war

Today I got to wondering about all this Iraq War stuff. In particular, our politicians have been doing the bring-the-troops-home/cut-and-run dance long enough that I've tuned them out, so I have no idea if anything reasonable has been said on either side.

Lacking input from my deceased career-officer grandfathers, I tend to collect my war-related information from other retired military types, so I note that:

• Various retired generals have refused the post of 'war czar'. I recognize that the military has changed since Vietnam, where my soon-to-retire grandfather threw a party when my sister and I were born, but I can't imagine career officers refusing posts because they disagree with a war. I can only see them refusing if they thought the people in charge were idiots. I mean, I'm sure he knew some actual bad words, but about the worst epithet my older grandfather had in his arsenal was the word 'foolish.'
• Senator McCain, who thinks we need to stick around to fix this up, thinks Bush's handling of the war has been "a train wreck."

Having established that the war is going badly, or maybe that the retired generals who think the war is going fine are soft-spoken, I still have to figure out the viability of cutting and running or staying the course. If we:

• Stay the course.
  • A Google search of 'why we should stay in Iraq' got me a bunch of documents produced in 2005, so the arguments there are that terrorists will declare that they've won if we leave, and I think I remember the overuse of the word 'embolden' from back then, so it's not clear I learned anything there, except for the fact that there was an exit strategy: beat up the insurgents, get the Iraqi government and security forces on their feet, and bail in an orderly fashion.
  • Leaving will cause a civil war. I haven't heard this one for a while, so I don't know if it's still in use.
  • "We're fighting for freedom," if used correctly, actually means that we're trying to free Iraqis from oppression, instead of just sounding like something you chant at 'cut and runners.'
  • Pottery Barn has no 'you break it, it's yours' policy, so if we stay in Iraq to clean up the mess we made, we can't blame trendy household goods.
  • As far as I know, Orson Scott Card, the science fiction and fantasy author, has no military background, but he writes much more compellingly on staying the course than I do.
• Cut and run:
  • Two unrelated McGoverns think that we're stuck in a quagmire, and instead of losing credibility if we leave, we'll gain respect for admitting an error.* Also stubbornness and face saving are not good reasons to keep getting people killed.
  • Again from 2005, ten reasons we should get out, among them that we're blowing a lot of money on this, people are dying, everybody hates us, and our presence feeds the insurgency.
  • Bill O'Reilly concluded in early 2006 that there are too many crazies over there, and we should get the heck away from the nutballs.**

Stop the presses! I just learned that there's a whole page of links from a political science class at the University of Michigan, and since I very carefully never took poli-sci the same way everybody else carefully never took physics, I have concluded that my current project looks, in the face of all those links, daunting. Ok, since I'm not a politician, stultifying.

But based on what I learned so far, my original supposition that since Bush seems to be totally incompetent, so whatever he wants to do is wrong, isn't working out for me. I don't want our troops to be stuck in Iraq for fifteen months at a time; I think that's unconscionable. However, it's not clear to me that wars can be won quickly, and there is something that looks like a government over there, whether or not it's getting safer in the Bagdad/Indiana market. Ok, after reading about the security in the market, now I'm not sure again. Crap.

For my last-ditch effort, I'm going to try actual history. They didn't teach Vietnam when I was in school, so I'm going to look at Afghanistan. The USSR tried to prop up the government there, and after nine years, they gave up and went home. We called them losers, and Afghanistan turned out, um, Talibany. But I found an interesting article about the thoughts of some of the people who fought the Afghans, and they advocate getting out since the insurgents just get better and better with more practice, even when your own government keeps touting its progress.

I guess this means that my next task is to hunt up some credible information about US progress. I think I'm screwed.


* I don't know what planet they're from, and I identify as a raging liberal.
** I don't know what planet Bill O'Reilly is from, either.