This has been Iraq Week in Washington, with our ambassador to Baghdad, the poor guy, Ryan Crocker or Crocker Ryan, I forget which, and our four star, Petraeus, testifying first to the House and then to the Senate committees most concerned with getting us out of, further into, or just settling in the swamp that is Iraq. Bad metaphor. You need water to have a swamp, don't you. There's precious little of that in the sand, isn't there.
What they seem to be saying is that things are tough in the sand and we may have to be there for quite awhile while oil and water, Sunni and Shia, try to blend like homogenized cream. This is not likely to happen and I haven't even mentioned the Kurds and the factions within factions.
Meanwhile, Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the top constitutional lawyers in the country, the U.S. that is, was offered the job of dean at the new law school being established at U.C. Irvine down in John Wayne country. He was offered the job. He teaches at Duke. He argues before the Supreme Court frequently. He's written books that I admire for their excellent descriptions as to what the law is, which is not easy. Have you ever tried to describe a law that you're familiar with, accurately? Take the speed limit law, or the red light or stop sign law and describe it. Not easy, is it. Well, Conlaw is like that in four dimensions.
After making the offer, and after it was accepted, UCI sent its dean to visit to Chemerinsky to tell him, 'Sorry, pal, we must've made a mistake. Have a nice life.'
Why?
The long knives were out. Conservative knives. Out to knife the liberal.
This is a crime.
Some folks think I'm a 'liberal' because I believe in giving a guy an even shake despite his race, religion, or ethnicity. Other people don't. Screw 'em, I say. Screw the liberal, they say. Chemerinsky got screwed.
Which brings us back to the war in Iraq.
The conservatives believe that the U.S. was ordained by God to bring democracy and Jesus to the world, not necessarily in that order. The liberals ask who elected us to bring democracy to the rest of the world? Democracy, as I see it, is an idea of government which we trace to the ancient Greeks and adopted stemming from some troubles in our mother country, Britain, not Iraq, Babylon, India, China, etc.
So of other people don't want our democracy shoved down their throat, I don't think I have the right to shove it, do you?
Sure it would be nice if the Afghans, the Iranians and Iraqis treated women like people, provided them educations, and fair treatment when it came to divorce, support, and child custody, but they don't. Over there the men control the women and all aspects of their lives. "Owning" them may be too harsh a word, but I have heard it used in this context.
Do we have the right to impose our values?
I'm not so sure that we do.
What we do have a right to do is to practice our own values, which do not include torture, for example, and to show the rest of the world why our way is the better way, if they want to adopt it, which they don't.
This is called 'soft power.' We propagate it as a by-product of the stuff we do really well, such as sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll. Our movies and pop music, pop culture in general, have a way of permeating the world in an instant, when it is appealing. This is why the Ayatollah and why Osama have trouble with us and want to see us obliterated from the earth. We threaten them without even trying, just by putting forth our music, films, dance, and attitude.
So they attack the World Trade Center, the symbol, for them, of all that's wrong, with us.
This was a crime.
It was not a war.
Blowing up our symbols is criminal.
It does not represent a war against us, although I have no doubt that Osama's gang would like to see us gone.
I mean war in the traditional sense of World War II where the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was designed to sink our threatening fleet, the one that stood athwart Japan's plans to make an empire out of the Philippines, Malaya, Indonesia, China and wherever else it stood to provision itself with raw materials such as petrol, rubber, and labor.
We threatened them. They, Japan, attacked us. Hitler declared war on us shortly later, and we were in with both feet, fighting nations at war.
Osama is a pipsqueak compared to them, and that includes all of his active supporters.
Sure, he bloodied our nose, killing close to 3,000 in his first foray on 9-11, but dropping the Trade Center is not the same as sinking our Pacific Fleet, is it?
We lived to fight another day in both instances. Osama did not impair our military capability in the least. In fact, he energized it, beyond belief.
Instead of concentating our forces to go after Osama, we divided them and went after him (he's still at large, as far as we can tell, from the tapes he issues, which our people say appear genuine) AND Saddam Hussein, who deserved going after, but not on the 9-11 pretext.
The world had no problem with our going after Osama in Afghanistan.
The world had a big problem with our going it alone after Saddam, who richly deserved getting, because he hadn't attacked us.
So we must have done that for some other reason of state. Such as that we wanted to show the Muslim world not to mess with us.
Well we've surely showed them what happens when you mess with the U.S.
The U.S. gets quagmired, as in Vietnam.
One of the lessons we didn't learn.
Powell said not to go in unless the whole country is behind you. The whole country wasn't behind Bush, at least not after his pretext ('Yellowcake") was shown to be horse manure. He sold the U.S. a bill of goods and his supporters bit. Even his non-supporters felt a need to support our president on the theory he was supposed to know what he was doing. I don't believe he did.
So now we're stuck, but good.
We can't get out of Iraq.
I think Bush and Chaney planned it this way. We have facts on the ground. The big bad U.S. has invaded. Let the U.S. figure it's way out, now. This will take years. No matter what we do, we lose. Stay, and lose more lives, we lose. Pull out any time in the next few years, we lose all those lives and still gain very little, if anything.
We squander our hard power, and our soft power.
We have enough fire-power to incinerate the world.
Yet we're stuck in the sand.
Conservatives think this is all in a good cause.
Liberals think not.
I think not.
Conservatives will fight to the last of your sons.
Liberals think more highly of your sons.
Petraeus toes the Bush line.
That's why I don't put a lot of stock in Petraeus, any more than I did Westmoreland.
Hell, McNamara, Bob McNamara, the Sec'y of Defense, now says he was wrong about Vietnam and is very sorry.
Well, I'm very sorry we went into Iraq. We blew away the Iraqi army, and its maximum leader, Saddam Hussein, but we had no plan to consolidate the military victory, the inevitable military victory, with a political settlement that would work. Silly us. I thought we knew how to do this right. Apparently I was wrong.
I hate to see more American lives lost, don't you?
But here we are, stuck.
We can't quit because we'd look bad.
We can't stay because we're already looking bad.
Time to come home, boys and girls.
Regroup.
Fight again another day, when we've thought it out a little better in light of experience.
Yours truly,
rs
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