[Mb-civic] Fw: an interesting article/opinion piece

[John Herzog]

EVEN WITH HISTORY'S LESSONS, WE REPEAT OUR WAR BEHAVIOR

By Georgie Anne Geyer >
WASHINGTON -- Since the beginning of the "lightning" strikes on Iraq three 
years ago this coming
March, a constant undertone of criticism has compared this generation's war 
to the 1960s
generation's Vietnam War.

Many, particularly supporters of the Iraq conflict and its imprecise goals, 
have pooh-poohed the
comparison, pointing out (without too much geographical genius) that one was 
in Asia and the other
in the Middle East. Also, that Vietnam was fought against an army and its 
related guerrilla
movement, while Iraq is being fought against a congeries of largely 
unrelated, mad insurgents who
strike with the rationality of thunder or hurricanes.

But the Vietnam analogy does not dissipate -- and for good reason. Only 
recently, Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), who suffered as a POW 
in North Vietnam, stated that Iraq was even more serious for America and 
would have even more dire consequences. I share McCain's wise, if dark, 
vision.

Looking at the comparisons between the two wars -- and at what we might 
learn from them about our country and ourselves -- we have to consider at 
least two important questions that are crucially
tied to our future:

1) What can and should we learn from comparing our behavior in the two 
conflicts that could help
us today? 2) What can we learn from the American way of war, and the 
Anglo-Saxon history that
precedes it historically, that could free of us from the repetitious 
behavior that seems to bind
us?

Vietnam and Iraq are closely related in the American psyche. Others have 
called them both
"optional wars" or wars of choice. But I choose to call them "theoretical 
wars," because they were
fought not on the basis of any threat to America or even for any territorial 
gain, but because of
unproven theories advanced by men who, in fact, turned out to be woefully 
wrong.

If Vietnam fell, the theory went, other Asian states would "fall like 
dominoes" and all of Asia
would overnight become communist. (How many times did those of us in Vietnam 
nod disbelievingly at the strategic stupidity of such thinking!) Vietnam 
was, to its makers, not a colonial war, with
the Vietnamese fighting us as the "New French," but a war against the spread 
of communism in all
of Southeast Asia.

So we fought for theory and lost 50,000 good men and women, killed hundreds 
of thousands of
Vietnamese, and brought only humility and shame down on our country.

In Iraq, again we are fighting not because of any real threat to us -- 9/11 
was clearly the work
of the Taliban and al-Qaida out of Afghanistan -- but because of theory. 
Weapons of mass
destruction would destroy us. Saddam is a maniac. We need to fight the 
terrorists there so they're
not waking us up in the morning on the South Side of Chicago or in Portland 
or Seattle. Democracy
in Iraq would save the entire Middle East.

To today's creators, Iraq was not a war of occupation in a traumatized land 
that still remembers
the bloody British occupation of the last century, but a noble war of the 
West to save the entire
Middle East.

So we fight again for elusive and slippery theory, we lose good men and 
women, we kill countless
Iraqis, whose children then move on to become insurgents, and we are now 
despised in a wondering
world.

But it behooves us to look back still further -- to the early decades of the 
20th century and
particularly to the period of the British empire, to the French and, to a 
far lesser degree, the
American intervention in the Middle East between 1915 and 1922, a period 
parallel to the First
World War in Europe.

The comparison between what a fading, yet still driven British empire did in 
the Near East then is
so stunningly similar to what we are doing in Iraq today that it takes a 
serious person's breath
away.

Look at the classic analysis of the period, "A Peace to End All Peace: The 
Fall of the Ottoman
Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East," by scholar David 
Fromkin. It's all there in
excruciating detail, how the Anglo-Saxon world endlessly repeats its 
disastrous policies toward
the world.

Between 1915 and 1922, in those same countries of the Middle East in which 
we are deeply mired,
the British actions exactly paralleled ours. T.E. Lawrence was there with 
his often illusionary
victories and tales. At one point, the British thought of giving Iraq to the 
British Raj in India,
sort of to get rid of it. A mysterious Arab named Muhammed Sharif al-Faruqi, 
his background
unknown to the British imperialist officers, was nevertheless trusted by 
them; they believed him
when he said he had an "Arab uprising" to support them. It was as 
nonexistent as the weaponry and
intelligence a similar man, Ahmed Chalabi, gave to the Pentagon.

The Brits dreamed on and on. They would replace the Caliph, the highest 
authority in the Islamic
world, in Constantinople -- no, they would give the French Constantinople as 
a prize for French
concessions. They lost tens of thousands of men in a mess of a battle at Kut 
in modern Iraq, but
never thought to analyze why. The more they lost, they more London thought 
they had to gain --
after a period, it had to be made "worthwhile." But after the area had more 
or less momentarily
settled down, Brits demobilized massively, and Winston Churchill saw they no 
longer had the
manpower to enforce anything, much less empire. And so it ended, but the 
Middle East never forgot
all those humiliations at the hands of the West.

We must ask why WE repeat. In its status, Iraq today is as much a 
theoretical war as was Vietnam,
and as were the British in Iraq, and Syria and Palestine. We could easily 
have learned from
history -- but, once again, we did not.