The good thing about picking such an intangible invisible enemy as “terrorism”, is that you never have to spend too much time justifying your wars and your actions. “Terrorists”, much like “communists” a few decades ago, can surface anywhere and take on any appearance.
Although they preferably do not dress like us and probably do not celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving. Ideally, their skin even has a different shade.

Declaring war on an invisible army force with, by definition, no way to assess your progress, is very convenient for two reasons:

First, because there’s nothing like a good war to help people forget about other less palatable aspects of your policies. Bush’s government is only the last of a long line of variously skilled politicians who have waged some improbable war and based their entire political agenda on this premise.

If we look on the American side, we got everything from the 50’s war on commies up until the would-be-laughable (if not for the countless lives it has destroyed, both in the US and abroad): “war on drugs“…

While there’s no need to go over the futility and hopelessness of the latter war, one thing bears reminding about the cold-war and one of its long-term consequences: following 1979’s invasion of Afghanistan by soviet forces, the US directly provided both military and financial support to resistance troops. The very same people that would, a decade later, take over the country and instigate one of the most oppressing Islamic dictatorship of all times, while apparently backing Al Qaeda operations… But more on that later.

Has anybody noticed to what extent domestic policies have been reduced to an overt game of back-patting self-gratification between white-house cronies, while at the same time receiving close to no media coverage?

I guess it’s much more exciting to report about the glorious advance of the War on Terrorism, rather than, say, focus on Bush’s catastrophic environmental policies or his frighteningly medieval AIDS prevention program based on… “abstinence”…

All in all, Bush’s buddies hardly bother hiding their cynical agenda: they know no one’s watching and hardly anyone cares, ’cause that whole war stuff is so much more exciting.

The other reason why you would want to start a war with enemies you can’t count is precisely that you can’t win it… There’s an infinite supply of evildoers to ensure your “war” never comes to an untimely end, suddenly bringing back the public’s short spanned-attention onto your lucrative little business of cronyism and embezzlement…

Of course, in order to avoid unpopular messy wars, this strategy requires quickly jumping from one opponent to the next, forcefully fitting entirely unrelated countries under a common description of “axis of evil”…

And to a point, it works: nobody (read: no mainstream media) seems to have noticed how quickly Afghanistan disappeared from the US focus and how, beside a few gas pipelines quickly restored and put back to work, nothing much has changed in war-torn Afghanistan ever since… Why did everyone forget so quickly about the original goals of the campaign in Afghanistan that seemed so clear at the time (“eradicate Al Qaeda”, “find Osama Ben Laden”, “rebuild the country”)? Simply because, just when it started being a bit more complicated than dropping bombs and shooting a few underarmed disheveled fanatics, when it started being about building stuff and organizing and investing important amount of money in a country with little promise for immediate return (remember: no oil there), then the US government understood it was time to get the hell away, let the UN deal with the mess and move onto the next target… Which happened to be the good old arch nemesis of yore: the evil Sadam Hussein!

And that’s where the invisible-enemy strategy choked on a serious bone and showed its flaws: when you can’t see your enemies, it’s much harder to beat them, especially if they start actually materializing into real, concrete, people with good reasons to kick your ass and wide support from their country.

Most people (including me, I must admit) were somewhat expecting this to happen in Afghanistan, as there’s a very famous historical precedent. But the US military were quite careful not to make the exact same mistake that cost the USSR its worst military defeat ever. There was close to no ground engagement in Afghanistan, and the US backed pretty much anybody willing to say they disliked Al Qaeda, giving them weapons and telling them to go take care of the bad guys for them, thus making room for the next generation of US-equipped violent factions that will backfire in a few years. But at the time, it worked out well, as the dreaded guerilla war that proved fatal to Soviet troops twenty years ago was avoided.

But there wasn’t such an option in Iraq: against a real country with a somewhat real army, the US had no other choice than to engage completely and send ground troops. Plus, this time, they had a much more specific agenda regarding the use of local resources (let’s liberate the oil derricks) that required real involvement, not just a few bombs casually dropped here and there. The problem came when, after getting rid of a bunch of thinly-motivated Iraqi regular troops, they had to deal with other people who had their own agenda (anti-US, pro-islamic etc) and much more determination to carry it through.

This is how the loop has been looped and now the US faces the same exact problem which the Soviet faced two decades ago: myriads of invisible partisans that do not care for their life and can easily get their hand on semi-heavy weapons (the ones the US provided them with, back when we still liked them better than their evil Iranian neighbours) that are all too sufficient to inflict continuous, relentless damages to occupation forces. If you’ve read any account of the Soviet-Afghan war, you will have noticed how strikingly similar the attacks are: a few people with a rocket-launcher can down a lot of planes or helicopters without much effort. The Afghans have done it successfully for years, and so are the Iraqis now.

