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Weekly Newspaper and Travel Guide
for Pecos Country of West Texas

Opinion

Friday, August 19, 2005

Smokey Briggs

Sage Views

By Smokey Briggs

Why we will
lose in Iraq

We will eventually lose the “war” in Iraq. I say that with the certainty that I would say the sun will come up tomorrow.

History, justice and common sense promise us our defeat.

As the Imperial forces of Rome eventually lost Britannia and Gaul, as the Imperial forces of Britain eventually lost every guerilla action they ever fought, as the French eventually lost to the Vietnamese, as we eventually lost to those same people, we will lose in Iraq.

The only difference between our loss in this war and the loss of World War II by Germany is that we get to pick the day we declare defeat.

Why are we going to lose?

The reasons are simple.

First, you cannot fight guerrillas on their home turf and win - you can do a better job than we are doing but you still cannot win.

Germany wages one of the most ruthless and well run campaigns imaginable against the guerillas of Yugoslavia during World War II and they lost.

They were far more committed and far more willing to do whatever it takes to win than we are.

Second, we cannot justify our war.

If we could, President Bush would have walked out the front of his place in Crawford and explained why Cindy Sheehan lost her son and she, even wrapped in the grief of a mother who has lost a child, would have probably understood.

His silence speaks loudly.

We might have been able to justify our initial aggression.

“I thought he was going to hit me so I hit him back first,” was a solid part of my schoolboy survival technique. If somebody threatens you, take them down and do it hard.

But, when Hussein was removed, the only just thing we could do was leave.

If the Iraqi people wanted to re-organize themselves and later invite us to come help, okay.

But that is not the case.

Instead, we are setting up a puppet government no better than that which we removed except that it might sell oil to us at a discount.

We have done it under the banner of “freedom and democracy” but the banner is only a cover for the ugly truth.

The truth is that while proclaiming tolerance, we are imposing our own imperial form of democracy on a people who do not want it.

While we do it we are shoving our culture down their throats as well.

Yes, Joe Iraqi, we are here to teach you how to be tolerant and we will shoot you if you do not like having our culture imposed on you.

Democracy shoved down your throat at gun-point is slavery - I do not care how many constitutions you write or how many elections you hold.

According to the Iraqi Constitution that we are “helping” to draft there will be free health care, every kind of social program known to man, equality of women in all things, a right to vote (in government aka American sponsored elections) blah, blah, blah - enforced by the new, “free” Iraqi state.

And so, we will lose.

We will lose because Joe Iraqi does not give a hoot for such things.

These “ideals” are not his. We may wish they were, but they are not and all the tanks and constitutions under heaven will not change him.

What we will do is make him mad. We will make light of all he holds to be true and we will succeed in killing his cousin with and AK-47 in his hand. We will also succeed in killing his neighbor’s daughter with a doll in her hand because bullets and 20mm high explosive rounds do not differentiate between soldier and kid.

We will succeed in stiffening his resolve. And, when his daughter dies, his Joe Iraqi’s neighbor will be a new recruit to the cause. We will succeed in putting thousands more American kid’s in harms way to die standing at a roadblock looking at government issued identification.

What we will not do is change Joe Iraqi’s heart and mind. No more than ours would change if the shoe were on the other foot and the Great State of Iraq had deposed the Evil President Bush and Iraqi tanks were rolling through Dallas and they were helping us write a “correct” constitution.

If that were the case, American heroes would be blowing up Iraqi roadblocks and we would cheer them.

And they would lose.

Freedom is about self-determination. It has nothing to do with what god you worship, or how many McDonald’s hamburgers you can afford, or whether you think women ought to be prohibited from displaying their faces (Iraq) or their breasts (U.S.A.).

What we are offering Iraq is cultural and religious destruction - not freedom.

And so, we will lose, because one day we will get tired of pouring American lives into the sand for the right to tell Iraqis how to run their country and treat their women.

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