The only amazing thing about the desperate attempts by BushCo to wring the very last drops of middle class wealth out of an imploding economy is the breathtaking shortsightedness of the monied class in whose name it’s all being done. Were they all absent from kindergarten that day when Miss Kinnian went over the parable of The Goose That Lays The Golden Eggs? Just who do they imagine will be shelling out the shekels needed to fuel their yachts, once they’ve wrecked the system itself? Lenin was right. These fools are so greedy, and so short-term in their focus, they’ve sold the rope with which to hang themselves. Unfortunately, by the time that happens the rest of us will have long ago drowned in the mud and the blood lapping up against the scaffold.
Brilliant, eh? Well, if the economy has come a cropper, at least the good news is that we’re not condemned to repeat history when it comes to that stubborn little conflict in Iraq. You know, the one that is sucking up all our money, wasting lives by the millions, ruining our military and trashing our good name abroad. Just like in Viet... er, never mind.
I have been waiting for the better part of five years now for the Iraqi equivalent of the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive. Perhaps the assault on Basra is it.
For those whose high school history textbook conveniently forgot to mention it – along with most anything else that might be of value to an informed citizenry – the Tet Offensive was a major turning point at home in the prosecution of the war. For years, the president and his hacks had been assuaging Americans with inanities like, "We’re seeing light at the end of the tunnel", or "We’ll have the boys home by Christmas". When the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong drove so deep into South Vietnam that US marines were literally defending the American embassy from being overrun, the folks at home got the message. Militarily, the Tet Offensive was actually unsuccessful for the North in the medium-term, as US forces rallied and repelled the invasion. But, strategically, the discrepancy between the initial achievements of the attack and what US policy makers were telling the public gave the government a ‘credibility gap’ (it was actually a lot more like a canyon), and gave the war the smell of defeat. It took another five years to actually withdraw, but Tet was quite arguably the beginning of the end.
One reason that both Bush and his war have so far survived is that he could plausibly argue, especially to the poorly informed, that the US is at least not losing there. With the ‘surge’, he could and has been arguing that we are now winning. Scratch the surface slightly and these become absurd assertions. Add in the costs attendant to these supposed benefits and the assertions become downright obscene.
But not many Americans, comfortably insulated from the war by administration policies, are scratching or adding. Which has had me wondering for quite some time now, will there be a Tet equivalent to wake somnambulant Americans out of their stupor long enough to put down the remote, pick up a pen, and write their representatives in Congress?
Probably not, and it probably wouldn’t matter if they did. Democrats in Congress have shown themselves about as capable of reeling in the president as the sociopathic president is capable of feeling compassion. And now, of course, with only nine more months remaining to this disaster (assuming Cheney actually relents and leaves office), it’s almost inconceivable that they’d remove this human scourge from office. Considering what Bush has already done, what possible offense could now move Madame Pelosi and Monsieur Reid to finally act? Does the guy have to nuke San Francisco? If he deployed Ralph Reed to shut down Vegas, would that be sufficient?
But Basra will nevertheless go some distance toward convincing the sixteen or seventeen Americans still supporting the war that maybe they goofed after all. And it will probably especially convince the already enlightened that the time to act is now. In particular, we can hope that military personnel and their families will look at these events and will be moved in greater numbers to say "Basta!" to Basra. It takes a lot for a soldier or a soldier’s father to effectively say "Cindy Sheehan was right and my commander-in-chief was not only wrong, but knowingly lied to me", but that is precisely where the Basras of this war can be helpful.
Maliki said he was putting it all on the line when he attempted to invade Basra. I say ‘attempted’ because the assault was apparently so poorly planned that the government armored vehicles couldn’t even get into the city, being too wide for the narrow lanes. Brilliant. We’re likely to be spending three trillion bucks on some drunken fool’s Middle Eastern debacle, and nobody thought to ship over a tape measure? Anyhow, Maliki claimed – before he fled, that is – that this was going to be an all-in death-match against his fellow Shiite, Moktada al-Sadr. And, of course, he was backed by American air power in his invasion, which the corrupt and inept leader – the one in Washington, that is – defined more presciently than he could have imagined as a "defining moment".
In the end, it went down a bit differently than Nuri and George originally had in mind for their excellent adventure. The Iraqi army, centerpiece of Bush’s "Iraqification" policy, stalled and melted. The public rose up in disgust and took to the streets in cites all over Iraq, including Baghdad. The Green Zone imperial fortress is under assault from rocket and mortar fire. Maliki has given up his fight-to-the-finish rhetoric and is negotiating surrender with al-Sadr.
George Bush, of course, is having another "Mission Accomplished" moment, calling this debacle a sign of progress in Iraq. Most Americans have long ago given up listening to this fool. For John McCain, however, and for the party he shares with Mr. Bush, this is a disaster of the first rank. McCain has essentially leveraged his entire presidential bid on the surge. If I had a nickel for every time he has said "The surge is working" over the last year, I’d buy out the Republican Party wholesale, then drown it in Grover Norquist’s bathtub.
Irony is too gentle a word for the prospect of this Vietnam vet getting consumed by another Vietnam war. I once respected McCain on some levels, but I can’t imagine today that he hasn’t long recognized – along with Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and John Edwards – the lie of this war, choosing nevertheless to subsume the resultant tragedy to presidential ambitions of seemingly incalculable proportions. How anybody like that ever gets to sleep at night, I’ll never know. You gotta be missing a gene or something. And yet every president in my lifetime has shown himself quite capable of wholesale death and destruction when it suited his political ambitions.
And so, here we go, back to the future, back to disaster. We just couldn’t hang with all that prosperity and so we trashed the lessons of the Roaring Twenties and brought back Roaring Reaganism. We just couldn’t learn enough from the Vietnam experience to prevent some little embarrassment of a legacy admission to the presidency from taking us into a carbon copy war, even while he and his homies skipped out on the first one.
It’s bad enough that those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat the past.
Hell, we are the past.
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