The Chicago office communicates its heartfelt joy at hearing that the New York office is safe and well. Words fail this office but the feelings are genuine. (The CO also apologizes for having failed to do its part to keep your internet Tamagotchi alive while you were on the continent. We tried once, but the net, she was a stormy lass that day and Blogger was a cranky ole ... you get the picture.)
Now, on to a topic where I have words aplenty: politics.
There has been quite a lot of bumpf about how we are at war and how we need to steel ourselves for the difficult struggle over the long term and so on and so on. There has been precious little detail on what exactly that will involve and how it is to be accomplished. I think that is for a good reason. The most obvious, and perhaps only, thing the United States can do as its next step in this war is to invade Afghanistan.
I don't need to remind anyone that this has been tried. And that it was not, um, a success. And that it was exceptionally brutal, as was the companion invasion of Chechnya. And that the end result was, well, the Taliban.
There's always the possibility of embargo: starve the brutes, take the first-born and second-born too! Let's get Old Testament on their asses! Except there is already famine in Afghanistan. And Osama Bin Laden is still there, oddly enough. Iraq too.
Lest this seem hyperbolic, I recommend this story from the International Herald Tribune. The IHT quotes the recommendations of "defense experts" as:
To restore U.S. credibility, they said, the Bush administration may well need to commit American armed forces to ground attacks to capture or kill terrorist leaders and overthrow regimes that help or harbor them. 'Washington has to be ready ultimately to send in forces - probably airborne - to seize and temporarily hold the capital of a hostile regime or the center of power of an organization, sustaining the inevitable percentage of U.S. casualties,'
To say nothing of casualties among those unfortunate enough to live there.
Open U.S. support for foreign surrogate forces to make war on regimes backing international terrorism.
Hmm, I seem to recall this strategy having been tried before. In a similar vein, I heard someone say on TV last night that the US has to "get behind the democratic opposition in Iraq." Hey, good idea! They're rarin' to go, I'm sure.
Revealingly,
Now we have to worry less about Chechnya because peacetime standards are not going to stand and you are going to do things you wouldn't normally do," the official said.
That is, we are going to start behaving as Russia did in Chechnya.
But can't we just "take him out"? Please, there's no 'just him' to this sort of thing.
"To be effective in killing people, you need cluster bombs, even napalm, not cruise missiles" of the sort designed for pinpoint accuracy and minimal casualties among nearby civilians, according to Mr. Gerecht.
Ah, but we'll have ALLIES!
Coalition warfare against terrorism is an overriding threat. British, French and other European leaders seemed to foreshadow strong allied support for a new, bare-knuckled U.S. war on terrorism.
I don't mean to be snotty. On the contrary, I'm sure each did everything that human ingenuity, will, and cruelty could do in order to win. And they did not win. In short, I don't see a war that is winnable. I'm not even sure I understand how it is to be fought, except with unimaginable savagery towards civilians. It reminds me more of the "war on drugs" than World War II.
But we're in a war whether we like it or not, no? I don't have a good answer to that. Would it be a war if we didn't treat it as one? Well, yes: if the US loses a major building every couple of years, that's a war, or, close enough to a war that whether it's "really" a war is a merely semantic point. But I can't help thinking that the US and the world as a whole is going to be significantly worse off if the US insists on keeping up its part in this war. By all means, fight back: I'm no pacifist. But let us recognize that we have been at war for some time: the United States blows something up in some other country about once every six months. And let someone, please, think in terms broader than war. World War II ended with the Marshall plan. Perhaps this one can end with some serious effort at justice for the Palestinians. It surely isn't going to end with someone "surrendering" and everyone else going home.
My apologies for going on. I'm just trying to work it out.
Posted by Mike Green at September 13, 2001 01:43 AM