The War That Was, And The One To Come (or, Scotch and Acid)

It is misleading, in both a logical and a gramatical sense, to speak of the war in Iraq. There have been several wars in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, many of them occurring simultaneously. Since so many wars have been grafted onto and spawned from the original "cause" for the war, which in my mind was non-existent, we must assess the wisdom of the war now as being distinctly different from the wisdom of the war in 2003.

To say that it is intellectually dishonest for one to feel differently about the war today than he or she felt about the original invasion is like saying it is inconsistent for one to feel differently about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds than he or she felt about Eight Days a Week.

The war started out rather straightforward. It was conventional, with conventional goals and a conventional and predicatable course. American tanks rolled into a largely defenseless country and blew shit up until the government disappeared. This was the war for which Americans trained and which they won in less than a month.

The next war was the war for control. And, since the goal of the first war was to destroy the government that controlled essentially everything in Iraq, the American military found itself with the task of controlling....essentially everything in Iraq. This war was a war for which Americans most decidedly had not trained, and in five years minimal progress has been made.

The Americans' inability to run Iraq, which could only have surprised people as naive and self-absorbed as our boy king and his sycophantic entourage, led to the next war. The next war was the Sunni insurgency against American occupation. This was also a war for which the American military had not trained and which they tried to win via indiscriminate arrest and blunt force.

Smashing a ketchup packet with a hammer does not get rid of any of the ketchup, however, and four years later the Americans essentially surrendered to the Sunnis, entering into an agreement with the killers of thousands of American soldiers wherein the local Sunnis would be left unmolested as long as they kept control of Al Qaeda, another enemy the Americans had been unable to defeat or control.

The Americans' primary enemy in Iraq is now Iran. America's natural allies in Iraq are once again the Kurds and the Sunni Arabs, which makes one wonder what the point of this war was in the first place, since this allignment simply represents a regression to the status quo ante bellum, with the interim price of one million dead and three million displaced. Oops.

By destroying Saddam Hussein, the man who for 25 years kept revolutionary Iran at bay, the United States finds itself with this unenviable task. And here we have the latest war, the true war, that has resulted from the invasion of Iraq: the inevitable war with Iran.

Any honest debate about withdrawal from Iraq and troop levels would make it clear that Iran is the primary determinant in the equation. Iraq is over. No longer a country, one fifth of its population displaced, its intelligentsia shattered, its children irrevocably brutalized, its infrastructure eviscerated, a land where trust is as dangerous as the gun.

We will go to war with Iran. This is the war to come. This is the acid trip after the glass of Scotch. Iran is the Sgt. Pepper to Iraq's Love Me Do. The irony is that, with American armies in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, any American war with Iran will be primarily fought in Iraq. In the coming year, we will see that our crime of agression in Iraq was a crime against American soldiers as well as the Iraqi people, and the south of Iraq will become a graveyard for America's delusions.