The V-Word

The V-word seems to have become the first “politically incorrect” word that the rightwing has adopted. It carries with it the painful memories of their generation, and a painful legacy taught to ours. There are as many theories as to what went wrong in Vietnam as there are people who experienced or studied it.

I fear that because the memory is so painful, and carries with it so much weight, that it has become impolite, if not taboo, to talk about it in context to our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hear people on the radio allude to Vietnam, then quickly write it off – bring up shallower points of pointing out just how different the geography is between arid desert plains and jungle. Though the geography and enemy are different, I have questioned how different the military strategies are in this war of terrorism with the military strategies of the Cold War.

Though we ended up winning the cold war, we won all of our battles politically – not militarily. Let us remember that Korea was no great victory. We were pushed out of Pyongyang by the Chinese and came to a stalemate at the 38th parallel. This is now the DMZ between North and South Korea still zealously guarded by over a million troops on both sides, even though the Berlin Wall has long sense come down. Vietnam was... well, Vietnam. Central America was a covert bloody mess for us too. Let us not forget whom we empowered to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, lest we forget September 11. I think there are strong lessons and parallels that we must draw from to learn from our mistakes for sounder victories in the war on terror.

Secretary of State Colin Powell fought in Vietnam, and applied our lessons their to a self-named doctrine that I hope the Bush Administration is working with today. The doctrine consisted of understanding your political objectives, matching political objectives with military objectives if necessary – creating a clear and concise mission, with a clear and concise exit strategy. Following this would prevent open-ended wars like Vietnam, with military goals that were impossible to accomplish without working against political objectives.

Unfortunately, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was recovering from a rocket attack on his hotel in Baghdad, he continued to speak of “transformation” of the Middle East. Though indeed a democratic and libertarian transformation of the Middle East would be amazingly helpful in the war against terrorism, we must ask how well this can be accomplished with Abram’s tanks and Apache gunships and how long that would take. Though these machines were meant to end the cold war, we must remember that World War III never happened – it was statecraft and triumphs of will that brought an end to that affair.
Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq, Terrorism Insurgency Vietnam Quagmire Exit Strategy

saboteurs of hope

I don’t think anyone really knows what’s going on in Iraq. It’s such a strange occurrence that terrorist acts are going unclaimed. Even the most atrocious suicide bombings in Israel tend to have several claimants. The Pentagon has painted the terrorist and guerillas all to be former Ba’athist. This might well be true, but this is also the most convenient excuse for the Pentagon, so I am more than a bit skeptical.

It’s very difficult fighting an anonymous enemy. Though this enemies name might be a mystery, its motives are revealed through its tactics. The tactics have been blatant use of force against infrastructures designed to make life easier on common Iraqi’s. Oil pipelines have been by and large kept down and unusable through persistent attack. This prevents oil money from entering the country through the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). The United Nations and now the Red Cross have been suicide bombed, the UN twice. Other NGO’s and IGO’s are fleeing as well because of this –including Doctors Without Borders, one of my favorite charities. Those who work with the CPA, particularly Iraqi Police, are being targeted.

All of this has one clear aim: make life miserable for the occupiers and the occupied. Unfortunately, the secular Ba’athist and militant Islamists, as well as regional governments, have reason to want the Iraqi’s to shrug off the Americans or the Americans to shrug off the Iraqi’s. I don’t know that this means that they are working in tandem though.

These attacks are only getting worse, and I imagine they will sustain at their current level if nothing else. What this means is that American’s must have a stomach to weather through this storm. Unfortunately, August 19th and October 28th don’t quite carry the same national resolve as September the Eleventh. Bush must work to set clear and reasonable goals, considering the reality of the situation, to provide a timeline and/or conditions of a return of Iraqi national sovereignty.

I don’t know what an appropriate exit strategy at this point is. I do feel that if Bush chooses to not leave before squashing this rebellion, we might well be there past is potential second term as President expires. Unless a new counter-insurgency doctrine makes it’s way from West Point or Washington think tanks to the Pentagon in the next few months, we ought not expect an end to this resistance against us or the sovereign Iraqi government for quite some time. We ought also to weigh how much our continued overt presence only helps the attacks by encouraging alienated and despondent Iraqis to abed these saboteurs of hope. Even through all it’s shortcomings, our involvement in Afghanistan perhaps ought to be the framework in Iraq as well.

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Spinnaker, Iraq, Terrorism Insurgency

I should be posting more soon. My Oct 1 blog is being published this week, which means I have to write something new for the Spinnaker - which will be posted here.

I saw Noam Chomsky tonight at UF. Interesting fellow... maybe quirky is a better word. He was a horrible speaker, honestly.... he speaks like William Saffire writes.... kind of a coherent rambling of facts and/or observations with little holding them together... no central thesis... and i disagree with him on a lot, i see him sometimes as a glorified conspiracy theorist. He's so far out of the mainstream and ignores the conventional wisdom to draw complete pictures which makes for interesting, but often very flawed, theories. One thing he did say struck a cord with me:

"Fundamentalism is destroying this world: be it religious or market fundamentalism"

Tags: Treyopia Current Events Noam Chomsky

Go Taikonauts!

sorry for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been swamped with schoolwork.

Yay! China launched a man into space! It’s about damned time too. I’ve been waiting for this for years now, when I first discovered the Go Taikonauts website.

I certainly hope this sparks a new space race. I think we’re becoming far too bored with space missions. I blame that partly on the International Space Station. In retrospect, it seems like it was a well thought out idea to justify shuttle launches for another decade. You know that for the price of this war in Iraq, at least the first price before being revised up a few weeks ago, we could have sent a manned mission to mars? $100b is the price tag. Think of it! We could have had the reality TV that we got from the war, far lighter casualties, and colonized a new land that didn’t already have people in it!

Despite what my good friend Nina (who’s living in China for a year) says about how they need to work on drainage and garbage disposal first, I think it is a noble effort and I hope the shoot for the moon. In any case, I extend my congratulations to the CCP for this achievement. Go taikonauts!


Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events China Space Taikonauts

A few of you questioned my reasoning that Saddam was only bluffing his WMD threat in my last post. Admittedly, it looks foolish on the face of it, but there is an underlying logic. Hussein was willing to front the image of a wild, unpredictable rouque for his own security. Did it work? Perhaps well enough. It certainly gave Clinton second thought, even though his own words show that he was in favor of regime change.

But to back my conclusion up (/sarcasm), the Washington Post ran this article today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25416-2003Sep30.html

Tags: Treyopia Spinnaker Current Events WMD nuclear proliferation Iraq Hussein Saddam