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Tuesday, February 15, 2005
The Real Revolution in Iraq
Are we overlooking the real revolution in Iraq? It will take me a while to get to the point. Bear with me. First, from a recent TV show, a popular misconception that must be corrected:
AMY GOODMAN: We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Why don't we start off with Christopher Hitchens. Your assessment, Christopher, right now, of what's happening in Iraq.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: I think that the United States and coalition forces are not militarily defeatable in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain what you mean?
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Yes. I mean, I think it's important to know first what can't happen. I've been mocked for saying this in an earlier report from Iraq, but I'm reprinting it in my upcoming collection. Military superiority is something you have to see to -- to believe. Unless the United States chooses to be defeated in Iraq, it cannot be. Therefore, the insurgency, so-called, will be defeated. And all logical and moral conclusions you want to draw from that, should be drawn.
TARIQ ALI:Well, I think Christopher is right on this, that militarily, it is virtually impossible to defeat the United States. After all, they were not defeated militarily in Vietnam, either. It was a big military offensive by the Vietnamese. But had there not been a growing opposition to the war in the United States, a big anti-war movement which penetrated and percolated into the heart of the American army, that war could have gone on.
What brought the Vietnam War to an end was the combination of the Vietnamese military offensive and just a refusal by the American public, and in large sectors of the army to accept that this war was winnable. The question is this: The United States army cannot be defeated militarily; they're incredibly powerful, but can the Iraqi people be defeated? Can Iraq be anything else but a lame colony mixture of Gaza and Guantanamo under foreign occupation?
Actually what brought the Viet Nam War to an end was a second massive invasion from the North employing more armor than the Wehrmacht had at Kursk. This was the second such: the first, 1n 1973, was soundly defeated, with fewer than 20,000 of the invading 150,000 North Vietnamese troops who came south ever getting back home again. All the armor and mechanized invasion equipment was captured or destroyed: and this by ARVN, with about 400 US casualties for the entire year. The US supported the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam with supplies and US air assets; we didn't send in the ground forces.
In 1975 there was a repeat of the invasion, but the Democratic Party in Congress decided that it was better to show up Nixon than to defend the land into which we had poured so much blood and treasure. The Congress voted 20 cartridges and 2 hand grenades per man in ARVN and forbade the use of US air assets. South Viet Nam accordingly fell. After that came reeducation camps, purges, Boat People, and the US got a new cuisine in Orange County.
The US Army didn't accept that the war was unwinnable: IT HAD BEEN WON. The Viet Nam War was over and the US and ARVN had WON it. That victory was confirmed with the second war begun in 1973 ending with the utter defeat of the North and its Soviet allies. So the Soviet Union patiently rebuilt the North Vietnamese Army, sending in armor and trucks and ammunition and supplies, and a new Third Vietnamese War was begun in 1975, and this time the Democrats declined to fight it. South Viet Nam, having been abandoned by its allies, accordingly fell to North Viet Nam which had not been abandoned by its allies.
In another conference someone recently used the Viet Nam War as an example of how the insurgents always win. This is nonsense. The insurgents generally lose, even given assets like sanctuary areas and the support of a major power. Insurgents won in Algeria. In Afghanistan the Soviet puppet regime held on for a couple of years after the USSR bugged out, despite insurgents supported by the US from sanctuary areas. In Palestine the insurgents haven't won yet. In Viet Nam the insurgents were destroyed, wiped out, finished, annihilated, killed to the last man; Viet Nam fell to an old fashioned across the border invasion by a large armored army, and that only on the second attempt. It is not an example of successful insurgency, and those who repeat that canard are either trying to steal a point in support of their own agenda, or are willfully ignorant of the facts but insist on "being entitled to an opinion" without regard to any knowledge of the subject.
In Iraq the insurgents can win only if we abandon the newly elected government. Now true: pacification of the Sunni Triangle is going to take a while. However, the Sunni insurgents have not helped their cause by their ceaseless murder of Shiites all over Iraq; they have enraged the majority Shiites. The Arab Shiites of Iraq do not have a long military tradition; the Turks used Sunni plus Turkish officials to govern Iraq. And of course the Iranian Shiites are not Arabs at all being, like the Kurds, Indo-Europeans (Aryan; Iran == Aryiana, but use of those terms is not politically correct in some circles). The Shiites are used to being second class, and have been since the Sunni slaughtered their Imam Ali way back in the early days of Islam. This doesn't mean they can't learn how to govern themselves, and to occupy the Sunni areas. It will take time and help from allies. And of course it is likely to be bloody, hard cheese on the Sunni. But it is nonsense to say the insurgents inevitably will win. The best prediction is that absent massive support from powerful allies they will lose: and the US certainly has the power to discourage any nation from helping the Sunni insurgents.
Now understand: I did not advise going into Iraq. Given $300 billion to spend I would have put the money into nuclear power plants, alternate energy sources, fuel cell research and development, and other means of getting the US out of its dependency on anything going on in the Middle East. "We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but the guardians only of our own," and now that that Cold War is over we do not need armies stationed in Korea and the Middle East and Europe. But we are there now, we did not spend that money on energy sources, and we are as dependent on Middle Eastern oil as ever if not more so. We have bet so heavily on changing the entire course of Middle Eastern politics that we have far fewer choices than we had in 1989 or 2002.
I still prefer that we spend money on developing our scientific and engineering resources, on developing American technology, than in pouring money and blood into the Middle East as payment for oil; but it is getting harder and harder to see how we get out of Iraq without staying long enough to leave a new kind of government in Iraq. I am sure that is possible. I am not sure that a Shiite government strong enough to suppress the Sunni insurgency will be very grateful to us, or indeed all that preferable to Saddam; but perhaps so, perhaps it will. At least we are giving women the vote in Iraq, and that itself is a major, major revolution in the Middle East. Its implications are not easily foreseen, but that is the real revolution we have exported on the tips of our bayonets (or fired through the muzzles of our Abrams tanks...)
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Between them Microsoft and Adelphia are going to drive me mad. And certainly waste enough of my time.
I am connected to the Internet by satellite; the Adelphi Cable Modem was working but their DNS servers were not. The result was that until I reset the machine I could do mail and view my own web site because those addresses were cached, but once that cache was lost I was cut off entirely. I do not know how long it will take Adelphia to fix all this. If they bother.
When Cable Modem works well it works really well. Of course this morning all the servers here reset themselves having downloaded a ton of Microsoft updates. Whether that is part of the problem with Adelphia -- it does seem an odd coincidence -- I don't know. Satellite works but the latency is infuriating. Ah well.
There are times when I really hate computers and all the problems with keeping them going. This is one of those times.
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