mld, August 9, 2002 at 5:57:00 AM CEST

"Morituri Te Salutamus"

...was the salute of the gladiators to the Emperor immediately before they began combat. (Though, in many more cases than the average Joe, influenced by Hollywood's version of life in the arena, thinks, the fights were not to the death)

I wonder how it tranlates into Arabic? It seems that the phrase could come in handy for some diehard denizens of Baghdad.

"Those Who Are About To Die Salute You!" The LA Times reports that top military intelligence officials, speaking off the record, are saying that Saddam will choose to defend the cities with his most loyal troops, armed citizen brigades, and his remaining stocks of chemical weapons.

This isn't news to me, as I wrote the same damn thing a few weeks ago, and have thought that for months. While I'd like to beat on my chest and claim clairvoyance, it's a fairly obvious predidction for anyone the least bit familiar with matters martial to make.

There is a more important, and difficult question. What are we going to do about it? I've been thinking quite a bit about this, and here's what I would say to Bush43 if I could get his ear for five minutes:

"We need to start the psyops now. Yesterday, two weeks ago, in fact, and for a few reasons.

One, is to get the civilians out. If they start now, some at least will be able to pack up and go before Saddam catches on. It'll be too late once our divisions are massed on the border. By then, Saddam will have the city locked up tight, and it will mean death for any Iraqi civilian to try and escape. Saddam needs his human shields, and he needs his citizens to die wholesale for the TV cameras, so he can try and drum up world opinion to stop the US Army tearing Baghdad apart brick by brick until we put his head on a pike.

The first combat air missions over Baghdad need to be dropping leaflets, not bombs. And they need to say exactly the opposite of what your dad told the world. He took pains to point out that GWI was not about Saddam. You need to say that's exactly who and what it's about. Let them know that you're willing to let him surrender peacefully, and go live out his life on Diego Garcia in comfortable exile. Make sure Saddam knows that offer ends after the first US serviceman dies in the war.

Saddam can bluster all he wants to the people about how he'll win this war, but when the Iraqi people see that he can't even stop the paper from raining down, they'll start wondering how he's gonna stop the shrapnel.

Oh, and forget all this idiotic surgical attack on Baghdad stuff. You try that and all you're going to have is a bunch of good men cut off. It'll make Mogadishu look like a paintball game. Bring 250,000 to this party, more if you can, and make sure the Iraqi street knows it.

Second, we need to start, in the minds of his troops, the process of delinking Saddam's survival from their own. His rank and file have already decided to fold as soon as they can. It's the hard-core troops, the Guards, that we need to work on, hopefully until only those few hundred of his fanatics are left to fight for him.

So, George, start beating the drum. Beat it so loud and hard that they cannot help but hear you on the streets of Baghdad. I don't care if the first airborne assault is on the HQ of Al-Jazeera news network - take control of the airwaves, radio and TV. Hack into his networks - you've only got the best geeks on the planet at hand. Start treating his people to the preview GWII vidclips, coming soon to a city near you. I'm sure we've got lots of footage from your dad's combat interruptus to use, and maybe you can get some of those Hollywood FX wizards to gin you up some more modern-looking stuff, with the latest weapons. Hollywood doesn't like you, but it's been proven they'll do anything for money.

Make sure you tell them that Saddam is going to gas them. You can bet he's not going to warn them. Reinforce the lesson with some of those pics of the casualties from the war with Iran, and from when he gassed the Kurds. Show them clips of the Iraqis surrendering in masse in GWI. Promise humane treatment if they surrender, and lots of aid for the country afterwards. The carrot and the stick.

Lie, fake 'em out. Make 'em think you've gotten pissed off, gone crazy. They're used to that in the Middle East. Chew on some carpet if you have to. If you're not that good an actor, find an actor that looks like you, and have him do it. Threaten to nuke the city if Saddam uses his WMD.

The world will go nuts, but what the hell are they gonna do about it? The press will jump you like Slick Willie on an intern when Hilary's not lookin', but it's tough to be the leader of the free world, and you have to have a thick skin. That flak you'll catch ain't harder than dyin'. You can always write in your memoirs later you never really meant it. The only people that won't believe you are the ones that hate you already anyway.

I really don't care if you do use a nuke, and I don't think most of the people in the US do, either. Use it to scare the hell out of them. Consider popping a little bitty one outside Baghdad, in the desert, far enough away not to hurt them, but close enough for them to see it. An airburst at the right altitude will mean little or no fallout.

