Needlenose

Pssst…is the chopper ready to go?

Looks like Swopa’s recent prediction of a pre-election 2004 troop withdrawal from Iraq was on the money. I can’t imagine that it will be so easy, though; lots of folks in Iraq want the U.S. to stay, including some of the terrorists, who would be bummed to lose their American pinata just as the party got going.

So while King George the Witless spouts crap like “We’re going to prevail. We’ve got a good strategy to deal with these killers,” (huh? more prancing on the old flight deck wearing a cod-piece?), the situation on the ground continues to go downhill.

Elements within the so-called Coalition Government anxious to keep the Americans around can drag out the nation-building process (let’s see if they meet those deadlines). And the terrorists? I imagine that a few attacks on Saudi or Kuwaiti oil pipelines or refineries would do the trick. Or more hits on members of the puppet government. Who can say? But I can’t imagine it will be too hard to keep us around – after all, we Yanks ain’t quitters:

“Two years into the war on terror, the will and resolve of America are being tested, in Afghanistan and in Iraq,” he said. “Again, the world is watching. Again we will be steadfast; we will finish the mission we have begun, period.”

The term “quagmire” was coined to describe the increasingly costly and unwinnable U.S. ‘intervention’ in Vietnam. Although the language used by Dubya and his Oily Men to describe the war on Iraq were borrowed straight from WWII (Saddam=Hitler, Anti-War=Appeasement, de-Nazification=de-Baathification), the conflict most closely resembles Vietnam.

Just as in that conflict (and unlike WWII), the U.S. never actually bothered to declare war. In both cases, Congress abnegated its constitutional rights to wage war (a point on which Senator Bryd droned on at great length, in a complete turnabout from his stand on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution). Fabricated evidence embraced by the Administration provided the causus belli for each conflict (Vietnam had the Gulf of Tonkin incident). Now we’re engaged in the futile endeavor of ‘imposing democracy’ (nation building) on a country that’s preparing to split into at least 2 parts.

And now, in the most chilling development, we’re starting to hear that dripping sound of American blood spilling into the desert as those stubborn ”pockets of resistance’ change their fighting tactics. By the end of the conflict Vietnam had cost more that 50,000 American lives – but of course that didn’t happen all at once. The first troops started dying in dribbles and drabs, 2 in 1959, 8 in 1963 and so on, in a steady escalation. I just hope this time the war doesn’t take 30 years and 5+ million dead Iraqis to play itself out.

In a break with history, however, I’d like to introduce a better metaphor for our unwinnable conflict – let’s replace ‘quagmire’ with ‘quicksand.’ I realize that the Iraqi desert is not particularly sandy, but it seems more appropriate than invoking a jungle/bog metaphor, and given time, the conflict is likely to spill over to Iraq’s sandier neighbors.