The net that shall enmesh them all
Edited, Written, and Published by Josh Nossiter
Monday, July 9th, 2007
But all along the president knew exactly what he was doing. From the earliest planning over six years ago to the present fruition of the administration’s grand scheme, Mr. Bush and his brain trust have operated with a brilliance never before seen in the annals of the U.S. presidency. These keen students of history, clear-eyed and fore-sighted, have devised what future generations will applaud as the only possible means to defeat a faceless and implacable foe.
In his July 4th address, Mr. Bush told the nation that we fight in Iraq the same foe that attacked us on 9/11. It’s the same folks, Mr. Bush insisted. He was derided for failing to mention that more Iraqis are fighting each other than are fighting or being fought by Al Qaeda, and that Al Qaeda didn’t figure in the Iraq mosaic of hatreds until we blundered in back in ‘03. This derision is misplaced. The president is exactly right. Our Iraq strategy was indeed designed from the very beginning to fight, and defeat, Al Qaeda.
Consider the Soviet Union. Once a colossus bestriding the globe, hated and feared from Ashgebat to Zanzibar, a mighty military menace whose least hint of a threat made grown bureaucrats tremble. Then came the ten year quagmire of Afghanistan. The precious Soviet treasury was emptied. Soviet war materiel was chewed-up faster than it could be replaced. The wretched Soviet army incurred more casualties than it could ever recover from. Militarily and economically weakened by the endless war of attrition with the bloodthirsty mujahedeen, the USSR simply collapsed. Although the Reagan administration took credit for the Soviet downfall, the lowliest Afghan freedom fighter played a greater role in the collapse than any Reaganaut.
The lesson was not lost on the Bush brain trust. Confronted with a foe that, like the Soviets, could not be bombed back to the stone age a la Vietnam, or whose massed troops could not be bulldozed into the desert sands, as they were in Iraq War I, the administration seized on the remarkable similarities between the Soviet Union and Al Qaeda to borrow from history for its new strategy: Quagmire. Bog Al Qaeda down in a perpetual and unwinnable sectarian war, and before long its resources would be stretched to the breaking point. Thus Iraq, where Al Qaeda is fighting not only U.S. and Iraqi government troops, but also with furious Shiite and Sunni gangs energized by the atrocities committed against them. Any day now Al Qaeda will throw in the towel through sheer exhaustion. The recent failed London car bombings illustrate just how far the terrorist group has fallen, and how well the administration strategy is working.
Of course there is collateral damage from Bush’s calculated quagmire. Veterans of the Iraq insurgency are helping to tear Lebanon apart, again. Iran has been greatly strengthened. Even the Syrians are flexing their muscles. And of course there are all those U.S. and Iraqi casualties, all those wasted hundreds of billions, all those millions of refugees. To say nothing of the political damage the war has caused the Republicans here at home.
But as Mr. Bush has often said, Iraq was the right thing to do. Besides, as the president also likes to remark, you don’t make barbecue without crushin’ a few t’maters and slaughterin’ a few hogs.
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A NOTE TO READERS
There was nothing new at The Nossiter Net between March 3rd and April 26th, nearly eight weeks. The reason: tech sabotage. Yahoo Geocities, the host for this site, denied access for the entire period. At one point, they even managed to lose all the files. In many discussions with Yahoo staff, no clear explanation was forthcoming. No one seemed able to fix the problem. Ruling out the possibility of Dubbya’s revenge, I finally wrote to Mr. Terry Semel, Chairman and CEO of Yahoo! Inc and described the ordeal the page had undergone since the beginning of March. A week later, a helpful Yahooo engineer named Jason called. He had my letter before him. Though he couldn’t do the repairs on on the spot, he promised a fix by the next day. That was April 26th, nearly two months after shutting me down in the first place.
The Nossiter Net apologizes, which is more than I can say for Yahoo Geocities.
©Joshua C. Nossiter, 2007
