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How Ragtag Insurgents Beat the World's Sole
Superpower
By Ted Rall
11/23/05 "ICH"
-- -- Most Americans were unaware that we had botched
Afghanistan; most still are. I watched the Pentagon send in a
miniscule 8,000-troop complement where, according to its top
strategists, at least half a million occupation soldiers (stationed
for at least 20 years) would have been needed to control the
nation's roads, pacify the provinces and establish the security
essential for building an economy and political system. Banditry and
looting soon made the average Afghan nostalgic for the security that
accompanies tyranny. On the other hand, since U.S. soldiers quickly
gained a reputation for shoving, kidnapping, robbing and even
torturing innocent Afghans, perhaps their small number was a good
thing.
If Afghanistan was a dry run, I observed at the time, there was
little reason to expect that Iraq would turn out less disastrously.
But no one, especially not the newspaper editors who'd been conned
into supporting the Fourth Afghan War, wanted to hear that argument.
Four years later, little has improved. Most Afghans, Peter Baker
wrote recently in The Washington Post, "still grind out the
subsistence lives they did under the Taliban." Women still wear the
burqa. "Corruption is widespread," The Week reports. "Outside Kabul,
the country functions like a group of independent fiefdoms from the
Middle Ages." Ordinary Afghans "are angry at the continuing war, the
widespread malnutrition, and the snail's pace of progress."
As I'd feared he would, Donald Rumsfeld deployed the same low-rent
approach to Iraq. There were too few troops to secure the Iraqis or
themselves. As inexperienced weekend warriors shot up carloads of
civilians from rooftops above invisible checkpoints, it soon became
apparent that our forces were undereducated, poorly trained and
excessively preoccupied with their own safety. The Americans'
cultural insensitivity, often beyond the point of brutality,
transformed people grateful to be liberated into insurgents in a
matter of months.
Now even the hawks say that Iraq is lost. "The U.S. cannot
accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily," admitted
Representative John Murtha, a Vietnam vet who sparked the serious
debate Congress ought to have held back in 2002--when he voted for
the war. "It is time to bring them home."
Thomas Edelman, whose letter to the editor appeared in the New York
Times the same day Murtha's speech rocked the House of
Representatives, articulates the last logical reason not to cut and
run. "Regurgitating the notion of 'dancing Iraqis throwing flowers
before American tanks' has no merit when the brutal enemy to be
defeated assumes with good reason that it is bound to win. All it
has to do is to wait us out," he wrote.
True, Iraqi resistance factions would wait for us to leave before
turning on each other. Then again, isn't that what they're doing
now?
Edelman again: "The rhetoric of aspersions cast on our leaders for
having deliberately misled us; the repeated dangling of terrible
mistakes; and the rumblings about the impatience of the American
people not only give the terrorists hope but also convince them that
what is in their minds a weak and contemptible society of 'infidels'
lacks the fortitude to see its mission completed."
He's partly right: If the United States could prevail against its
fearsome Axis foes in World War II, it could surely beat--even after
countless errors of omission and commission--a rag-tag assortment of
ad hoc cells of moonlighting jihadis. But if wealth, education and
weaponry were the sole determining factors in war, we would have won
Vietnam. What was missing was political will.
Edelman's plea for compartmentalization is appealing, but we can't
separate the way we went into Iraq from the challenge we face now.
Winning a war requires a politically unified society, something the
United States hasn't enjoyed since 1945. Since then our fractured
nation has been unable to summon the unity to issue a formal
declaration of war, much less win one. Bush-era America is highly
fractured. Because the Administration can't count on most citizens
to help, it has had to fight its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the
cheap.
After 2000 most Americans told the CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll that
Bush had not won "fair and square." After 2004, the pollsters found,
"the nation seemed nearly as divided as it had been in Bush's first
election." How can he convince the half of the country that
considers him an illegitimate usurper to risk their lives, or those
of their sons and daughters? How can he get them to tighten their
belts for a real war effort--one with sufficient troop strength to
win?
Bush might have earned Democrats' fealty after the disputed 2000
election by convening a sort of national unity government, one that
recognized the deep and even ideological divide in the electorate,
appointed Democrats to key cabinet posts and ruled from the center.
Bush's radical-right policies and appointees, coupled with his habit
of impugning his critics as traitors, instead increased the
alienation of those who thought he'd cheated. "Not my president,"
the bumper-sticker read. And not their war.
The Republicans' decision to forego consensus made it easy to start
their war. It also made it impossible to win.
Ted Rall, America's hardest-hitting editorial cartoonist for
Universal Press Syndicate, is an award-winning commentator who also
works as an illustrator, columnist, and radio commentator. Visit his
website www.tedrall.com
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