re spending endless billions on this wretched war but can’t extend the unemployment benefits of Americans suffering from the wretched economy here at home. The difference between this and a nightmare is that when you wake up from a nightmare it’s over. This is all too tragically real.

Losing in Afghanistan

UPDATED: The New York Times has a piece on the unwinable war in Afghanistan here which is worth a read. More chillingly, the Times has photos of all of the U.S. service members who have died in Afghanistan. Looking at the photos literally sickens me. These could be the faces of my children, young military guys I see out at clubs or my daughters' friends. The faux patriots who seem to love war and killing non-Christians never factor in the young lives that are being thrown away or the everlasting damage done to the families of the dead and severely wounded. In my view - unlike Obama who is merely escalating the Bush/Cheney fiasco - true patriots question the loss of the lives of Americans and the squandering of resources in a war that will ultimately end like Vietnam.

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Another front on which the Obama administration is not being honest with American citizens is the debacle in Afghanistan. True, the mess was created by the Chimperator, but now well over a year into his presidency, Barack Obama is gaining ownership of this ill executed war. A war which if properly handled by the Bush/Cheney regime might have avoided the spread of the Taliban into Pakistan. The conflict has real relevance for me because I know people serving over there and I have a daughter who has a boyfriend there at this very moment. As Joe Klein notes, despite the cheer leading of military leaders, it looks as if we are losing regardless of the amount of men, money and resources thrown into the fool's errand. We should have learned from the Soviet experience, but as is too common, American hubris always makes those safe at home and far behind the lines think that our troops can accomplish what others before us have not. Think Vietnam as another example of such a hubris based disaster. Here are highlights from Klein's piece in Time magazine:
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The adage is: if you're not winning against a guerrilla insurgency, you're losing. We're not winning in Afghanistan. And our performance in Marja isn't helping any. Indeed, it hurts in several ways detailed in this excellent NY Times piece: But the insurgents' extensive intelligence network in Marja has remained intact, and they have been able to maintain a hold over the population through what residents have described as threats and assassinations. In April members of the Taliban visited one old man late at night and made him eat his aid registration papers, several residents said, a Mafia-style warning to others not to take government aid.
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At the beginning of May, a well-liked man named Sharifullah was beaten to death, accused of supporting the district chief and not paying taxes to the Taliban. His killing froze the community and villagers stopped going to the district administration.
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The fact is, no credible "government in a box" showed up in Marja when the U.S. Marines and some Afghan elements took it in February. The fact is, there is no credible long-term alternative to the Taliban. These results have two disastrous impacts on the impending battle--or something, whatever you want to call it--in Kandahar Province. It does not inspire confidence in the Afghan government's ability to govern the area after NATO troops seize it, especially since Kandahar is the Taliban heartland.
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I must admit, again, I'm mystified about where this effort goes from here. Nothing I've heard from the U.S. military or other elements of our government leads me to believe we're on the right track here.

Veterans' Day - A True Hero

Living in the area of Virginia that I do, one becomes accustomed to having large numbers of military personnel always around in every social setting you encounter - yep, including in the gay clubs - and in time you find that some of these individuals are pretty amazing people. George Coker, one such individual, is written up in today's Virginian Pilot as part of its series on American POW's. We served on a neighborhood pool board together for an number of years including two during which he was the president and I was his VP of the community organization (I later served as president).

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Since I "came out" and moved to Norfolk from Virginia Beach, George and I haven't had much contact. Recently, however, at the funeral of a mutual friend's mother we had a chance to visit briefly and he and his wife were as cordial to me as ever - unlike some former neighbors and "friends" to whom I became invisible once they learned I was gay - and reconfirmed that he's a unique individual. There are things George and I disagree on, but I will always deem it an honor to have come to know him and work on endeavors with him. Here are a few story highlights (George was 23 when he was shot down):

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You have - deep inside - a reservoir of unimaginable strength. "If you're never tested, you don't know," says George Coker. Coker has been tested. Shot down over North Vietnam, he spent 6-1/2 years in captivity. Most of it was hard time - the kind they make movies about, the kind only a fanatical enemy can deliver.

