Needlenose

Back in ’03 I believed that all parties in the recently fractured Iraq would want to keep us around, the newly empowered Shi’ites in the ‘Coalition Government’ for protection, and the coalition of the Evil-Doers (former Baathists and jihadis) to have easy access to Americans to kill.  I posited that it wouldn’t take much for the latter to keep U.S. troops mired in the Quicksand of Iraq through acts of terror or sabotage.

Obama’s decision to close up shop in Iraq is already being sorely tested by the recent Coalition of the Evil-Doer’s massive terror attack, and of course is already being second-guessed by our home-grown warmongering reactionaries.  Of course if it were up to them, we would still be fighting in Vietnam.

Given that an overwhelming majority of Americans are pretty tired of hearing about a war that was only supposed to last a couple of weeks is now almost 9 years old, and that most of them probably don’t really care how many Iraqis die, the Coalition of the Evil-Doers will need to bump up the game and threaten the oil supply to keep around the American piñata – or in the words of Frank Herbert: “The Spice must flow!”

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.