Three days to go and I will be freed from my self-imposed prison of getting my news only from The New York Times. Six days since I’ve written my last installment. You may have thought I finally succumbed to the lack of news. “Here lies BostonJoe,” a priest might have been saying. “He died from terminal brain shrinkage at the lack of real-time interactive blogging news.”
But alas, I am still kicking. There was just very little in The Times that has moved me to write in these past days. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah.
As the days without writing have mounted, I was forcing myself to seize on an article or issue I cared about, and grind out a thousand words or so. But nothing. Nada. The satirical little critic in my brain has locked himself in a padded rubber room, and is using his index finger to flap his lips together to calm his crazy-without-real-news mind.
I found a couple of short things to say today. Well, at least I will try to keep them short.
What would a “Fit To Print Me” rant be without a little bit of criticism about The Times’ coverage, or lack thereof, of the War in Iraq? In today’s Sunday edition, it appears that no U.S. Soldiers were killed in Iraq on Saturday. No deaths reported. Saturday appears to have been some kind of Sabbath for war. At least yesterday, it was. At least, if you can infer from the lack of Times’ coverage, that there was a lack of actual war. All the stories today dealt with meta-Iraq issues. What is happening on the constitution. What is happening on the home front. What the president and other important politicians are saying about the war. Lots of coverage about the peripheral issues of the war. But no war.
When I think about it, it would be like Sports Illustrated sending a photographer to the Super Bowl, and the photographer bringing back a lot of shots from things that were happening in conjunction with the Super Bowl, but bringing back no actual photos of the game. It is really kind of stupid.
The war stopped, according to The Times coverage, on one other day this week. And, it almost moved me to write about it. But not quite. And then, in the next days paper, the deaths that had gone un-reported on the day without war, were mysteriously shuffled in with the little body count graphic that runs most days.
All this lack of talk about the actual war, led me to a thought. We, as a society, seem to be very interested in meta-issues. We will talk, write, view, analyze, critique, complain, and rant about four thousand aspects of a thing. Sometimes it seems that all the hullabaloo surrounding a thing becomes more important than the thing itself. It seems to me that this is the kind of people we are in the United States these days. We would much rather film our kids’ birthday parties than be actually engaged in attending them. I don’t know. Maybe this isn’t a valid point. My mind is just mush. Three more days.
Second item I wanted to talk about. I envisioned doing some background research on this piece and writing a really killer diary. But, it is 1:00 a.m. (Now only two more days to go, really) and I have wasted the day working on my novel and not writing this grand diary. So I will just give you the rough outline. Maybe someone else has already done the diary. Or maybe some genius out there, who I have been shut off from without the gift of blogging, will have the answers I am seeking without the need of research. Anyway, here is the short version – and some of my suspicions.
There was an editorial in today’s Times by David Brooks. “Winning in Iraq” is the title. I don’t normally bother reading Brooks. I just don’t care about what he says. But, I was searching for material to break out of the slump, and the title got me.
The article is basically an endorsement of an idea by retired Lt. Col Andrew Krepinevich. The colonel wrote a book called “The Army and Vietnam.” In it, he discusses counterinsurgency tactics, apparently. The colonel’s big ticket idea is something called the “oil-spot strategy.” I am sure I, nor Brooks, does the strategy justice – but in short, the idea is that the way to win against an insurgency like the one in Vietnam or the one in Iraq is to use massive amounts of troops to secure small outposts of the civilization to be pacified. Make that one street in Baghdad happy for instance. Control it. Protect it. And pour lots of money into it so that people want to come there from the more war-torn parts of the country. Do that at a lot of spots across the country. Slowly gain the trust of the people in these controlled zones. And then expand the zones as you gain in-country allies, until all the various “oil-spots” touch one another, and you win.
Brooks makes it sound like the best god-damned thing since apple pie. But I am extremely skeptical. I haven’t been able to read any of Krepinevich’s original work, so I am in no position to bash him or his ideas. But my sense is that the whole thing is a lot of nonsense. It is another way to talk about war as some meta-issue. “Here is the recipe that will win it all folks.” And I just think that is crap.
Apparently, the people in the Army are all fired up about this tactic. My basic question for research is, if this plan was so great, why the fuck did it not work in Vietnam. Did the colonel only write about it after drawing lessons from the failure in Vietnam? And if so, and if the ideas were so roundly lauded, why weren’t they at least tried before Iraq became a special late addition to Dante’s construction of Hell? Isn’t this just snake oil? A new thing for Rethugs to seize on so they can continue to waste life in this boondoggle. A fucking stupid war, is a fucking stupid war. This one was bad ab initio. Some slick tactics aren’t going to make it better, are they? Or am I just one of these unpatriotic assholes who simply wants his country to fail?
I’ve been opposed to this cluster since the first days of saber rattling. I like saying I told you so a fuck of a lot. I had long conversations with my semi-conservative father-in-law in the run-up to the War. And, in the aftermath of major combat operations. I remember quite clearly telling him what was plain to me in those very early days, and what I think should have been plain to anyone old enough to read a fucking newspaper. I don’t think you need to have Top Secret clearance to the presidential daily briefings to understand this. I said to him something like this, “Iraq has evolved throughout the history of the world. Saddam and his Baath party were a part of this evolution. (Surely aided in their ascent by various colonial powers which cause Iraq to exist in its current form). Our being there will never erase the underlying tensions that required a dictatorial government. It is similar to the amalgam that Yugoslavia was – and the need of that country to have a Tito, in order to remain a unified country. For as long as the U.S. remains, we will lose one to five soldiers a day, on average. And when we finally decide to leave, Iraq will then have to seek out its new equilibrium. And that will be one of two things. Another vicious strong man who can hold the country together. Or, a brutal civil war ending in some type of total genocide or partition.” I am feeling pretty fucking prescient, as I look back on things. I want a fucking job in the White House. Who in the fuck is running this country?
But anyway. I just don’t see us talking our way out of this. We are leaving. Either sooner or later. The earlier we get the fuck out, the less men and women we lose (and kill) and the quicker Iraq will get on with its own final acts of bloodshed. There ain’t no “oil-spot” that is going to blot out this turd of a policy that Bush has shat.
Talk to you in a few days.