Or maybe the bright boys at Aberdeen can help you rig up the world's largest fuel air bomb. Get it big enough, drop it a little closer, and it'll look like a small nuke. That one you can let the fireball touch the ground for that good ol' mushroom cloud look. Hell, forget the dropping. You can wheel it in if you need to, and build it in place.

Don't waste any more time trying to make the case against Saddam. There's no one anywhere, in any country, that has not already made up his mind, and nothing you can do will change them. Just go to Congress, and ask for a flat out declaration of total war. They'll give it to you. They've read the polls, and know that We The People will have their asses for a ham sandwhich if they don't.

But all this may not work, so you better get the American people ready for a tough one. Tell them before we go any farther that it might mean a whole damn bunch of sons and fathers coming home in body bags before it's all over. You owe it to them.

Because if all this bluster and intimidation don't work, if the Guards don't rout, and it comes down to a house-to-house, brick-by-brick knifefight, we're gonna lose about ten thousand troops, maybe more, and the Iraqis are gonna lose about ten time that many, with an awful lot of those being civilians.

That's an awful lot of people dying just because you don't like the taste of carpet."

 

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mld, August 2, 2002 at 5:31:00 PM CEST

USS Clueless

Steven Den Beste is the captain of the starship USS Clueless, an essay, rather than link, oriented blog. I read his stuff regularly. Lately he's written some good stuff on open-source software, religion, and like almost all bloggers nowadays, world politics. His stuff is well thought out, and carefully crafted.

Today's entry addresses the question, or more accurately, the accusation, that the 9/11 attacks on the US were the fruit somehow of our foriegn policy. It's one of those essays I wish I'd written. Go read the whole thing. But since I know many of you will not, here's a taste: The extremists wish a return to the glory of Islamic dominance of the world, because it is what God told them would happen. And every year that passes makes this seem less and less likely, as the Islamic nations fall further and further behind the west in nearly every way that can be measured. 600 years ago, Islam was a great and glorious culture, but 600 years ago there was no humanist, liberal democracy combined with capitalism and science. Now those things exist, and no nation combines them better than we in America; and in every possible way that can be objectively measured, secular liberal democracy and capitalism and science are kicking Islamic culture's ass. They're being buried, and we don't even seem to be doing it deliberately. We are so much more powerful, and our culture so much more vital and vibrant, that we don't even notice theirs.

They call us devils, because they truly see us as evil. We are the embodiment of the forces fighting against God and Islam, and we're winning. We win in terms of economic might; in terms of military power; in all forms of temporal power in fact. And we're winning the fight for minds and souls; our ideas are infecting the Arabs even in Holy Saudi Arabia, the very core of Islam, home of the two Mosques. We profane their faith just by breathing.

Stuff like this is the reason why he's on my blogroll.

 

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mld, July 28, 2002 at 8:41:00 AM CEST

Casus Belli

My friend marya is a Buddhist, and a sincere, well-meaning pacifist. I think this is because she's from California, so it was inevitable, like little Palestinian kids growing up to hate Jews. : -)

A few days ago, she posted on a maillist we share a fairly anguished plea for a few of us that she characterized as being "pro-war" to explain why we should go to war with Iraq, and even more importantly, how we would heal the wounds, and assuage the hate, the survivors there would feel toward us in the post-GWII era.

Gee, what an easy assignment. :-) She reminds me of a college prof I had, that if asked a question that seemed critical of her theses as preached in class, would ask the questioner to present his arguments in a five thousand word essay. She passed them out like M&Ms. It will surprise no one that knows me and my loquacious ways that I never let that shut me up. :-)

This is not a reply to all of her questions, but does address one of them, specifically, why is this war needed, and worthwhile. I've addressed the reasons in several previous posts, but they are mostly buried in long posts that include other things about the war in general.

Then, just like there is a deity up there that knows and cares about my everyday, mundane existence, I get sent an email that will serve to explain the why of this coming war, in terms that her feminist, liberal, empathetic soul can identify with. (For the record, I use none of those adjectives in that last sentence in a perjorative manner.)

You can read the whole thing here, but here is the telling passage, about an event that happened in Saudi Arabia, a religious oil theocracy, Ground Zero of the Islamic faith: On 11 March at Girls' Intermediate School No 31 in Mecca at just after 8am an accidental fire took hold. It quickly spread and the teenagers fled outside. But within minutes the religious police, or mutawwa'in, had also arrived. Incredibly, as some girls fled out of one gate the police forced them back in through another. Fourteen girls died in the blaze. Dozens more suffered horrific burns. Their mistake had been to flee the fire without first putting on their black robes and headscarves. Some were still in nightdresses. That was enough for the police effectively to condemn them to death. Some even beat rescue workers trying to save the children. 'Instead of extending a helping hand, they were using their hands to beat us,' one rescue worker said.

