Victory Anywhere Any Time

Pat Ryan

I've been watching The Decider's moves since the election and I ain't encouraged that he's learned anything at all. For historical reference, I supported the invasion of Afghanistan, and did not actively oppose the Big Adventure  in Iraq, because I was pretty clear that they were going to do it no matter what, and The People were so terrorized by the whole NeoCon War Machine effort, that  reason was not going to make any headway at all.

In fact, like a few million other progressives, I kept up with the whole Scooter, Dougy, Wolfie, Shooter crowd.Their Office of Special Plans, Cheney's 1% Doctrine and all of that intentional lying in service of a higher calling, proved out to be exactly what we all knew already; an unholy alliance between failed business executives, failed academics, and a subset of Christian Leadership that Christ would have driven out of the temple with a whip in a New York Minute.

Still, there have been voices of sanity at every stage of this sick little adventure:

General Shinseki told these yo-yos that they'd need around a half million troops to hold and rebuild. Rummy had a whole different vision of a lean mean force, and hey, that worked ok, because if it turned out that we were understaffed, we could blame it on Clinton, but not with the meddlesome Shinseki throwing sand in the gears.

Gen Jay Garner (retired) was fired within a month because he was advocating, you know, Democracy and self-determination. Obviously didn't get the memo.

Ayatollah Al-Sistani, apparently the only player in this game on any side who has actually read Madison, Jefferson, Locke, and Hume. After Garner was thrown to the wolves, Sistani tried to get Bremmer and his crew of Republican dirty tricks operatives to begin reconstituting gummint by holding local elections, thus having local pols answerable to local people early on.  Bremmer, like his clueless masters in DC, could not even get his tiny brain around this very basic concept. I mean how could the savage brown skinned people possibly be capable of  this sort of rational decision making.  They were (and are) cynically manipulated US electoral politics so easily, and the basic fratboy arrogance dictated all of their moves in what should have been totally predictable ways.

I could go on until my monitor runs out of ink, but from Sun Tzu to Machievelli to Maslow, the big brains agreed on a few basic concepts for holding a conquered nation...

Retain as much as possible of the existing power structure.
Get the soldiers on your payroll.
Ensure the availability of basic services to the civilian population.
Be brutal and public in punishing resistors, but be generous and rewarding to collaborators.
Give priority to employing men between the ages of 15 and 35. They get bored standing on the street corner. They are ashamed to be conquered, ashamed to be unable to provide for their families, and ashamed to get their doors kicked in at two in the morning and have some 19 year old kid put his boot on their heads.
Hint: Nobody wants to see their own house and family blown up, and they'll cooperate with anyone who will help to keep that from happening. So far we've failed to demonstrate that we are that trustworthy entity.

So-o-o-o-o-o-o why the title?

In early December '06 a Captain Travis Patriquin did a little powerpoint presentation for his homies in Anbar Province. Eighteen slides that clearly and simply laid this situation out for those unfortunate to be actually  out there trying to make it all work.  This  presentation has been widely circulated among the field officers and NCOs but The Dark Lord and the puppets don't see how this'll  help with those permanent bases, and it could easily lead to a situation where the Iraqis actually controlled their own economy.

Captain Patriquin was killed by an IED just days after he wrote this presentation, but there are good men and women, American, Iraqi, British, and Kurdish, all over Iraq that are doing the right thing right now. What we're lacking is leadership.

By Pat Ryan Feb. 13, 2007