Time Makes Fools Of Us All

Take a break from warblogging, and warblogging becomes irrelevant.

Well, no. But it's funny, almost... with the events of the last week or so, all the stuff I've had sitting on my hard drive no longer seems so damned relevant, does it?

Still, in the interest of fairness (to whom? to myself? yeah, I guess so)—and also because these are some pretty good reads—here's some thoughts on what might have happened....

Liberation Theology...

...by which I mean to say that it seems to be an article of faith, in Administration and neocon circles, that the people of Iraq will lay down their arms and welcome Coalition forces with, if not flowers and open arms, then at least a grudging goodwill—that the Coalition will be greeted as liberators, rather than invaders.

I mean, it only makes sense: whatever the Iraqi people may think of Americans, there's no way that day-to-day life for the average man in the street could possibly be worse under even a US puppet government than under Saddam Hussein. Everybody knows which side their bread's buttered on, right?

Right?
Well...
What would I do, if it were my country that was being "liberated"?

Good question. I've heard it posed and answered by various lefty commentators: a recent Ted Rall screed conceded that although "[m]illions of Americans consider Bush to be a hateful, extremist dimwit who seized power ... in an unconstitutional judicial coup d'état ... even the most passionately anti-Bush Americans would eagerly join their W-loving compatriots to fight any army that invaded the United States in the name of some theoretical 'liberation.' I know I would." Steven Grant says similar: "Is it any great surprise that Iraqis are not surrendering in droves, and seem to resent being invaded, even when we tell them it's for their own good? (I mean, I don't like our President, and I'd be strongly inclined to resist any foreign invasion to remove him from power.)"

I did a little thought experiment: Try to imagine the most benign invader possible, one with a cultural history of being peaceable, level-headed, and benevolent. Imagine the United States being invaded by Canada.

Imagine Canadian troops massed at the Northern borders, bent on liberating us from harsh market-based economics, coming to bring universal health care, arts funding, and poutine to their benighted Southern neighbors. Would I be tossing rose petals before the tanks, or would I be hurling Molotovs and shrieking Die, maple-niggers, die?

Tough call. But consider, too, the inevitability of defeat. It's obvious the Iraqi army is shamefully outgunned and undertrained, and cannot possibly prevail: even delaying tactics are essentially pointless, as the Hussein regime has no real friends in the region who might come to its aid. So the sensible thing is to back the winning horse, right?

You'd think so. Except that History isn't exactly teeming with examples of nations doing the sensible thing. Here's just a brief extract from Lee Sandlin's long and vitally important psychohistory of World War II:

...[B]y some unmistakable point—the autumn of 1942 at the latest—[the Axis powers] should have understood that they'd been wrong and that their prospects for long-term victory were inexorably zeroing out. They still had the economic and military strength to sustain their armies in the field indefinitely, no matter how grim the strategic situation became, but by any rational calculation of the odds, they should have begun hinting through backwater diplomatic channels that they were willing to negotiate a cease-fire. Neither Germany nor Japan ever did so. Not until the last days of the war did either government even begin to consider the possibility of a negotiated settlement—not until they had absolutely nothing left to negotiate with.

But then, that's the point. A rational calculation of the odds is a calculation by the logic of peace. War has a different logic. A kind of vast feyness can infect a military bureaucracy when it's losing a war, a collective slippage of the sense of objective truth in the face of approaching disaster. In the later years of World War II the bureaucracies of the Axis ... gave up any pretense of realism about their situation. Their armies were fighting all over the world with desperate berserker fury, savagely contesting every inch of terrain, hurling countless suicide raids against Allied battalions ... while the bureaucrats behind the lines gradually retreated into a dreamy paper war where they were [perpetually] on the brink of a triumphant reversal of fortune....

Not everybody succumbed to these fantasies. But another, even stronger pressure worked against those who understood how hopeless the situation really was: they knew that defeat meant accountability.... [and that] every additional day the war lasted—no matter how pointless, no matter how phantasmal the hope of victory, no matter how desperate and horrible the conditions on the battlefield—was another day of judgment successfully deferred.

This is the dreadful logic that comes to control a lot of wars. ... The losers prolong their agony as much as possible, because they're convinced the alternative is worse.

Set aside some time and read the rest. It's unmissable.