I get confused sometimes. I hear all this talk about war in Iraq. Can't help it, really, it's in all the papers and on TV and radio all the time. Constantly! But here's my problem with all his talk of a war: Didn't we sort of annihilate their army when we first got there 5 years ago? Then didn't we take all their guns away and disband them, send them all to bed without any supper and occupy their nation? As if that wasn't enough, didn't we hunt down Saddam Hussein until we found the guy hiding literally in a hole in the ground? And didn't he get hung shortly after that? Like dead hung? Isn't like sort of the very definition of winning a war? Maybe even over-winning it?
And if memory serves me well, didn't our own President Bush The Younger announce on May 1, 2003 that the mission in Iraq was accomplished? He dressed up in a pilot costume, had himself flown onto an aircraft carrier, had a big old sign made and everything, no? Seems to me the American soldiers in Iraq at the time were pretty happy to hear that, figuring maybe, "Cool! Now we can leave this friggin' sandy sauna!" That was more than 5 years ago now. For some strange reason, our troops are still there. They won the war in two months, captured the head guy and did what you expect your armed forces to do; kick ass mightily. It wasn't their idea to attack a country who never attacked ours, but they are soldiers and they do what they're told to do. That's what the military is all about, that's the deal. Says so right there in the small print when you enlist.
But isn't it insulting to these brave kids in our military to say that 5 years after they won a war quickly and decisively the government that sent them there is still hoping for a victory? They won the damned illegal war 5 years ago. What more do we want from them? To re-kill their army? To knock down every building in the country and shoot every Iraqi who's not so crazy about the idea that their country was beaten like a rented mule and still having the army who did it hanging around to rub salt in the wound? How much victory do we want here? I repeat: We destroyed and disbanded their army and hung their leader! That's one in the win column. Enough already! Get our army out of there and let the Iraqis figure out what Iraq is supposed to be like.
After all, they're the ones who have to live there forever and ever, not our soldiers, although the GI's are starting to wonder about that. It's not an army's job to train the army of a nation they invaded. Believe it or not, armies don't generally do that, the thinking on that being that they might just have to fight them again, and now they know your tactics. Nor are armies often used as police forces. Policemen are people in squad cars or walking a beat with maybe a pistol and a can of mace who keep civil order and catch crooks, give out traffic tickets and stuff like that. They are not body-armored, helmet-wearing, automatic rifle-toting soldiers who drive around in tanks, armored vehicles, helicopter gunships and jet fighters. That would be an amy, a totally different sort of organization from a police force with a different purpose.
So I wonder about all this talk of a war. Wars are big, loud and bloody, two armies shooting at each other ferociously and lobbing bombs back and forth, buildings being blown to bits and the earth getting shredded and scorched. People die in horrible ways and get wickedly maimed, lots and lots of them. One side or the other kills more of the other guys than they lose, capture some territory and win the battle. They do that often enough and bingo, they win the war. It's not exactly a brand new human endeavor. What's going on in Iraq these past 5 years is not a war, but something else. Apres-war, maybe?
What exactly that something else is can be hard to figure out, but it sure doesn't sound like a war, unless the definition of a war with armies and battles and troop movements and conquering and all that has been changed. The soldiers don't seem to know what their mission is, they weren't trained for getting picked off one by one by snipers and roadside bombs and working as cops. Every so often they get sent on some sort of surge, a decidedly non-military term. Never at any point in their training did the term surge come up. During the surge our soldiers kill guys in civilian clothing who are pointing rocket launchers and rifles at them, people who work for some crazy Muslim cleric or another.
So they kill them and wreck their neighborhoods, then move on to the next crazy Muslim cleric gang and kill them and wreck that neighborhood too, probably figuring that if they keep killing enough guys with rocket launchers and wrecking their neighborhoods and avoid getting a leg blown off by a roadside bomb that eventually the enemy will all be dead and the President can dress up in a costume again and announce "Mission really accomplished" and then they can come home to America where they can finally get a decent slice of pizza or go to a ball game.
Or at least that's as near as I can figure it. Unless of course the whole thing is a phony front for stealing Iraqi oil and putting the fear of God into Iraq's neighbors and the old guys running the war figure it's okay to waste a few thousand soldiers' lives and limbs as long as they keep getting richer. You think? Nah, Americans would never do that kind of thing. It's probably just me misinterpreting what I'm seeing right in front of me. I could have swore we won that war when we destroyed their army and captured their whole country and hung their president. Funny how our eyes play tricks on us sometimes...
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