[Peace-discuss] Supporting our troops

[C. G. Estabrook]

The US occupation of Iraq should be opposed because it's a crime, not 
because "victory is not possible."  In fact, it seems pretty clear that 
the US will be victorious, in the sense that it will achieve it basic 
war aims -- permanent bases in the country with the world's second 
greatest oil reserves, and continued American control over the major 
energy reserves in the world.  Of course the Democrats support that as 
well as the Republicans.

Its been a primary goal of US policy since World War II (like Britain 
before it) to control what the State Department called "a stupendous 
source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in 
history." Establishing a client state in Iraq would significantly 
enhance that strategic power, a matter of great significance for the 
future. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observed, it would provide the US with 
"critical leverage" of its European and Asian rivals, a conception with 
roots in early post-war planning. These are substantial reasons for 
aggression -- not unlike those of the British when they invaded and 
occupied Iraq over 80 years earlier, at the dawn of the oil age.

Give me an example of a democracy not established at the point of a gun. 
  In cases where the metaphor breaks down -- Switzerland, Athens, the 
Roman Republic -- it was still the military conflict that made whatever 
democracy developed possible, the Swiss being admittedly a complex case. 
   We have several much-advertised recent examples of an occupying 
army's imposing formal elements of a democratic polity "at the point of 
a gun" -- the Confederacy, Japan, Germany.

But of course the US has and had no intention of establishing an 
independent democracy in Iraq (with the further threat of independent 
Shiite control of the oil-producing regions around the Gulf, from Iran 
to Saudi Arabia).  Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority meant 
to impose a constitution by fiat, choose ministers, and govern thru an 
"Arab facade."  But the non-violent resistance of Sistani and the 
majority Shiite community forced the US to hold an election, which of 
course the US tried carefully to control, as it has tried largely 
successfully to control the government that issued from it.  Note the 
current dispute over the oil law.

The slaughter in SE Asia 40 years ago -- where we may have killed 4 
million people, while Bush-Clinton-Bush have killed perhaps only 2 
million in Iraq -- was also a US success: we prevented a peasant society 
from establishing independence in the US-run world economy, scotching 
the "threat of a good example."  Now Vietnam begs for Nike factories.

Of course it's ridiculous to claim that sending Americans who don't know 
any better to brutalize Arabs, to kill and be killed, is "supporting our 
troops." --CGE


Bob Illyes wrote:
> You wrote "Support for the troops and support for victory, not
> withdrawal is not the same as supporting W." Of course not. But
> victory is not possible. The WMDs were not there. Democracy
> can't be established at the point of a gun. There is nothing we
> accomplish by remaining except additional slaughter. We did this
> before in Vietnam. Several million dead in the end. They died for
> what? I think Johnson's reason for escalation was that admitting
> error would bring down his "great society" plans. This sort of
> nonsense is not supporting our troups, it is deserting them.