Want to Win the War on Terror? Vote Democrat

[biglefthander]

"In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. Only one who knows the disastrous effects of a long war can realize the supreme importance of rapidity in bringing it to a close." – Sun Tzu

Herein lies the dilemma we the American people face. The current war—entering its sixth year—is now our longest continuous military engagement since the Vietnam War, the lengthiest in American history. This fact alone should be troubling, since Vietnam was a disastrous 20-year affair which threatened to tear our nation apart. Furthermore, there are many factors that make Vietnam and the War in Iraq very similar.

Both were wars started under false pretenses. Both were wars with no clear political objectives attached. Both were civil wars which American governments saw fit to create and to intervene in. And both wars degenerated into police actions where American troops were ultimately defending unpopular, ineffective national governments against popular nationalistic insurgencies. The longer the Vietnam War progressed, the more obvious it became that American military forces would have to destroy most of Vietnam to defeat the enemy, since the enemy was the majority of the Vietnamese people. And now we are embroiled in a conflict where the enemy is the majority of Iraq. Just one generation later, the children of Vietnam veterans are fighting the same kind of unprincipled, unending conflict.

With the lessons of Vietnam so fresh in the national memory, how could we have stumbled into creating yet another civil war and the resulting counter-insurgency operation destined for failure? Look at the background of the President, Vice-President and Secretary of State. They have spent the majority of their non-governmental careers in pursuit of one object, and their political and financial supporters have shared that lust.

OIL.

It has been the lifeblood of America's rise to dominance, and it has clearly now become the lubricant for the gears of war. With only five percent of the world's population, America consumes 25 percent of the world's oil production. With most unbiased experts saying the world has reached the peak of possible oil production, for now and the future, an energy crisis of unimaginable proportions is on our front doorstep. A dwindling oil supply and total lack of alternative energy sources, coupled with exponential demand for petroleum due to the rapid industrialization of Asia, has left America only one choice for the survival of its empire.

The War in Iraq is naked oil piracy on a massive scale. Iraq sits atop one of the world's largest and most easily exploitable oil fields, and until Saddam Hussein was toppled Bush's benefactors in Big Oil weren't getting any of it.

WMD? Al-Qaeda connections? Freedom? Please. Wars are almost never prosecuted for reasons of idealism. Idealism is generally the exclusive reserve of the invaded, the occupied. The Sons of Liberty had idealism on their side. The Soviets at Stalingrad held the high moral ground. Idealism has nothing to do with the US invasion of Iraq. That is just the sugary syrup they add to the bitter medicine warmongers are forcing you to swallow. Wars of invasion are fought for land and wealth. They are fought for control of strategic territory, and to control natural resources. Iraq offered both.

Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarshal, said of the methods used to galvanize his nation for a German conquest of Europe "…it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." This model, perfected by the world's first neo-cons, proved successful in the cruel and selfish hoax perpetrated by the Bush Administration in its objective to use the US military to occupy, secure and exploit one of the world's most oil-rich nations.

The Nazi model was updated and polished, then applied to hijack the fear and anger caused by a national tragedy on 9/11, amplify it through deception, misinformation and pandering to achieve the goals of the Project for the New American Century, a right-wing think tank (whose membership included Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the chief architects of the Iraq invasion) which pushed for years to achieve regime change in Iraq. Why--in the early stages of a war against a global Islamic insurgency--topple a Middle East regime which was secular, stable and of no threat to the United States?

OIL. It cost $36 per barrel the day before the invasion. It closed at a record $113 per barrel yesterday. Exxon has posted new record profits for ANY US corporation in history almost every quarter since the war began. Win the War in Iraq and take their oil for pennies on the dollar. Become bogged down in Iraq, destabilize the Middle East and the price of oil on the world market spikes to record levels. A win-win situation for Big Oil.

"He who joyfully marches to music rank and file, has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."–Albert Einstein

Any student of modern world history knows the common result of every aggressive, offensive, imperialistic invasion. Napoleon failed in his lifelong quest for mastery of Europe. So did Kaiser Wilhelm. And Hitler after him. So too his Japanese allies. The British Mandate in the Levant, and the Raj in India, and the Empire in East Africa eventually ended. France lost in Algeria and Vietnam. North Korea failed to dominate its peninsula. America was thwarted in Indochina.

In the Middle East, our handpicked strongman in Iran, Reza Pahlavi Shah, was run out of the country on a rail. The Western puppet in Iraq, King Faisal II, was deposed and executed. The Soviets were rudely expelled from Afghanistan. It doesn't matter if it is by proxy or by direct force, the result is the same. One year you are in control, the next year you are evacuating your viceroy just ahead of an angry, nationalistic mob. America's Iraq adventure will also end in this fashion. As Gandhi said, "any nation prefers its own bad government to the governance of a foreign power."


