You will get different estimates about precisely how close he is. We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into Iran, for instance -- into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.
We know that he has the infrastructure, nuclear scientists to make a nuclear weapon. And we know that when the inspectors assessed this after the Gulf War, he was far, far closer to a crude nuclear device than anybody thought, maybe six months from a crude nuclear device.
The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
-Condolezza Rice, September 8, 2002
My
last post seems have really stirred the shit
in the comments. I like it when that happens and I'd particularly like to thank Mook for being a psychopath. It keeps things interesting around here, particularly when my writing sucks, which seems to happen a lot.
In the comments, Mook makes a couple of interesting assertions that underscore both how batshit fucking crazy he is and how goddamned dumb the Bush administration is. You have to work awfully hard to be that uninformed and I don't want him thinking that I don't appreciate his effort. When Bill O'Reilly finally has the good sense to commit suicide, Mook is more than capable of taking over that chair.
First, he states "Vietnam is a fair parallel to Iraq in that it was a large scale war in which we were not seeking to conquer and rule the country," which is true for what it's worth. It just doesn't happen to be worth much.
You see, Americans live with this adorable notion that people care what American
motives are when the United States bombs or invades their country. I can assure you that they don't. Americans can get away with this because they consume half of the world's illegal drugs and possess half of its nuclear weapons. I learned a long time ago not to argue with heavily armed, stoned people and hopefully you did, too.
South Vietnamese villagers didn't like having their huts burned down and accordingly worked with the Viet Cong more than they otherwise would have. The Filipinos didn't enjoy being waterboarded and their liberation from Spain did little to alieviate that dislike. And I'm pretty sure that your average Iraqi doesn't feel especially "free" when he can't go to mosque without getting blown up. Also, replacing Abu Ghraib with, well, Abu Ghraib was probably less than wise. Just sayin'.
Americans like to point to the post-war occupations of Germany and Japan, yet neglect to mention that anyone capable of forming an insurgency in either country was fucking dead. Oh, and the allies had something approaching a proper force to population ratio in Germany and Japan, which they don't in Iraq. As you may have noticed by now, airplanes and smart bombs aren't particularly effective in civil pacification operations.
Mook continues; "Saddam was a nutjob threat to the region with a history of producing and using chem(ical) weapons. That threat was successfully removed."
Actually, that was true in 1998, as we later learned. As one can read about in
Deception: Pakistan, the United States, and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, the Clinton "blowjob bombings" of December '98 were devastatingly effective in wiping out what remained of Iraq's WMD capacity while Republicans questioned the need for those bombings at all.
Mook suggests that Saddam "had expelled weapons inspectors back in 1998", which isn't the case. The inspectors left because he stopped giving them access to suspect sites. After they left, Saddam refused to readmit them.
Furthermore, the United States is the
last country on earth that should bitch about the production and use of weapons of mass destruction. First, America actually invented most of those weapons and is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon. Second, the US government has excelled at (often accidental) proliferation and looking the other way when really scary countries like Pakistan get the bomb.
You know who else has WMD and a history of using them, Mook? The United States, the United Kingdom and France. You might know them as a majority of the permanent members of the Security Council.
Second, the US had a complicated history with Iraq's WMD program. Specifically, they provided the original funding for it during the war with Iran with agricultural credits and dual use technology transfers from the Reagan administration. This is something that Donald Rumsfeld doesn't like to talk about much, but knows quite a bit about.
Third, the idea invading a country that you presume has WMD and will use it on you or give it to terrorists is the single craziest fucking thing I've ever head. If Saddam did have them, the invasion would make it a self-fulfilling doom prophecy.
Here's how it works. No national leader would pass along a weapon like that and expect to long survive. Someone would only do something like that if the destruction of his regime was a certainty. It seems to me that if you're announcing that you're going to take a guy out, you're assuring that he'll either use those weapons on your troops or pass them along to terrorists so that he can exact his revenge from beyond the grave. The Bush administration is goddamned lucky that Saddam didn't have WMD. If he did, Pittsburg might no longer exist today.