On one side, a bunch of regular militaries in a foreign country, on the other side, guerilla fanatics with an increasingly wide popular support (due mostly to US ruthless behaviour toward civilians during the invasion)… Odds -and time- are working strongly against the US. And it’s not hard to see the specter of an Afghan-style defeat looming over the horizon (Vietnam being not too far either, although the involvement levels are definitely not comparable).

Just as a note: although there hardly ever was a single real “battle” fought on Afghan territory during the Afghan-Soviet war, the Soviet lost a total of more than 25,000 troops over their decade of occupation, before completely withdrawing in 1989…

Continued in some next entry

in the meantime, you can always read this rather funny piece about why “White House No Longer Uses Orwell and Machiavelli as ‘Consultants'”

In the grand recent tradition of American war journalism, yet another story of hyper-inflated, grossly exagerated, nearly fabricated, piece of pseudo-news…

This article from the Toronto Star details how the US Military entirely made up a ready-for-TV war drama. A must read if you still had an ounce of trust in major US media outlets.
Continue reading

It suddenly downed on me while reading yet another article pointing out how the US still cannot manage to justify their invasion of Iraq, even after the fact…

Delenda Est Carthago

First, let me give a bit of explanation for the ones who were lucky enough not to endure years of latin grammar and history during their childhood.
Delenda Est Carthago, or more exactly: “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” (“And therefore, I conclude that Carthage must be destroyed”), was the motto of Roman conservative senator Cato the Elder. In fact, it was much more than a motto, it was a slogan, tirelessly punctuating every single of his interventions at the senate. Even when the subject debated was in no way related, he would always weave in his subliminal message: “Carthago delenda est”…
Something like: “we need more fund for the new aqueduct, and carthage must be destroyed… let’s paint the coliseum blue and carthage must be destroyed… we need to fight corruption within the administration and carthage must be destroyed… etc. etc”

The goal, obviously, being to convince the Roman senate to go on yet another war against rival city Carthage and make sure nobody got out alive this time…

This warmongering successfully started the third, last and most vicious of the Punic wars, opposing Rome to Carthage and unsurprisingly resulting in the complete obliteration of the weaker one.

Now, I am sure I could find half a dozen wars in the world’s History which would perfectly stand the comparison to “US-Irak Pt. 2: The Vengeance”, but this one is particularly striking in its similarities.

What reminded me of this old tidbit of history was probably, more than anything, the rhetoric used by US warmongers to justify their position before the war: no need to be subtle there, just utter pseudo-truths and dumbed-down arguments over and over again, until they become the official media truth.

But is this the only points of comparison between the two? Well, hardly… curious about how far it could go, I tried to complete my superficial knowledge of this particular slice of history and felt an increasingly dizzifying feeling of déjà-vu as I dug into history books.

What are we talking about again?

Well, it all starts with this rather wishy-washy politician, not really famed for his wit, but quite popular among conservatives for his obtuse, simplistic traditional views.
Then, there is this old nemesis, once a mighty and threatening empire, but now a war-torn piece of land crushed by the previous conflict, painfully recovering under strong economical sanctions.
What happens then?
Well, building a hatred for the other, based mostly on inane non-factual arguments, employing fear and panic as instruments of war, this politician and his allies eventually succeed in starting an unnecessary and unfair conflict, quite predictably won by what is then an unchallenged superpower… all this for the benefit of none but the private interests of a handful of people.

As you guessed, I was merely giving a small lecture on the Third Punic War (149-146 BC), as accounted for by most history books.
History, perpetually repeating itself? nah…

Among the many interesting details of this (rather gratuitous, I’ll admit) comparison, is that this war, although it had little impact on the Roman empire by itself, is considered the first step of what eventually became its demise… and because it just sounds too familiar, I will merely quote some history website:

“The accidental Roman Empire suddenly shifted into high gear. However, the massive wealth that was created for Rome awoke old tensions between the classes, and the Republic would live in a state of crisis for over a hundred years – a crisis that, at its conclusion, would precipitate the demise of the Republic in favor of a dictatorship.
Rome failed to prosecute corrupt bureaucrats effectively since the courts showed a strong bias towards the senatorial class. […]
The historian Sallust […], dated Rome’s corruption to the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC and the absence of any foreign threat.”

Did that sound a bit scary? oh sorry…