Bollettino

The reductum ad absurdum happening among Shiite tombs outside of Najaf shows, among other things, how absolutely blind D.C. still is to its war and where it is fighting it. There are no editorials asking the question they should be asking: why are we in Najaf? Indeed, a complicated question. Is it because Sadr’s thuggish militia has invaded a sovereign town? Hmm, sounds like – well, sounds like what is happening in Kirkuk with the Kurdish militias. Sounds like what we agreed to in Fallujah. Sounds, indeed, like what we promoted in bringing Chalabi and his men into Baghdad. So let’s think up a different reason. The original reason – to get rid of a minor irritant to Paul Bremer’s proconsulship – has slipped away into history. The story that Sadr was a minor and unpopular leader, much purveyed among the embedded press in April, has slipped away with the Bremer era. The new story is that the inhabitants of Najaf welcome the American intervention. That might well be true – but alas, Najaf is not Iraq. It is not Sadr city in Baghdad. It is not the Shiite South. It is a city in which the respectable make good money on the piety that sends endless streams to Najaf.

The LA Times has a think piece on the subject today by Tyler Marshall – who seems much less credulous of the American military’s wishful thinking than Alex Berenson at the NYT. Here is the heart of the article:

"Is it better for Iraq and the political process and for democracy to embrace these people or suppress these people?" said political analyst Khudeir Dulaimi in Baghdad.

"It is better to engage the country [including] his followers, who are very great in number. If we suppress them, they will emerge again."

Hussein Shahristani, a nuclear scientist who had sought the prime minister's job, agreed. "Despite the hundreds killed in Najaf and other cities, the sense I get ... is that people are more sympathetic to Muqtada than ever before," he said.

Analysts believe that a key to Sadr's political clout has been his emergence as the only national symbol of defiance to the massive U.S. military presence that remains in Iraq despite the formal hand-over of sovereignty. As the U.S. presence grows more unpopular, Sadr's aura gains more luster.”

This is from Bush’s interview with Tim Russert on February 7 of this year:

“The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was it was a political war. We had politicians making military decisions, and it is lessons that any president must learn, and that is to the set the goal and the objective and allow the military to come up with the plans to achieve that objective. And those are essential lessons to be learned from the Vietnam War.”

There’s a DJ in Bush’s mind that does the scratching. Scratch compassion and gaybaiting, scratch conservativism and spending like a drunken sailor, scratch tax breaks for small this and that and 200 million dollar tax windfalls for members of America’s fortunate set. Here, the cutting between thinking and doing has achieved a truly historical status of dumb. Dumb and Dumber, it appears, is as premonitory of the current phase of American history as the Marriage of Figaro was of the French Revolution. While the comment on Vietnam is mostly nonsense, there is a core of sense to it: there are wars in which the strategy that Americans have embraced since Ullyses Grant – massive manpower, massive firepower, crushing movement – doesn’t work. In fact, it doesn’t work except in wars of a scale like the Civil War. The war in Iraq is a politician’s war par excellence in Bush’s confused terms – its starts and stops are dictated not by tactical advantages, but by strategic ones. We are throwing American bodies into the fire in battles that are unnecessary, and from the results of which we have to retreat. The strategy is being set by a set of ignoramuses in D.C., quintessential corridor politicians. It is a strategy that seems, every day, to be more independent of, and contradictory to, the tactical encounter with reality in Iraq. That encounter is full of an angry population that responds to house to house searches, checkpoints, surgical missile strikes on wedding parties and the like with rage. It is full of gaps – a doomed search for non-existent WMD, and an inability to guard the arms depots from which we know the Iraqi guerrillas get their weapons; stop and start occupations of towns in coordination with a half fictitious Iraqi army; the painting of creaky schoolhouses by soldiers in a country of 40 to 60 percent unemployment, as an effort to win the hearts and minds of students who have all vivid memories of their fathers face down in the dust, spreading them for another army raid on a suspected terrorist nest.

And now, as a legacy tribute to Paul Bremer, we are attacking one alleged murderer, Muqtada Sadr, on behalf of another one. This is playing out in that scene of dumb and dumber glimmer and glamor, the arrogant and, for most of the last year, useless, negligent, and propagandizing American media, where pundits get giggly talking about the “tough” – i.e. murderous – Allawi, the man who blew up civilians in terrorist incidents (like setting cars with bombs in them in public squares) in the fight against Saddam. Such are the joys of bringing democracy to Iraq.