That's not to say that Iraq shouldn't have been invaded, just that WMD was a laughably silly reason for doing it.
Saddam seemingly couldn't get out of bed in the morning without making a monsterously dumb strategic miscalculation. "I'll invade Iran. What could happen?" "I'll invade Kuwait. What could happen?" With the cocksucker French and Russians determined to lift the UN sanctions, it was only a matter of time before Iraq went on a shopping spree and Saddam did something dumb again and the United States would inevitably have to come to the rescue.
That being the case, better to take him down when he's weak than when he's strong. But that's a complicated argument to make to an uneducated public. It also lacks the peppiness of "mushroom clouds" and makes for a very busy bumper sticker.
Then there's the matter of unintended consequences, which President Bush seems to be the poster boy for.
In his 2002 State of the Union, the president and David Frum created an artificial "axis of evil" consisting of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and specifically cited the dangers of their weapons programs. Then the US invaded Iraq. Predictably, Iran and North Korea accelerated those very programs to deter the United States. They might be evil, but Iran and North Korea aren't stupid. The best part? Deterrence seems to have worked. At least against the United States. Once the Commies and Persians figure out how containment works, Bush is fucked.
Mook took great exception to my contention that Operation Iraqi Freedom was "the most underplanned and undermanned military operation of its size in human history." Perhaps I could have stated that more clearly and I'll use this space to elaborate.
When one country decides to invade another, it usually knows two things before proceeding. First, they figure out what it will cost. Second, they decide what should happen when they win. The Bush administration was unique in resolving neither.
Paul Wolfowitz famously had the balls to go before Congress and say with a straight face that the war would cost no more than $50 billion and that would be financed through Iraqi oil revenues.
Both predictions turned out to be patent horseshit. Once you factor in the damage to the American economy and the continuing health care needs of the wounded veterans, this war is well on the way to eventually costing
three trillion dollars. And that's three trillion in borrowed money, teenagers. For the first time in American history, a war is going to be paid for by the children and grandchildren of those who fought it. And to think that Larry Lindsey was dumped on his ass for suggesting that it was only going to cost $200 billion.
And you know what Iraq has been doing for the five years since "Mission Accomplished?" Importing gasoline. They sit on the second largest patch of it, but they're actually importing it. Turns out that three decades of war and sanctions rips the tits off of your production and refinery capacity. Who knew?
More importantly, the suggestion that the resources of a conqured nation could be exploited to pay for the conquest sort of undercuts the assertion that it was an operation where "invader does not seek to control the invaded country." The Wolfowitz plan would have been brilliantly original if the Germans hadn't thought of it first. But it does explain why the only arm of the fallen Iraqi government that was protected when the looting started was the Ministry of Oil.
As to the planning of what "victory" would look like, the history is there for anyone who wants to read it. The planning of the war took a year and a half. The planning for the aftermath only started about 3 months before the invasion. America's two proconsuls, Jay Garner and L. Paul Bremmer arrived in Iraq mere weeks after their appointments and had no documented directives on what precisely they were expected to accomplish. That, in a nutshell, is how Iraq ended up with a fucking flat tax before it had anything that even remotely resembled security. It's almost as if President Bush invaded a country to decide whether Steve Forbes was right all along.
Anyone who has read Rajiv Chandrasekaran's majestic
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone knows that the Coalition Provisional Authourity was little more than resume padding for budding young hacks from the Bush/Cheney 2000 campaign. If you once blew the guy who got coffee for the deputy director of lying in the Wyoming Republican Party, there was a better than even chance that you were going to rebuild Iraq's electrical infastructure. The results are obvious. Iraq still has no reliable electricity, but they do know all about the Bush vision of hack power. Of course, they already learned that from Saddam.
Worse still, the CPA went about attempting to sell off Iraqi state industries in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, which explicity prohibit that sort of thing. That only further undercut the Bush administration's already battered reputation for competence and respect for the rule of law.
Now, I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. . .
Q: If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties? Cheney: Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.