I am not a cultural relativist. I am unashamed to stand on my hind legs in front of the world and state that there are some regimes and cultures that do not deserve to have a place in the human community. The sooner that these cultures, malignant cankers on the global body politic, are removed, even though it be by force, the more wholesome and happy that body will be.

A major concern of hers was the problem of healing the hurts of a war that causes the deaths of many innocent people, and how the survivors could ever come to not hate us. In this, I think, she overestimates the love that these people have for their current leaders, woefully underestimates their desire for the freedoms that we take for granted, and incorrectly suspects that those soon-to-be-freed peoples will blame us for the deaths associated with the regime change, and not those tyrants that they wish to be quit of.

The everyday people of Iraq are effectively prisoners in their own country, ruled over by a murderous warden. He has been directly responsible for millions of their deaths, both directly, at the hands of his security forces, and indirectly, by starting wars with his neighbors Kuwait and Iran. They are nothing more to him than a tool to use in consolidating and maintaining his power. Each individual there lives another day only at his whim, and only for his purposes.

We are coming to storm the walls of that prison, free those people, and kill that warden, along with his small circle of tribal henchmen. Some of us will die. Many more of them will die in the crossfire, as it were, in the battle. Most of the casualties, I believe, will come when he decides to take down as many of the Iraqi people as he can as revenge for "betraying" him, as they surely will, and unleashes his nerve gas and anthrax upon them, in a final apocalyptic frenzy, Samson in the temple.

The survivors will understand that the deaths are the work of the warden and his guards, not the rescuers. I truly believe that they will welcome us the way that Paris did the Allies in 1944, and the subsequent establishment of a representative democracy there will be much less difficult than it is proving to be in countries like Afghanistan, that lack both an educated middle class, and a modern infrastructure.

Much has been made of late in the press about the fact that Saddam has been "laying low," not recently giving us any extreme provocation to go after him.

Folks that think that it's a Good Thing to continue to hunt down ancient Nazis for crimes of the WWII era act as if the statue of limitations against genocide and the use of chemical weapons against civilian women and children is Saddam's case has expired.

As I've stated in other essays, Iraq is the keystone that supports the entire arch-evil of repressive Islamic fundementalism, and it's removal will foster a renaissance of freedom and enlightenment on the Middle East. We could simply choose to pursue an isolationist course, wipe our hands and our consciences clean of the plight of the millions of people there. but I believe that this isolationist course to be morally bankrupt, like watching a stranger being mugged, and not offering to help him against his assailant.

It is one thing to decline to help for fear of personal safety, if the mugger is a beefy monster of a man, and you, the prospective savior, are a ninety-eight pound weakling. At least, in that case, we can understand a reluctance to act. We can understand why Andorra, Taiwan, or even any of the European nations do not move to free the Iraqi people.

It is quite another when you are easily able to overpower the criminal. By virtue of our economic and military power, a happy accident of national history, political system, and geography, we are the only option. No one else can do it.

For us to ignore Iraq, even if Saddam loved us, was our best buddy and most trustworthy ally, and not a credible threat, an avowed enemy, would be cowardice on a national scale. Here, happily, if it is not blasphemous to use that term in this case, we have an instance where the Right Thing To Do, and prudent self-defense, and one and the same thing.

Some will argue that we will unseat Saddam for selfish economic reasons, to exploit the nation as a trading partner. I can answer that in one sentence. It is never wrong to do the Right Thing, even though that action may eventually benefit you also.

Saddam knows that he cannot survive this war. His army will for the most part desert him, and his own people hate him, though with a muzzle pointed at their heads, they will mouth platitudes of support.

Even at this late date, if he were to offer to abdicate his throne, to live out his life in exile wherever he could find someone to take him, (Did you know that Idi Amin is alive and living in luxury in Saudi Arabia? I wonder if the ICC cares... snort) I think we would be forced to accept such a bloodless compromise, to save both US and Iraqi lives, justice be damned. Better one, or even a few hundred, or a thousand murderers go free, than tens of thousands die. This is an offer that I feel should be made, and publicized throughout the world, but we should take special care to ensure that every adult in Iraq hears it. While I have no great hopes that this stratagem will succeed, it will be important both for the prosecution of the psychological war against the regime, and winning the subsequent peace.

So, this could end peacefully and reasonably. But I think we all know that he will never accept that. That leaves us little choice but to take him down.

It's the Right Thing to do, and millions will come to thank us for it.

 

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