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Iraq
“exit strategy?”
By James Rothenberg
02/15/06 "ICH" -- -- Fairness dictates admitting that one of the
harshest criticisms leveled against the Bush/Cheney
administration may be unwarranted and even unadvisable. I’m
speaking of the charge that this Iraq war was waged without
sufficient planning for what was going to take place after the
“major hostilities” had ended. Without a viable “exit strategy”.
How many times have you heard that? They didn’t have an exit
strategy. Their worst error.
It’s unfortunate that many Americans fail to grasp the magnitude
of the advance planning needed simply to stage the invasion. You
can’t simply wait for the Authorization for Use of Military
Force and then make a few phone calls. Stuff has to get moved
and stuff has to get done. Food, munitions, tanks, beds, band
aids, finishing up that air base in Qatar. With this in mind it
is not surprising that the Downing Street Memo revelations were
not taken seriously by respected U.S. and British policy makers.
Bush and Blair had committed to war practically one year before
the invasion? And this was a secret? It takes months to raise
the price of a stamp.
Just for the two leaders to psychologically prepare their
populations for war required lengthy propaganda campaigns. As
any advertising specialist can vouch for, you can’t implant your
product into the public brain in a single push. First you’ve got
to part the hair, open the scalp, get to the brain, open it…it
takes time.
Did we fault the Soviets for not having an exit plan when they
invaded a country? Or the Nazis? We are way too astute for that.
It would be insane to take over a country in order to leave it,
and if there’s one thing Wolfowitz and Perle and Cheney and
Libby and Rumsfeld and the rest of the gang are not it’s crazy.
Why these people are just one step away from a Presidential
Medal of Freedom!
The war planners had enough to think about just to get their
hands on the Oil Ministry before everything caught fire. If they
had to foresee every little power outage and beheading it would
stunt their every move. Besides, this was a time to test the
“flexibility” of our transformed military. Sure, some said the
invasion would be a “cakewalk”. Actually, one said it, Kenneth
Adelman in the Washington Post. Everyone else knew it, but it’s
not the kind of thing you say before you attack. Nothing to be
gained by it.
And there’s something else. No matter how many times you invade
a country, you always get a little nervous. A little sweaty.
It’s a natural thing. Every performer goes through it. Every
athlete. I’m sure they were sweating plenty in the White House
that first night until they saw those lovely light flashes in
the dark, Baghdad sky. That had to be comforting. Reminded me of
the fireworks scene in To Catch a Thief.
Little noticed and under-appreciated was how Bush/Cheney rule
gave us the first “good war” of this new century. Oh, don’t you
remember? Afghanistan. That was a good war, wasn’t it? It was
justified. We went in after Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. We
didn’t get them but we sure got a lot of other people. You mean
you don’t remember? John Walker Lindh. The wedding party…all
bombed out…ruined. Sure. But there’s one thing about the United
States. We don’t intentionally target wedding parties.
Come to think of it we never had much time to debate the
“goodness” of the Afghanistan war. So fast did we go off to
places where there were “better targets”. It revealed a
limitation of our great nation’s ability to fight and decisively
win multiple, simultaneous wars. We could fight them, and win
them, but our publicity department was stretched so thin that we
could no longer cover both of them. So Afghanistan was left to
suffer. Future plans should accommodate the growing need for an
enlarged public relations department. This will fend off
complaints from war critics that they were deprived of the honor
of airing their position in the public arena.
Finally, the Pentagon has quietly accomplished something
remarkable. No less than the New York Times has postulated the
emergence of a second superpower – the only power capable of
restraining the awesome power of the United States – world
public opinion. This has not escaped the attention of our
rulers, who bit into this problem with the same intensity that
one reserves for any serious rival. In so doing we may be
marking the beginning of a new international norm for warfare by
appealing to the doctrines of accepted practice – generality,
duration, and opinio juris – a stunning achievement.
Legitimizing the killing of journalists in a time of war. That
would be one fine day.
James Rothenberg, writer/activist -
jrothenberg@taconic.net
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