Something Important

Fred Barnes tells us that there may be a Christmas present in store for us. Not this Christmas. Next. After what appears to have been dithering with a feckless policy, something has caught Mr. Bush's attention. The loss of Congress has been a great bracer, it seems. Nothing like searing pain to focus one's mind.

So. A plan for Victory in Iraq. About bloody time.

No retreat, not exit strategies, not peace with honor. Victory. Which means throwing the ISG report into the slop bucket for the unwashingtoned pigs to squabble over, and stepping out of the looking glass back into the real world. The plan, then -- the one that could work -- is to destroy the Sunni "insurgents," secure Baghdad and then work out into the troubled province of Anbar.

How? No, stupid, not by taking troops away. Sending more in. Fifty thousand, who will act as warriors, not gatekeepers. Clear out the bad neighborhoods and then actually stay, rather than running back to homebase and letting the badguys regroup. War is not an endless game of tag. As Barnes states, "Earlier efforts had cleared many of those sections of the city without holding them. After which, the mass killings resumed." Bloody hell. No. Stay and stomp on the cockroachs every time they crawl out of their holes. They will bring their disease, but that mustn't justify allowing vermin to propagate.

"The Keane-Kagan plan ... is an application of a counterinsurgency approach that has proved to be effective elsewhere, notably in Vietnam. There, Gen. Creighton Abrams cleared out the Viet Cong so successfully that the South Vietnamese government took control of the country. Only when Congress cut off funds to South Vietnam in 1974 were the North Vietnamese able to win." Bloody hell.

Security first, then negotiations. Duh. The US military budget is bigger than those of the forty next largest combined. Hmm. What ever shall we do with this gigantic military? Hmm. Shall we impress ourselves by marching it up and down Main Street like a gay pride parade? Shall we secret it away in Alaska and Okinawa and Guam, just in case someday somebody might attack us and we'll have an army then and be safe cuz they'll be ascared of us oh wait we've already been attacked hmm I wonder what went wrong with that plan? Shall we bussle our boys into enemy territory and have them shake their fists from behind the battlements? You might very well think so. But I should think we might actually use our hard gigantic military for the function that nature designed it. What function? It is a sort of fucking the enemy, but it's the opposite of procreation.

There is a new cliche abirthing. Let's go Roman on them. War is about blood. Hopefully that of the evil doers. Sometimes ours. But it's about blood.

We do not, however, enter into the fray without counting the cost. My son is in a job in Baghdad that is as serious as a job could be. When I speak with him, it isn't my place to pry -- pray, rather. If he wants to talk about it, I will make it implicitly clear that I'm safe to talk to. But it is a solemn thing. My point? Doing what is right has all kinds of costs, not all of them in blood.

Winning wars is about dead enemies, though. I will not justify the statement. Search through these pages for "Beslan" and figure it out yourself.


J