Housecleaning

I just found this draft from the end of February while cleaning off my desktop. Not sure why I didn't post it at the time, but the current turn of events, restrictions on modes of communication with the outside world and continuing trends in Iraq make it just as poignant now as back then. I haven't spoken with my friend about his brother's current status, but if nothing has changed, he'll be going back in October sometime after arriving at Fort Hood early last December. However, I have my doubts based on the fudging of the numbers that's been going on where the surge is concerned.

I was out with a few friends earlier tonight and the subject of one of their brothers came up. The individual in question is active duty Army home on leave from Iraq. Several interesting facts came up that are worth noting:

He was due to be home (Fort Hood in central Texas) in mid November in time for Thanksgiving but did not get back until mid December. My friend spent Thanksgiving up there with his brother's wife and newborn baby on Thanksgiving just to keep her mind off of the fact that her husband hadn't made it back for the holiday. I'm pretty sure they had pizza for Thanksgiving Dinner...

He hasn't been back for three months and he already knows that he is going to be redeployed in October of theis year, making his leave time only ten months, if that.

He is already training for his return, giving his body and mind no down time to decompress and try to get over what he saw and did during his time there.

One of his jobs was on the Fire Brigade, which essentially means that he was the first to respond to attacks on patrols in his sector. He found himself having to respond to attacks and put out burning Humvees with guys that he knew and may have been hanging out with a few days before inside. Then after the fire was out, it was his job to haul the burnt out vehicles with the charred corpses of his comrades back to the base.

Another job he did was to resupply the personnel in an active combat zone with ammunition. This meant that he was driving a truck loaded to the gills with explosives into a live fire zone on a daily basis. He saw and knew plenty of people killed while doing that as well as on patrols.

To blow off steam, he and his buddies would hunt the packs of wild dogs which roam the streets of Baghdad with M16s, sometimes emptying an entire magazine of rounds into one animal.

He saw and photographed on a regular basis (for a few weeks until he couldn't take it any more) scenes of utter carnage: the bodies of Iraqi and American soldiers in the streets rotting, animals foraging, stuff that my friend described to me as "World War II scenes of devastation in living, vivid color".

By all accounts that I've been observing, things are worse and getting more so every day. No amount of surging or supplementing is going to turn things around. The only way things are going to even begin to appear to improve is when we get all our forces out of there and let the situation play itself out.

This sucks the big one, but we have to realize that whatever our stated motives are or our physical presence is, if we remain in Iraq, WE WILL BE PERCEIVED AS AN OCCUPYING IMPERIALIST FORCE BENT ON STRIPPING IRAQ OF IT'S GREATEST NATIONAL RESOURCE.

Yes, the civil war will get worse.

Yes, there will continue to be sectarian killings.

No, the Iraq Hydrocarbon Act will not be able to be enforced (sorry, chums)

Our standing in the world as a nation and culture is at stake as well as the lives of countless people--soldiers, contractors, civilians, insurgents, you name it. After a while, who they are and which side they're on matters less and less. They are all casualties of an inane and senseless conflict that they have no interest in. There comes a point in any conflict where all that matters to one is simple survival.

Additionally, the stability of the entire region and possibly the fate of the world as we know it is hanging in the balance. It might take just one more nudge (such as action against Iran) to push matters past the control of anyone or any country. Scarily, this is looking like it will be a reality before the Christmas shopping season gets into full swing more and more.

Scott Ritter discussing his book Target Iran with Sy Hersh last October:

And because this condition exists, there will be war with Iran, unless a little miracle occurs, called the Democrats winning Congress, creating enough friction to stop the war, in the November elections. But even if that occurs, as you pointed out, there is no separation between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party on the issue of Iran. Everybody sits there and says. “Wait a minute, we’re losing the war in Iraq, and there’s 65% of the population that’s turned against this war. Certainly we’re not going to go to war with Iran.”

Again, I mean to correct the American public here. 65% of the American public aren’t antiwar. They’re just anti-losing. You see, if we were winning the war in Iraq, they’d all be for it. If we had brought democracy, they’d be cheering the President. It wouldn’t matter that we violated international law. It wouldn’t even matter that we lied about weapons of mass destruction. We’d be winning. God bless America. Ain’t we good? USA, USA! But we’re losing, so they’re against Iraq.

