McCain's war

By Capt. Fogg

The funny thing - well one of the funny things about John McCain is that he doesn't equate 100 years of peaceful US presence in Iraq with the likely result of 100 years of war.

"What I believe we can achieve is a reduction in casualties to the point where the Iraqis are doing the fighting and dying we're supporting them,"

he said somewhat ungrammatically to Tim Russert yesterday. With the disturbing caveat that that American presence would only require putting Iraqis in jeopardy he tacitly admits that whatever type of government it is that we wish to impose might take 4 or five generations for such a government to be an expression of popular will and not the will of a colonial power. I'm being as restrained as possible by saying that's misguided. I would prefer to say it's insane or at least dishonest and I have to wonder where he studied history, much less current events.

Our stated function as "advisers" to the South Vietnamese government wasn't very successful and I think it's not too far fetched to compare the internal popularity of American backed and corrupt puppet governments as opposed to native governments in both cases.

The assumption that a sufficient number of Iraqis would be willing to spend their lives, their children's, grand children's and great grand children's life spans or longer in that "fighting and dying" to sustain American colonialism for the long term good of their country contains an admission of it's improbability. If enough people to require American presence are still willing to fight against Western government after 90 years, than it's about colonialism not about democracy or independence. If enough people aren't in place after 6 years, it's already a dubious battle. In fact the military we would spend decades developing, arming and "advising" would likely be the ones to throw us out long before the next century rolls by. Just ask any of the other former colonial empires.

For that occupation to really be able to pass the job on to the Iraqi military would probably require the kind of government there that could ignore the popular feelings about a hundred years war. That means dictatorship, not democracy and it would likely be necessary for us to occupy other nations while continuing to fight stateless armies to a greater extent then we currently are doing.

The value of the McCain goals to the US is hard for me to see. It smells more like an unwillingness to challenge the validity of the Bush administrations ambitions and to chalk up the failure to a minor tactical mistake that can be remedied with more troops and more war. More troops and more war hardly reflects American public opinion and I find it strange that a candidate who will pander shamelessly to special interests has no interest in pandering to the electorate upon whom the sovereignty of this republic depends.

Cross posted from Human Voices