Kunstler: Victory

 December 12, 2005
What on earth does George W. Bush mean by victory? To remake Iraq in the image of Indiana?
I suppose I am the 1,289,654th observer to note that the president does a poor job of articulating the goal of our military venture over there -- which is to defend our access to the oil of the Middle East.

Incessantly flogging the word freedom the past three years was probably his biggest mistake. It would have been more precise, modest, and useful to say that we were supporting elections under a new constitution (written with our assistance) because the alternative would be to just appoint a bunch of guys we liked to be a government -- and that government would have had no legitimacy among the Iraqi people, not to mention the bawling of world opinion against it (and us). So, of course, elections were a necessity, and the policing required to make that happen has been an ugly struggle.

Otherwise, the most conspicuous freedom in Iraq, for most Iraqis, the past three years has been freedom from reliable electrical service.

But victory? That's really a howler. Over what? The terrorists, I suppose, if you call the larger enterprise a War on Terror, another unfortunate locution. The fact is that there is a vast popular antipathy against the United States that emanates from west of Gibraltar clear across the eastern hemisphere to the south Pacific. In formal terms, it is an Islamic jihad. Its clear goal is to expel interlopers from Islamic territory. It imposes rather severe penalties on the perceived interlopers, and its tactics are not gentlemanly, especially where civilians are in the way.

Victory against this would seem to imply the extermination of at least tens of millions of Islamic young men, not a realistic goal. We are equally unlikely to charm them into a change of affection by demonstrating the art of elections.

Getting back to the smaller theater of Iraq itself, we see a cast of characters arrayed against our presence: Shiites acting as proxies for neighboring Iran; former Baathists seeking crazily to regain control; Sunnis desperately trying to keep a hand in the oil revenue, since most of the oil lies in either Shiite or Kurdish territory; and of course there is probably a contingent of international jihadistas, young men from all over the Middle East and elsewhere, with no regular work except to harass and exasperate the infidel occupiers. There is certainly an inexhaustible supply of these young men. And an inexhaustible supply of munitions at their disposal. There is no chance whatsoever that we are going to pacify these warriors. They will not rest until we depart their ummah and we are not going to do that until there is no oil left in it.

So, victory in any conventional sense that Americans understand this word is out of the question, and the President's use of it is his biggest blunder since the "mission accomplished" stunt of 2003. The Iraq elections may succeed in establishing a legitimate government -- but then what? Will it govern for a month and a half and fall apart? The eventual likely outcome, as everybody knows, is civil war in Iraq, and perhaps a widening conflict with Iran on one side, Syria on the other side, and Saudi Arabia left to the Jihadistas. Elsewhere in the world, things will continue to blow up.

Meanwhile, back here in This Land is Your Land, the easy motoring utopia will remain non-negotiable and we'll drive Amtrak into bankruptcy.
from www.kunstler.com