HE WAS A MAN KNOWN TO BE SOMEWHAT SLOW, PROBABLY AS A RESULT OF KILLING A FEW TOO MANY BRAIN CELLS DURING HIS DRINKIN’ AND DRUGGIN’ YEARS, AND HE WOULD DO EXACTLY AS HE WAS TOLD.

There is an old saying that only a fool makes the same mistake twice. With that in mind, I guess we would have to say that our government is run by a bunch of fools, and the biggest fool of them all is our president.
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In March of 2003, President Bush led us into an ill thought invasion of a country that was never really a legitimate threat to our security, Iraq. Yes, Sadaam Hussein was, is and will always be a bad guy, and during his reign in Iraq, he committed violent acts against his own citizens that were truly vile. However, with all of his blustering about weapons of mass destruction, Sadaam turned out to be nothing more than a paper tiger.

Sadaam came from the minority Sunni population of Iraq, and perpetrated much of his violence against the Shiites. He was a brutal dictator, but if the brutality of dictators was a reason for us to commit our troops to war, then we would probably be fighting wars on dozens of fronts around the globe, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And here’s where the tomfoolery is most evident. Sadaam’s army collapsed in a relatively short time. When that happened, we should have installed a government, either with a popular leader or an installed puppet, and gotten the hell out of there. Our mission was accomplished the minute Sadaam was no longer in power, and we could have left Iraq with our heads held up high. That would have been the easy way and the smart way out. It would have been, if the stated goal of the administration in Iraq was the same as the actual goal, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t

I am not certain that we will ever really know President Bush’s true reasons for invading Iraq. This much we do know. The members of Bush’s inner circle, people like Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, wanted this war long before George W. Bush was ever convinced to run for president. They, through their Project for the New American Century, had been lobbying President Clinton to go to war against Sadaam right from the beginning of Clinton’s first term. They saw Iraq as an opportunity to suck the treasury dry by providing companies that they owned or controlled no bid contracts for which the U.S. government would be overcharged for either poor services or services that were never to be delivered. Companies like Halliburton would be able to grow exponentially as the result of these contracts, and that growth would fatten the pocketbooks of every one of these sleaze balls.
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President Clinton wasn’t buying into their line of crap, and, so, they set about to find a way to remove him from office prematurely. Fortunately, there were still enough honest people in the Senate to prevent Clinton’s removal from office after he had been impeached by the House of Representatives.
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That left them with a new goal, to find a dim wit to head the Republican presidential ticket in 2000, one who could be easily manipulated, and then arrange to steal the election. And that is exactly what they did by nominating George W. Bush to head their ticket. In Bush, they had their ideal candidate. He was a Southern governor who had a less than stellar record of serving the people. He was a man known to be somewhat slow, probably as a result of killing a few too many brain cells during his drinkin’ and druggin’ years, and he would do exactly as he was told.
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So, Bush became president, and 9/11 happened. That made his behind the scenes controllers ecstatic that there would now be an easy excuse to take over Iraq and its huge oil fields. They thought it would be an easy first step toward creating an American empire in the Middle East. Soon after Sadaam fell, they even named Wolfowitz to be the Viceroy of Iraq, a title reminiscent of the worst days of the British Empire.

The problem was, of course, things didn’t go all that well. They came with the overt intention of bringing down Sadaam, but their covert plans required us to stay, possibly forever. They never counted on, what they have termed, an insurgency. That term, of course, is a little odd when used to describe a group of native people who are trying to overthrow a foreign, uninvited, invader.Â
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They never learned the lesson of Viet Nam. That lesson was really quite simple. It is nearly impossible to win an unconventional war against the native population of a country you have invaded. In Iraq, as in Viet Nam, the people we are fighting are the people who actually are that native population, and they will continue to fight us as long as there is breath in any of their bodies. They did it in Southeast Asia and they will do it in Iraq, because they know that eventually our people will turn against a war for which there seems to be no upside.

But the mistakes keep mounting. The lessons we should have learned in Viet Nam have been forgotten. Even more recently, the lessons that we should have learned in Abu Ghraib seem to have gone down the tubes with revelations of torture taking place at
Guantanamo and the massacre at Haditha.
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And now, we are being told that, while the country and the world are asking about a timetable to end this awful mess, the president has committed an additional 1,500 troops to fight the insurgency in the Al Anbar region of Iraq. When asked about this new troop deployment, Lt. Col. Michelle Martin-Hing, spokesperson for Multi-National Corps-Iraq, was quoted in USA Today as saying, “The situation in Al Anbar Province is currently a challenge but is not representative of the overall security situation in Iraq,

That statement is perhaps the worst tactical error a press liaison could have made in this situation. The daily news tells us of the instability in Iraq, of the inability of the government to actually function and of the daily attacks that our troops seem unable to stop. It is, more or less, like the press briefing we used to see each day during the Viet Nam era, telling us the good news about our coming victory there. All we needed was a little more time and a few thousand more troops, and the Viet Cong would fall and be beaten. All we need in Iraq, according to Lt. Col. Martin-Hing is a little more time and a few more troops and Al Anbar Province will be stabilized and the war will be won.

Wars are won when there are clear goals to be achieved. There were no clear goals in Viet Nam, just as there are no clear goals in Iraq. Wars are won when we win the hearts and minds of the people of a country. That never happened in Nam and it will not ever happen in Iraq. It couldn’t then and it can’t now because in order to win that battle, one’s goals must be perceived of as being pure and altruistic. Neither of those wars was promulgated for pure or altruistic purposes. We lost in Viet Nam, and, eventually, we will lose in Iraq because there was never a real honest reason for us to be there.

We have not learned the lessons of history, and we do every veteran who was killed, maimed or merely served in our military a disservice to besmirch their memories by engaging in dishonest wars.Â
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That is not the message that should have been sent out for Memorial Day of 2006. It is not the message that should ever be sent out. The lives of those who are willing to toe the line for the defense of our country are too valuable to waste on useless wars.

HENRY A, HONIG – THE PUNDIT

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