More Iraq War

Time Magazine poses the unthinkable question to the US ruling class: Is It Too Late To Win the War?. The magazine leads with a story about the US Army Chasing the Ghosts (Subscription Required) and details Saddam's Revenge in The secret history of U.S. mistakes, misjudgments and intelligence failures that let the Iraqi dictator and his allies launch an insurgency now ripping Iraq apart. Their answer is Yes

James Wolcott (Vanity Fair contributing editor) is of the opinion that the USA is headed for severe Systems Failures. He quotes William S. Lind makes some Important Distinctions between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War:

"The primum mobile of Fourth Generation war is a crisis of legitimacy of the state. If the absence of a loyal opposition and alternative courses of action further delegitimizes the American state in the eye of the public, the forces of the Fourth Generation will have won a victory of far greater proportions than anything that could happen on the ground in Iraq. The Soviet Union's defeat in Afghanistan played a central role in the collapse of the Soviet state. Could the American defeat in Iraq have similar consequences here? The chance is far greater than Washington elites can imagine."

Emphasis Mine

The US ruling class is facing a crisis of legitimacy which is being exacerbated by:

• Stalemate in Iraq
• Enormous damage caused by hurricanes and government ineptitude
• Two million displaced persons within the USA due to the hurricanes
• Energy crisis caused by the hurricanes, war in Iraq, limited refining capacity, and possibly 'peak oil'
• The Housing Bubble
• The growing US national debt
• PRC's economic growth
• Survival of the Cuban Revolution
• Success of the Venezulean Revolution

And yet, approx. 40% of Americans think it is in their best interest to support the current regime. They may be enough to keep the current regime safe for it is better to have one person supports you and does something about it, than ten people who are against you and are not going to do anything about it. The trick to ruling is to keep those ten sitting on the couch.

James Wolcott also bemoans the mixed messages and staleness of the slogans of the anti-war demonstrators. My answer is that democracy is messy while fascism can get everybody marching in straight lines with nice uniforms and a unified message. I would much rather have the messiness of democracy than the singlemindedness of fascism. Getting disparate groups of people to agree on anything is almost impossible. That's tolerance in democracy is so important. Those slogans are the results of protracted negotiations and compromises - which is why everyone falls back to the tried and true ones.

My opinion about the future of the USA is the rise of fascism after the severe economic shock of debt and the coming defeat in Iraq. There is a sufficient number of people who believe that all of their problems stem from moral laxity and backstabbing by the liberal elites. The white puritanical Christians (Protestant and Catholic) will form the backbone of this movement.

Prof Juan Cole explains Why we Have to get the Troops Out of Iraq now:

The first reason to get the ground troops out now is that they are being fatally brutalized by their own treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Abu Ghraib was horrific, and we who are not in Congress or the Department of Defense have still only seen a fraction of the photographs of it that exist. Sy Hersh learned of rapes, some of them documented. ...

The second reason is that the ground troops are not accomplishing the mission given them, and are making things worse rather than better.

...

Let's get them out, now, before they destroy any more cities, create any more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, provoke any more ethnic hatreds by installing Shiite police in Fallujah or Kurdish troops in Turkmen Tal Afar. They are sowing a vast whirlwind, a desert sandstorm of Martian proportions, which future generations of Americans and Iraqis will reap.

The ground troops must come out. Now. For the good of Iraq. For the good of America.

Emphasis Mine

I don't think the US ruling class is too worried abou the brutalisation of the US troops. They would rather it kept growing. Brutalised US troops could come in useful when quelling domestic uprisings. Then the US troops would not be squeamish about pulling the trigger on fellow US citizens - even whites!

The mission in Iraq is to be brutal. The USA can no longer rule by guile and through proxies. It has to demonstrate unflinching brutality to the rest of the world. They have to prove that they are meaner than a junkyard dog. The message is Don't Mess with the USA!. The problem is that this conflicts the US's self-image as a nice guy (for most of them anyway).