On I go, starting a second month of only taking news from The New York Times. There has been some front page war coverage the past couple of days. So, I suppose I should spend some time making amends for all my earlier criticisms of the Times’ war coverage. But, then again – fuck that.
I have a couple of items I want to highlight and then a real life account. And that is it. I am going to go consume, purchase, and forget all about every rotten thing my country is doing with the tax checks I am sending.
First, I have to say a few words about a story on today’s front page. I can feel the pressure building, and I am about to blow a gasket. But, I’m staying calm and focused. This will not be another rant. I’m just sharing an insight that makes me want to vomit. It is probably not even that much of an insight.
The title of the article was “Bad Iraq War News Has Some in G.O.P. Worried Over ’06 Vote.” And the part that really got to me was this:
“There is just no enthusiasm for this war,” said Representative John J. Duncan Jr., a Tennessee Republican who opposes the war. “Nobody is happy about it. It certainly is not going to help Republican candidates, I can tell you that much.”
Representative Wayne T. Gilchrest, a Maryland Republican who originally supported the war but has since turned against it, said he had encountered “a lot of Republicans grousing about the situation as a whole and how they have to respond to a lot of questions back home.
“I have been to a lot of funerals,” Mr. Gilchrest said.
All this in the context of “how best can we save our party’s ass.” I am pissed. This is not a war to them. It is a business venture. It was driven by politics and business. It had nothing to do with getting a bad guy or making our world safer from extremists. I don’t want to say I told you so to the idiots who supported this war back from before the beginning, but I did fucking tell you so. And, now that we all know it, I don’t really want to hear Republican hand-fucking-wringing about how the war isn’t making their constituents happy, or how they’ve been to too many funerals. Almost two thousand G.I.’s are fucking dead. They should all be unhappy about that. Democrats who supported this monstrosity, too. Twenty-five thousand innocent Iraqi civilians dead, at a minimum, and I still have a hunch that this figure is much too low. Number of terrorists state in the world then = X. Number of terrorists states in the world now = X + 1. We are war criminals. The only thing preventing the trial of our leadership is brute strength. We are some small subset of that same Nazi army that rolled throughout Europe and Africa in the middle of last century. And, to hear fucking Republican’s whine about how this FUBAR war is uncomfortable politically makes me gag. Tell it to fucking Casey, assholes. Fucks.
Speaking of Cindy Sheehan’s martyred boy, I did attend a candlelight vigil last night. On the steps of the capital in Lansing, Michigan. Two-hundred souls. A nice quiet time was had by all. I got a chance to speak out. And, as you might have gathered, I ranted like a lunatic about being angry and wanting to fight the fucking apathetic Fox-watching bastards whose asses are firmly planted on couches around the nation. The ones who helped bring us this fucking war, by not stopping the idiot they elected. I just don’t think that there is enough shared sacrifice on this whole “war thing” and I think the sated masses need to feel an impact. Maybe they ought not have a pleasant time the next time they trip down to Wal-Mart. I don’t know. But, I vented. It was cathartic. I met another blogger from dKos there. Had a chance to get more involved with the anti-war movement first hand. All-in-all it was good.
One other thing, and I will be done for today. (I only have thirteen more days of this stuff and a wake-up, as we used to say in the Army when we really wanted something to end). Reading the Times yesterday, I thought through an entirely new theory of combat. I think I want to share it with the Army War College or something. But first, I better run it by you.
I had this military epiphany while I was reading a front page article about the re-constructed Mosul police force. It is, as you might guess, a farce. A bunch of men in shorts (and street clothes) looking for pistols, etc. I had an image of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson walking into a restaurant in Pulp Fiction. The new station house in Mosul is not exactly the set from Barney Miller. It is a concertina wire-protected fortress on a hill in the heart of insurgent territory. Some concrete abutments and sheds. Sounds for the life of me like a military installation rather than a police precinct.
Anyway, the police force is propped up by the United States military. Shocking, I know. But, true. The whole thing sounded very much like the First Active Iraqi Army Brigade that I wrote about the other day. You remember the one. The guys protecting the three-mile strip in Baghdad called “Purple Heart Avenue.” The army brigade that doesn’t really function without the U.S. military. Pretty much the same thing is happening with the police in Mosul.
As I read about the recent history of Mosul, I started to come to my grand military theory. It seems that Mosul’s original police force collapsed, and that the insurgents took over the city, at the same time last November when the U.S. Army invaded and flattened Fallujah in an effort to root out the insurgents. And, it dawned on me. The whole big picture about what is happening in Iraq.
I call it the Whack-A-Mole Theory. You may have seen the arcade game. The basic premise is that you put a quarter into the machine, and mechanically, these moles start popping their little heads up through a bunch of holes on a board in front of you. Your job is to whack the moles with a mallet when they pop their heads up. No moles are actually harmed in the playing of this game. They are, like, plastic re-creations. Not even very life-like. Kind of zany looking.
Anyway, when you hit a mole in one place, another will pop up in another hole. Sometimes two pop up at once, so you have to hit them both real fast. The underlying premise of this game, which never changes, is that as long as you keep putting quarters in the machine, the moles are going to keep popping their heads up.
Through my longstanding reading about the War in Iraq, it seems to me that Uncle Sam has placed himself in front of a very large game of Whack-A-Mole in Iraq, and he is feverishly pumping quarters into the machine, and wildly flailing with his mallet at the moles where ever they rear their heads. Attack the “insurgents” in Fallujah, and they pop up in Mosul. Crackdown in Baghdad and up they rise in Tikrit. And, the premise of the War in Iraq seems to be exactly the same as that in the game. Uncle Sam can’t knock out all the moles while he stands there putting quarters in the machine. He can only keep playing the game until he runs out of quarters. The moles only stop when Uncle Sam walks away. The moles are there for his benefit.
This is not to say that the War in Iraq will shut down when we finally understand this concept. Unlike the arcade game, the moles in Iraq are going to have some internal fighting to do, to regain an equilibrium. They might even need to break themselves into a few different games. We might not like the equilibrium that is eventually achieved. It might be better than the one that Iraq had reached by having Saddam as its strongman. Or, it might be far worse. But, until we stop pumping quarters in the machine, the game is just going to go on.
What do you think? I can see Whack-A-Mole games in all the Army Officer Training Courses, kind of like flight-simulators for combat training.
