Bugger. Figures I'd have the same length problem, doesn't it?

[unixronin]

[Response to caged_admin, which length limits preclude posting in a comment:]"

To hit high points:

Politically wrong -- McNamara didn't explain why he said this, so I can't speak to it.

Economically wrong -- I'd guess DocWebster is right about the "We can't afford it" answer. Economically speaking, Bush has dramatically snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, and as far as I can see, has no credible plan to do anything about it.  I do not suggest that this is solely related to our "foreign military adventure" in Iraq, nor pretend to have a solution myself.

Morally wrong -- This requires a little more discussion.

To start with:

The attacks have only gotten bolder the longer we've shown ourselves to be weak, afraid, and unwilling to destroy our enemies.  They have shown no compunctions whatever about destroying us.

The attacks have gotten bolder, yes.  I think this is because the leaders have gotten bolder, more sophisticated, and more ... grandiose, for lack of a better word.  I'm sure a perception of the US as weak and unwilling to fight back has contributed, but ultimately I question whether it's made that much difference.  You used the key word yourself -- "fanatical".  We're fighting people who don't care whether they live or die.  We're fighting people who are convinced that dying in battle against us is a direct path to Paradise, where "battle" is defined to include "walking into a restaurant wearing ten kilos of Semtex."  Hell, we're fighting against people who don't see any moral problem with a 21-year-old mother of two strapping a bomb to herself to go blow up whoever she can get close enough to.

For me, the "morally wrong" part of the Iraq war is going to war under false pretenses, as it were -- the continued claims, even after intel reports said Saddam almost certainly had no WMD, that he did and this was why we were doing it.  I think in some respects, it's not that the war itself was necessarily morally wrong -- the man was a bloody-handed butcher, and as you've pointed out, his sons were every bit as bad -- as that through ineptitude and unwillingness to own up to error, we've managed to create a PERCEPTION that what we were doing was was morally wrong, because we created a perception that we were doing it for reasons known to be false, which then raised the question of the real reason.  Iraq being a Middle Eastern nation with large oil reserves, and the US being one of the world's largest consumers of oil, the obvious perception was that it's all about the oil.  Little, if anything, was done to counter this perception, and all-but-officially pre-awarding the oilfield reconstruction contracts to Halliburton certainly did nothing to help.

(Oh, and incidentally, while on the perception-of-weakness point, I'll be the first to agree on the utter stupidity of giving aid to people who hate us.  Danegeld, anyone?)

Limitations of high-tech military equipment?  Well, to point out just one, an F-15E or an M1A1 Abrams isn't worth a damn when it comes to going house-to-house in the middle of a city and sorting out the ten hidden insurgents from the two thousand civilians who just want to be left alone.  And while we can win the hearts and minds of children handing out toys, and while we have plenty of people over there who are grateful to us and rat out insurgents to us, there's plenty more who think it's now past time we went home and are willing to give us a swift kick in the pants to help get the point across.  (It doesn't help this cause when we go into Iraqi neighborhoods and tell them that their getting basic services like water and electricity back is conditional on them ratting out insurgents.)  Most of the Sunni leaders want us to go home, most of the Shi'a leaders want us to go home, and the Kurds think we're not doing enough to ensure they get a say in the running of the country.  (Oh, and while we're at it, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Jordan are mad at us because they're afraid we may give the Kurds too much say -- which is to say, any at all.)  The best-selling popular music in Iraq calls us hostile occupiers and calls for fighting against us in the name of Allah.  (Go read this article.)

God-given right -- I have to agree with McNamara on this one.  Bush's repeated open declarations that America is serving the explicit will of God on Earth, that we have God's blessing for whatever we do and are therefore automatically Morally Right whatever we do, scares me.  Frankly, that sort of zealotry in anyone, friend or foe, scares me, because people who believe that they have God's blessing upon their actions tend to have little compunctions about their actions.  To name but one facet of this, I point to all those detainees in Gitmo (not to mention the 10,000 to 20,000 in Iraq) who are being neither accorded due process as civilians, nor treated according to the Geneva Convention as combatants.  Remember, too, that the government is refusing to even release the names of those they're holding ... some of these detainees are teenagers, fer crissakes, and so far as their families are concerned, they're just "missing" without explanation.  Their families don't know if they're dead or alive.  We just released two 14-year-old boys after holding them incommunicado for a year.  When did we start making war on children?

(Yeah, I know, children in the Middle East get onto Israeli buses wearing dynamite undershirts.  That does not excuse us.  "When you struggle against monsters, beware lest you become a monster.")

We also probably shouldn't overlook the several Canadian nationals whose travels we've arrogated unto ourselves the right to interrupt on their way home, with varying degrees of mistreatment following ranging from destroying their legal, valid Canadian passports to deporting them into the hands of hostile foreign intelligence agencies to be tortured.

South American despots -- I'll be the last person to claim that it was OK because they were OUR bloody-handed tyrants, any more than Saddam.  I don't, however, think McNamara is suggesting anything so simplistic here.  I believe what he's addressing here is the idea that we could just remove Saddam and bing-a-boom, fanfare, rimshot, it'd all be over just like that.  Removing Saddam was far from the end of one problem, and only the beginning of the next, and I read McNamara as meaning that we may just not have a tidy solution for that problem, but that we can't sit around in Iraq indefinitely trying to create one unless we want to have a new war on our hands -- we may, in the end, just have to withdraw and let the civil war happen, unpleasant though the prospect is.  We're not Superman.  We can't fix everything.

I'm about out of thoughts and ambition right now.  It's been a pretty shitty couple of days.

Comments

[docwebster.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry. I just have to. I just have that sort of mind, and there's no escaping it.

caged_admin and unixronin are having length problems!

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

You silly, twisted boy.....