-Vice President Dick Cheney, "Meet the Press," March 16, 2003
The above quote by Vice President Hunty McShootaguy seems to be the total and full extent of postwar planning in Iraq. "They'll love us like the Japanese love Ratt," the thinking went. "We'll get the genetically criminal Ahmed Chalibi in there and everyone'll be happier than pigs in shit. Besides, who
doesn't love a little sexual humiliation in jail?"
Anyone who knows anything about anything will tell you that you can't provide basic security with a ratio of occupiers to occupied that thin, let alone transform a society that is older than most, riven with historical sectarian divides, and is famously fucking cranky. The idea that you can take over a country as big and as crazy as Iraq with a force that thin and placate it with a guy who has actually convicted of a massive bank fraud right next door is worse than insane, it's criminal negiligence. Congress must have created a Department of Fairy Tales when I wasn't looking because I can't think of anywhere else that such "planning" could have taken place. On the other hand, it is perfectly representative of the entire Bush presidency.
If you were curious about what I meant by "the most underplanned and undermanned military operation of its size the human history", now you know. No intellectually honest person would say that the occupation of Iraq is a a testament to superior planning, manpower and execution.
Which leads me to the other points Mook has to make to make.
"Name another large scale war in history involving 150,000 invading troops where only 4,000 were lost over a 5 year period in in-country battle. Whether you all are honest enough to admit it, those relatively minimal losses, miniscule by historical standards, are a testament to superior planning, manpower and execution."
Oh.....
I can't think of another large scale war in history where over 90% of the casualties occured after the mission was described as accomplished and the major combat operations were deemed "over." You see, Mook suffers from a case of Bush Derangement Syndrome, too. He conveinently forgets major policy statements from his masturbatory Jesus when they conflict with his hallucinatory world view.
What Mook also doesn't work out in his retarded calculus is the number of
Iraqis who have been killed in that 5 year period. Surely, you remember them, right? Those are the folks you liberated! Well, the insurgents have killed nearly a hundred of them for every American they've smoked. Of course, that number is just a guess since the Bush administration can't be bothered to acttually count how many of the people it liberated have been subsequently murdered. Also remember that the one of the only things an occupying power is legally obligated to provide the occupied is security.
If you agree with the position that the insurgent tactics are indeed those of terrorists, you have to recognize what the point of terrorism is. And that's not to achieve a stellar body count, it is to instill fear. That's where the "terror" part comes in, see? And it seems to me that your average Iraqi is plenty scared.
The Vietnam analogy is being bandied about quite a bit in the comments of my previous essay, and that's worth exploring.
Mook contends that "we didn't deliver any semblance of democracy in Vietnam or in the entire region, whereas Iraq has had democratic elections. Sure Iraq's political alliances are fragile, but they are undeniably steps toward democracy like nothing we were able to accomplish in Vietnam. And so on. That progress in Iraq costing 4,000American lives vs. 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam."
Categorical nonsense. South Vietnam had plenty of elections. They just didn't mean a whole lot because those governments were incapable pf providing basic services, such as security, to their constituents. Sound familiar?
The Vietnam analogy also falls apart in the face of the "what if America wasn't there in the first place" test. If America wasn't in Vietnam, the north would have swallowed the south and bunch of people would have died. That's tragic, but ultimately what happened anyway.
If America never went to Iraq, Saddam would be running a criminal government that targeted political dissidents and ethnic rivals. But since America went into Iraq the way that it did, anarchy has broken out where the violence is completely random and no one of any faction is safe. Worse still, a Kurdish declaration of independence remains a distinct possibility, which would provoke a Turkish invasion with the United States in the middle.
That's your "superior planning, manpower and execution" at work.
But you're right and I'm wrong, Mook. Bush is
Clauswitz in a fucking cowboy hat. You finally got me. I'm the deranged one. George W. Bush will remembered as the greatest military mind in recorded history!
I may be wrong and engaging in faddish "truth to power" rhetoric. But you're consciously and despite all of the available facts, speaking "truth"
for power, which is usually infinately worse, son.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Gimmie Shelter By: The Rolling Stones
From: Let It BleedPermalink 
FUN WITH WMD, DEMOCRACY, STUPIDITY & IRAQ
