One Last Push? To Accomplish What?

One of the talking points on Faux News must be “the last big push” in Iraq because my wingnut conspecific was spouting off about John McCain’s having a plan to straighten out Iraq by sending in a huge infusion of troops. To do what exactly? What can more troops do? One thing is kill more Iraqis and break more Iraqi stuff, leaving the place a bigger pile of s**t than we have already made it. The second thing is to provide more targets so the casualty count can go up. Neither of these things may rightly be counted among the indicia of “victory” in my humble opinion. Then again, I’m not a foreign policy and military genius like John McCain.

The US is never going to make the puppet government legitimate at the point of several hundred thousand rifles. All that can conceivably be accomplished, and it is by no means a slam dunk sure thing, with respect to the US installed regime is to compel the Iraqi people to acquiesce in the regime’s rule out of a continuing fear of death. Then, the US would have to stay forever to prop up its favorites, because as soon as the US leaves, these guys are going to be overthrown and replaced with men who did not collaborate with an occupying enemy. There doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to do this other than to avoid embarrassing the idiots who got the US in this mess in the first place.

The US is never going to make the Shia and Sunni factions join hands and sing Kum Ba Ya through force. The most that can be accomplished is to unify them temporarily in their hatred of the US or, at great expense and risk, keep them away from each other. Again, there is no way out as the factions will be all over each other as soon as they can.

The US cannot compel the future Iraqi government to act in the interests of the US in the region unless the US is prepared to occupy the place and oppress the Iraqi people forever. In all likelihood, an Iraq left to its own devices will consider the US a dangerous enemy for the foreseeable future.

The things that the US regime wants to happen in Iraq simply can’t be made to happen by the use of military force. The neocons thought that they knew the natural consequences of invading Iraq and toppling its government: happy Iraqis hungry to become democrats free of sectarian and ethnic tensions and grateful to the Americans for killing so many of them. They were wrong. Now they yammer about what will happen if the US pulls out. Why should we listen to them now when they have shown that they are not the least bit prescient or acquainted with human nature? As some progressive bloggers put it (I can’t remember which), you can’t uns**t the bed. All you can do is change the sheets, to strain the metaphor. It was a fool’s errand, and staying in Iraq is nothing more than the dog returning to its vomit.