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Aug. 27, 1966, was supposed to be a "milk run." Coker was on his 30th mission in the cockpit of an A-6A Intruder, zooming over jade-colored hills in the panhandle of North Vietnam. He and pilot Jack Fellowes were zeroing in on a bridge they were assigned to destroy. Without warning, the jet snapped crazily. A wing had been blown in half. Coker still isn't sure by what. "A lucky shot," he says.

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Not for the men in the jet. There was nothing to do but eject. Coker's arm and knee were torn up punching through the canopy. When he floated to the ground, "20 of them were waiting for me with open arms." He was stripped of his flight gear, arms tied behind his back. "I'd lost a lot of blood. I was pretty much in a state of shock." For the next few days, "I was roughed up, slapped around. They were trying to get some information. I could dodge most of it by pretending to be young and stupid.

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Ringleaders of POW resistance were banished to Alcatraz. Among those already there: Jeremiah Denton, who would later become an admiral and a U.S. senator, and James Stockdale, a future vice presidential candidate. "There were 11 of us. Four have since died. The rest of us remain extremely close. We had a very unique experience, even among the Vietnam group. It was the best of comradeship and the worst of living conditions."

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Each man was in solitary. Coker spent two years alone in a 9-foot-by-3-foot cell under a light bulb that burned 24 hours a day. Each night, a guard came in to lock him in irons.

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"You're capable of a great deal more than you realize, if you really set your mind to it. Look at me. I did it, and there's nothing special about me. I'm just another guy....

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I disagree. George is extraordinary.

Ex-Iraq General: Bush 'misunderstanding' Vietnam history

I guess since Chimperator Bush and Dick "Darth Vader" Cheney both avoided serving in Vietnam - Bush because of Daddy's connections and Cheney because it "wasn't for him" - it should be no surprise that these two fascists cannot understand the true nature of what went on in Vietnam. I suggest that both men watch the film "Fog of War" wherein Robert McNamara discusses the mistakes of Vietnam. Perhaps if they had watched the film before going into Iraq, the whole debacle could have been avoided. This MSNBC quote at Raw Story is illustrative:

MSNBC's Alison Stewart interviews retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, senior adviser to VoteVets, who was in charge of training the Iraqi military in 2003 and 2004. Alison asks Gen. Eaton his take on the accuracy of President Bush's recent statement, during his Wednesday speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that retreating from Iraq would cause the same kind of "violent reaction" that came from the United States' pullout from Vietnam.

"It's a very unfortunate trip back into history," says Eaton. "It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Vietnam war was about. Our enemy there was the North Vietnamese Army and their proxy forces, the Viet Cong. The issue in Iraq is a religious-based civil war with al-Qaeda thrown in there to complicate the affair."

Eaton calls Bush's analogy "unfortunate," citing "untidy parallels" between the behaviors of senior civilian leadership in Vietnam and Iraq. There is a failure on the part of the Bush Administration to devote diplomatic resources, in addition to fighting troops, to help the current situation.

Lady Bird Johnson Dead at 94

I know I am dating myself, but I always thought Lady Bird Johnson was a class act. I did not like here husband's Vietnam policies for obvious reasons and only missed having to enlist in the military by virtue of a high lottery number (269). Some of my friends were not so lucky - one drew a 2, but fortunately survived. Two other friends (brothers in fact) from my summers in the Adirondacks did not and committed suicide after returning from Vietnam. They just never got over the horror and mental torment they experienced. Here's portions of the Washington Post story on the other LBJ:

Lady Bird Johnson, 94, a first lady whose quiet ambition and determination allowed her to play an influential role in her husband's remarkable political career and to carve out an identity of her own as an advocate for beautifying the national landscape, died yesterday at her home in Austin.

Mrs. Johnson, who also was a successful businesswoman and philanthropist, had been in failing health for several years. She suffered a stroke in 1993 and was legally blind because of macular degeneration. She spent six days last month in an Austin hospital, where she was treated for a low-grade fever. "She just slipped away," family spokeswoman Elizabeth Christian said.

The full story is here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/11/AR2007071102146.html?hpid=topnews