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As
20,000 parcels of food aid and much-needed water reached
the Iraqi border town of Safwan, a
spontaneous pro-Saddam demonstration erupted as
the television cameras rolled: the shoeless, ragged
young men who crowded around the trucks pumped their
arms in the air and shouted that they would give their
lives for the Iraqi strongman. Even as we fill their
stomachs, it's clear we
haven't won their hearts and minds.
So
much for the perpetually clueless Jonah
Goldberg's prediction that Safwan would be the harbinger
of a warm welcome afforded the invaders by a grateful
Iraqi people, who would jump at the chance to be "liberated."
Snookered by an early Associated Press report of a few
half-hearted cheers and this
rather lame photo, Goldberg wrote:
"There's
every reason to assume that such
stories will be multiplied a hundred, if not a thousand
times over as U.S. forces approach the capital of the
Republic of Fear."
The
real story of "liberated" Safwan is told by
Geoffrey York of the [Canada] Globe and Mail:
"The
Iraqi teenager pointed to the stains on the chest of
his robe. 'See,' he said. 'They shot my brother, and
this is his blood.'
"Few
people in Safwan are willing to forgive and forget.
As many as a dozen people were killed here at the start
of the war, when U.S. and British forces bombarded the
town and headed northward toward Basra. The deaths have
provided an easy propaganda victory for the Saddam Hussein
loyalists, who still hold considerable influence here.
'The
British troops are shooting civilians,' said Kathem
Sajed
"
Goldberg
and his fellow cheerleaders for the administration's
war policy had better hope that such stories will
not be repeated a thousand times over. If so, then we
may ultimately "win" this war but at a price
that no one ever bargained for, least of all the War
Party.
The
Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Perle strategy was always predicated
on a certain amount of support from the Iraqi people,
who, you'll remember, were supposedly just
waiting for their cue to rise up. The invasion,
Perle crowed, would be a "cakewalk."
Challenged by Chris Matthews of MSNBC as to why this
would necessarily be so, Perle averred that all people
have "an inherent desire for freedom," and
this primordial instinct would confer success on our
military mission. Unfortunately for our soldiers in
the field, this desire for freedom is much broader than
Perle and his co-thinkers
ever imagined: it apparently includes the desire to
be free of foreign invaders. Oh well, back to the drawing
board
.
Perle's
resignation as chairman of the Pentagon's
Defense Policy Board is bound to be blamed on his
dubious
business dealings involving Adnan
Khashoggi and a mysterious "homeland security"
outfit d.b.a. Trireme Partners. But the failure of Perle's
policy, and the subsequent collapse of the military
strategy that evolved out of it, is reason enough to
have tossed him out on his ear.
Perle's
disgrace underscores the lesson of the first week of
this war. The Powell
Doctrine of intervening only when all other avenues
have been exhausted, and then only in overwhelming force,
is right at least, in a military sense – and
the Democratist
ideologues who have taken over the top civilian posts
in the Defense Department are dead wrong. Remember way
back in summer of 2002 when the first plans for
the invasion were being
floated? While senior military officers wanted to
replay Gulf War I and go in with half a million troops,
the ultra-hawks, grouped around Perle, were touting
a scheme to go in with a "light force" of
68,000 troops. (Perle
told David Corn that we could do it with 40,000.)
The Pentagon, already
highly dubious about the plans for an immediate
invasion, vetoed this harebrained scheme. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld split the difference between the ideologues
and the old guard: we went in with 200,000-plus and
even that, as it turned out, isn't
going to be enough.
When
voices of dissent were raised by senior military officers,
who questioned the rationale for invading Iraq, Perle
was contemptuously dismissive. As the [UK] Guardian
reported
at the time:
"Richard
Perle, a Pentagon adviser and an advocate of an assault
on Iraq, rejected the anxiety voiced as irrelevant.
The decision to take on Saddam, he said, was 'a political
judgment that these guys aren't competent to make.'"
Who's
incompetent now?
The
costs of this war are just now being toted up: not only
the blood of our young people, and that of the Iraqis,
but also $75
billion to start with – with no
end in sight. Worse, a Republican President will
probably wind up abandoning his campaign promise of
a meaningful tax
cut, and drag us into an
economic quagmire of spiraling deficits and increased
government spending.
"It's
got nothing to do with the war," griped Senate
Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R., Iowa),
in response to the Senate vote cutting the tax cut in
half. "The people defeating it want to spend money.
They ain't worried about paying for the war. They ain't
worried about the deficit."
Yes,
but how worried is the President? Someone should tell
Grassley to stop whining and face reality: George W.
Bush's war mania gave the Democrats the political
opening to make their move. We all have to make
"sacrifices" in wartime, they argued, and
the Republicans could muster no effective answer. When
it comes to choosing between the war and the economy,
this President is committed to focusing all his energies
on the former much to the dismay of his conservative
constituency, where dissent
from the Bushian foreign policy is already fermenting.
Perle
was only forced to resign after the failure of his policies
on the ground in Iraq but what about their consequences
right here on the home front? We are now told that this
war could last for months: be that as it may, the
longer this war lasts, the more the costs will pile
up, not only in troops, treasure, and national prestige,
but in the manifold encroachments
on our civil liberties enacted in wartime. We are
poorer in every way since the start of this war: we
are less wealthy, less safe, and far less likely to
avert a ruinous "war
of civilizations" against the entire Muslim
world.
Unfortunately,
the only price "the
Prince of Darkness" has to pay is the loss
of his non-paying position as chairman of the Defense
Policy Board. Our fighting men and women will pay with
their blood. Resign? If Perle had any sense of honor,
he would commit hari-kiri.
In
a
pointed editorial the day before his resignation,
the St. Petersburg Times named Perle as "the
guru of the civilian ideologues who are the architects
of the Bush administration's Iraqi war plans" and
the author, along with Vice President Dick Cheney, of
"a vividly optimistic scenario" in which the
Iraqis would take care of the Ba'athist regime with
little help from the U.S. military:
"The
lives of American soldiers are put at risk if our battlefield
plans are based on the political assumptions of civilian
ideologues instead of the expertise of our military
leaders. Some of those ideologues within and outside
the White House painted a scenario of an easy military
victory in Iraq because it fit their broader political
goals."
These
goals included rushing us into war before the anti-interventionists
had time to mount an effective
opposition. Perle and his friends foresaw a quick victory
in Iraq that would enable them to move on to their real
objective: re-drawing the map of the entire Middle East,
overthrowing the governments of Iran, Syria, Yemen,
Libya, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and the
Palestinian Authority. Perle's advice, when it comes
to these countries, is: "We could deliver a short
message, a two-word message: 'You're
next.'"
Thursday's
[March 27] Washington Post records the plaintive
cry of a senior military officer, who asks: "Tell
me how this ends."
It
doesn't, unfortunately unless Americans wake up in
time and rein in their rampaging rulers.
–
Justin Raimondo
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