"Terrorism is the war of the poor. War is the terrorism of the rich." – Leon Uris

Let us examine the War on Terror for a moment. First, let me ask, how does one conduct a war on a tactic? Because that is what terror is. A tactic, generally used by insurgent underdogs fighting against a militarily superior foe. There are scores of instances from American Revolutionary history where British commanders and members of Parliament decried Americans as "terrorists" because our armies attacked from the forests and at night and our navies raided unarmed commercial shipping. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. It just depends on your perspective. So instead, let us call this the War on Militant Islam, because that is what it is.

But it is our vast military superiority--and that of our ally Israel--which makes terrorism the only effective means of resistance for our enemies. Since the partition of Palestine in 1949, the Arab states have been pounded and humiliated every time they attempted to drive the Israel Defense Forces into the Mediterranean. With the nuclear balance of power firmly in the favor of the US-Israeli alliance, fighting with methods of conventional warfare are not just silly, they are suicidal. That reality has not diminished the Islamic radicals' appetite for war. In fact, the humiliation and feeling of impotence has only whetted it.

But the last thing our enemies will do is line up in a big field and slug it out toe-to-toe with the American war machine. So the Islamic jihad, once led by mighty cavaliers brandishing scimitars in great battles against Christian knights, then carried on by mujahadeen facing Soviet helicopters with shoulder-fired missiles, now changes its tactics again by using improvised explosive devices against armored vehicles. These people adapt, improvise and overcome in a far more nimble fashion than we are used to. And they are under no illusions about war being a civilized act. Barbarism and atrocity are desirable to their ends.

No civilized person can condone attacks on unarmed civilians. Ever. The criminals who perpetrated 9/11 are the lowest form of scum, cold-blooded killers of innocent civilians. The doctrine of jihad was expanded to include civilian targets because it is the civilians who pay for and supply armies. And it is civilians who present the easiest targets for fear, murder and intimidation.

But instead of lobbing insults and epithets at them, it is time to recognize that our way of warfighting, which has been designed to meet Soviet and Chinese threats in open fields and open skies, is not going to beat Al-Qaeda. Our tactics are wrong and we have chosen the wrong battlefield for the wrong reasons. The enemy is running the classic Vietcong playbook on their own home field, blending into cities with the civilian population, using terror to supply themselves with money, recruits and information. Every time a US soldier kills a civilian in Iraq, 10 new enemies spring from the shadows to join the insurgency. And every time an Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo is revealed, ten thousand new warriors answer the call of the mullahs.

The way to counter this threat is not to use shock and awe in an arbitrary fashion against contrived enemies. This has already proven a failure in Iraq. And it will fail against Iran, the Bush Administration's next threat du jour. Already the neo-cons have invented obfuscations over WMDs (a non-existent nuclear weapons program) to deploy our forces once again on the wrong, oil-rich battlefield.

Iran, which is, according to the Bush Administration, the world's largest state exporter of terror, has no known Al-Qaeda cells. The surest way to create them in Iran is to invade that country. That is the only reason they are in Iraq. Al-Qaeda goes everywhere America goes in the Islamic world. That is their mission, to defeat America whenever and wherever we tread Islamic soil. So in order to plant terrorists in Iran to justify an attack, Bush and his minions employed Congress, once again, to label the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary force of the ruling party, as a terrorist group. This is the equivalent of labeling America's Minutemen, the border security club, with the same pejorative.

The way to defeat Al-Qaeda in Iraq then, is to first get out of the way and let the civil war sort itself out, which will inevitably lead to Shiite control. Once the Shiites consolidate their power, al-Qaeda in Iraq will be as viable a force as a snowball in hell. There is a major distinction between the two factions of Islam, both ideologically and ethnically. Al-Qaeda is a Sunni extremist group, manned mostly by Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE and Yemen. The Shiites are mostly Persians from Eastern Iraq and Iran. Sunnis and Shiites hate each other with a passion we in the West can barely begin to understand. The civil war in Iraq has only exacerbated this ancient enmity.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a shadow of its former self, estimated by General David Petraeus at having no more than 5000 members and dwindling rapidly as Shiite control of Iraq is consolidating. Iran, purely Shiite, will never host al-Qaeda under any circumstances. The fighters and weapons they supply to Iraq are employed against al-Qaeda forces as often as they attack Americans. Iran is so loved and respected by the Shia majority of Iraq that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad skipped lightly into Baghdad with much fanfare and rejoicing. In contrast, any American official who has the bravery to show their face in public needs a protective phalanx of tanks, helicopters and Blackwater mercenaries every time they venture outside the Green Zone. America is the only player in Iraq that is the enemy of every other faction, Sunni, Shi'a and Al-Qaeda.

"When the leader is morally weak and his discipline not strict, when his instructions and guidance are not enlightened, when there are no consistent rules, neighboring rulers will take advantage of this." – Sun Tzu

The Bush Administration has literally delivered the one Islamic country that was under our control at the beginning of the War on Militant Islam and handed it lock, stock and barrel into the hands of the country that is supposed to be our greatest enemy in the region. And it was completely foreseeable and completely avoidable, simply by reading the most rudimentary book on Middle Eastern history, or actually listening to the experts at CIA and the State Department who have made it their lives' work to understand the Islamic World. Instead, Bush and his GOP cronies ignored the professionals, and fabricated a rationale for a war that has created calamity, suffering and hatred amongst the very people we need as allies.