But what happens when you get your butt kicked in one game? You're looking for the next game, where you can win. And right now, we’re looking for Iran for a victory. We’re going to go to war with Iran. When? Not in October, I’ll tell you that.

There’s a couple things that have to happen before we go to war with Iran. There has to be a serious diplomatic offensive to secure the military basing required to support the aerial forces necessary for sustained bombardment and the logistic apparatus that goes along with that -- the fuel, the bombs, the support personnel, the maintenance. We haven’t done that. We’re doing it. There has to be political preparation here at home. The Bush administration is not a dictatorship yet. They still have to go to Congress, and they still have to get a degree of congressional approval for military operations against Iran. Not that much, though. I mean, everybody is aware that after 9/11, Congress pretty much gave the Bush administration a blank check to wage war anyway they saw fit, so long as it dealt with the global war on terror.

Well, the "little miracle" did occur, but it doesn't seem to be working out as well as some of us thought now, is it? I guess we'll have to keep sending messages like the one delivered last fall until someone is under the dome who doesn't worry about how something looks politically and is more concerned with what the people of the country have mandated. Taking action like Hal suggests here might better serve the interests of the American and Iraqi people:

Now that we’ve unleashed a 120 billion dollars for Bush to grab and distribute to his friends – yes, some of it will go to Halliburton and Bechtel, you can bet on it – how do we get Congress to extract our troops from this insidious civil war in Iraq? They won’t step up.

I’ll tell you what we do. It was mentioned off-handedly on my blog yesterday. Today I woke up and said “Hey . . . ”

We have to get someone in Congress, one of the 140, to file a resolution for a National Referendum on the War in Iraq. A National Referendum to be voted on November 6th 2007. The resolution should be funded because it’s going to take some money to put this on every ballot in the country. The resolution should specifically state that the referendum before the voters is binding. My suggested wording:

“Resolved, the President of the United States is hereby ordered by the Citizens of the United States of America to implement a plan to withdraw all US troops from Iraq by March 31st 2008.”

It’s an up or down vote and if it receives a simple majority, the President must acquiesce.

But if the ruling elites and the big corporations have their way, the train will just keep on rolling, and it'll just get uglier. More of the Hersh/Ritter conversation:

SEYMOUR HERSH: But anyway, so the question then is -- we go to war -- tell us what happens next, in your view.

SCOTT RITTER: Well, it’s, you know -- it’s almost impossible to be 100% correct, but I’ll give you my best analysis. The Iranians will use the weapon that is the most effective weapon, because the key for Iran -- you know, Iran can’t afford, if this -- remember, the regime wants to stay in power, so they can’t afford a strategy that gets the American people to recognize three years in that, oops, we made a mistake. I mean, if that was Saddam’s strategy, it failed for him, because he’s out of power. Yeah, we realize we made a mistake now in Iraq, but the regime is gone. So the Iranians realize that they have to inflict pain upfront. The pain is not going to be inflicted militarily, because we're not going to commit numbers of ground forces on the ground that can cause that pain. The pain will come economically.

And it’s not just Iranian oil that will go off the market. Why do you think we sent minesweepers up there? We’ve got to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. The Iranians will shut it down that quick. They’ll also shut down oil production in the western oil fields of Saudi Arabia. They’ll shut down Kuwaiti oil production. They’ll shut down oil production in the United Arab Emirates. They’ll shut down whatever remaining oil production there is in Iraq. They’ll launch a massive attack using their Shia proxies in Iraq against American forces. That will cause bloodshed.

The bottom line is, within two days of our decision to initiate an attack on Iran, every single one of you is going to be feeling the consequences of that in your pocketbook. And it’s only going to get worse. This is not something that only I recognize. Ask Dick Lugar what information he’s getting from big business, who are saying, “We can’t afford to go to war with Iran.”

SEYMOUR HERSH: Final question: given all this, are we going to do it?

SCOTT RITTER: Yes, we're going to do it.

They're irrevocably disconnected from reality. The only thing that is to be done (if it's not too late), is to somehow disconnect them from their perches of power.