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Fraggin'

By Bill Shunas

In your dealings with The Wife did you ever have a conflict where you were entirely in the wrong, but, of course, you wouldn't admit it? When that happens you obfuscate and prevaricate or whatever that stuff is that you do. And The Wife lets you off the hook because either she loves you or tolerates you - whichever the case may be in your household. For example, you roll out of bed one morning more tired than usual. You see underwear on the chair where you had discarded it the night before. You put 'em on. It won't be long before you hear The Wife. "Are you wearing dirty underwear?" You've been caught, and now you have to save Face. You can try ignorance. "I didn't realize they were the dirty ones." You can try rationalization. "I didn't sweat much yesterday" or "There's only a little yellow." Or you can try an end run. "I was in a hurry. I planned to change later." You talk about anything but the real issue. That way you save Face.

The above underwear scenario is what comes to mind when one thinks about George Bush trying to justify the Iraq War. Lately there has been talk about surges, the Petraeus Report, and some of our goals being achieved. It seems that there is joy in the White House whenever a new word or phrase is discovered that creates the illusion of the war as being more necessary or more just or more winnable. And that is the main point. It is none of these. But in order to save Face, Bush keeps coming up with new irrelevancies. In reality, there is a little brown in his underwear.

Now there is a new player in the debate - the confused moralists. Okay, so there were no WMDs and Saddam was not allied with Al Qaeda. Can we go home? No. These people say that even though the war was started for dubious reasons, we have to finish it. We broke it. We own it. Their assumption is that we have the capability of finishing it. This is a false assumption. This is a policy version of the idea that we keep sending more soldiers to die in order that those who already died haven't died in vain - which they did.

Bush may welcome these confused moralists, but he is not of the school that the war was started for dubious reasons. After all, he started it. He knows why he started it. For oil control. He can't admit this. So he saves Face by declaring this as part of the War on Terrorism, another dubious concept.

You can't make war against Terrorism in the conventional sense. Armies fight other armies. Or they fight guerillas. Armies are not formed to fight people who stay in the shadows. Yes, if they ever discover where Al Qaeda is headquartered, maybe the military could help by sending in a missile or a special ops team. But basically, anti-terrorism work is police work. The closest you get to the military fighting in the War on Terrorism is something like fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban are not terrorists except to their own people, but they harbor terrorists (as does our ally Pakistan which is a different story). You may want to send your army after them, but that is only tangental to stopping terrorism. And as Afghanistan shows, military success in terms of eliminating terrorists is dubious.

There are those who believe that during the Vietnam War, the lives of some soldiers were lost because of the anti-war activities back home. Their argument is that without support back home, GIs let their guard down and had to pay the consequences. It is more likely that the factors contributing to the laxity of the troops in Vietnam were other than anti-war activities. Laxity resulted from seeing first hand that the war was hopeless as well as immoral and needlessly destructive. The anti-war movement probably saved a few lives by helping to shorten the war.

And America didn't support Vietnam veterans when we returned home. When the nation finally figured out that it should support Vietnam veterans, the right wing made some inroads with the "support the troops" idea. They meant that anti-war activities did not support the troops because it encouraged them to let their guard down when in harms way. For the sake of argument, let's say that what happens at home does have an effect on the troops morale and by extension their ability to survive.

At the beginning of the Iraq War, all the hype for this war, and all the reporters embedded with the troops created this popular crusade with the troops all supported and satisfied. Morale was high. But what happened over the next two years? The troops found out that there was no WMDs and Saddam was not involved in 9/11. The White House had lied. The reasons for this war and the basis of the morale boosting hype were bogus. Talk about depleting morale. Right there, the White House did it. And then they send them back for a second tour - and a third. Bush don't talk about supporting the troops no more.