The only way to win this war against a shadowy, slippery enemy, is to hit him hard where he lives. He doesn't live in Iraq. He is just a houseguest there. He will leave when we do. Osama bin Laden has never been in Iraq. He has never been in Iran.

Al-Qaeda and their Taliban allies are where they have always been since we created them in the 1980s. The wild, lawless regions of southern Afghanistan and the mountainous, tribally-run Waziristan province in northern Pakistan, along the Afghan border. Waziristan has become like Cambodia in Vietnam, offering a safe haven, supply depot and line of communication similar to the Ho Chi Minh trail. It is here where we must hit them. Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama was ridiculed last summer for suggesting this strategy, yet this is exactly what the CIA is now doing, having been left no alternative by the Bush Administration's blind, unyielding support of dictator Pervez Musharraf. Using an unmanned drone, the CIA assassinated the No. 3 leader in Al-Qaeda without endangering a single US soldier.

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." -Einstein

It is vital that a Democrat is elected President for this new approach to succeed.

Democrats bring to the struggle against Al-Qaeda a reinvigorated and imaginative determination to marshal both military and diplomatic forces and skills that the Bush/McCain policies have failed to deploy. McCain occasionally talks about it, but he then inflames the broader Muslim world every time he utters his repeated Guiliani-like sobriquet "Islamo-fascists."

Afghanistan/Pakistan ("AfPak" for short), is where the ultimate fight against Al-Qaeda must be waged, but as long as the surge continues, along with unyielding McCain determination to keep 140,000 troops in Iraq, there will never be enough troops to undo the damage to the AfPak campaign that the Bush/McCain surge in Iraq has caused. And Al-Qaeda will continue to do precisely what the CIA has warned it is already doing.

"The holding action was made all the more difficult in that the Taliban could not be isolated from their sources of supply or sanctuary; Pakistan provided both," said George Friedman, a geopolitical intelligence expert. "It really didn't matter whether this was because Musharraf's government intended to play both sides, whether factions inside the Pakistani military maintained close affinities with the Taliban or whether the Pakistani government and army simply couldn't control tribal elements loyal to Al-Qaeda. What did matter was that all along the Afghan border — particularly in southern Afghanistan — supplies flowed in from Pakistan, and the Taliban moved into sanctuaries in Pakistan for rest and regrouping. "

"Afghanistan is slipping toward failure because it has never been a priority and it has not become one," said Senator Joe Biden (D-DE). "Afghanistan's fate is tied to Pakistan's future. The border between them is just a line in the map. Extremists flow back and forth every day...we have to bring the war in Iraq to a reasonable conclusion because it is quite frankly sapping all our resources and all our attention."

Republicans, including McCain, are ideologically constrained (by the right-wing's fanatical lust for "victory" and oil in Iraq) from implementing a new, more effective approach against Al-Qaeda. Nothing in McCain's rhetoric (there will be more wars, 100 years of occupation, etc.) suggests that he will change course from pure militarism--which has failed--and begin using a better, more rational mix of diplomatic and military force against Al-Qaeda. Recent reports by non-partisan intelligence experts indicate the NATO forces in Afghanistan control less territory now than at any time since the invasion in 2002.

"The U.S. commitment of troops was enough to hold the major cities and conduct offensive operations that kept the Taliban off balance, but the United States could not possibly defeat them," Friedman said. "The Soviets had deployed 300,000 troops in Afghanistan and could not defeat the mujahadeen. NATO, with 50,000 troops and facing the same shifting alliance of factions and tribes that the Soviets couldn't pull together, could not pacify Afghanistan."

The President promised a Marshall plan," Biden said. "It has been nothing approaching that."

A new Democratic administration, freed from the failed Bush policies in Pakistan, will forge an alliance with the newly elected government that despite its hesitation to use military force against Al-Qaeda, will be more receptive once the hated, U.S. supported Musharraf is gone. Already Bush/McCain are being discredited by Pakistan's newly victorious leaders for propping up Musharraf despite unpopularity that rivals even that of Bush.

Moreover, throughout the Middle East, there is a palpable desire by Arab leaders to engage more productively with a new Democratic administration to forge common policies and goals against Al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists who lurk in their midst. They view McCain as another militarist who will alienate more than embrace potential allies in the broader struggle.

There is no other choice. Bush and the Republicans have had seven years to get it right. And they have not only failed to defeat our enemies, they have failed to adjust their thinking and their strategy. Einstein summed up the Republican war follies very nicely when he said "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

The American people would be insane too, if they elected the same people and expected different results.

:banghead:

[Hugabear]

1. Sun-Tzu obviously didn't live in a time of military industrial corporations

The military industrial complex benefits greatly from a prolonged war.