The Side Door to Iraq
Sat Jan 01, 2005 at 08:14:14 PM PDT
Despite my rabid social democrat liberal ranting, I also have some good contacts around the US Military, most of them by accident and all but two, retired.
One of them, a former SF Brass who spent his latter years in policy development in the Pentagon, said to me in October, about Bush, and from a soldier's perspective, "he has to go".
I had dinner with him and his wife, also a military employee, again today. I think he talks as straight as anyone I know, this is how the discussion went.
After the usual family and New Year pleasantries and some business stuff, the conversation turned, as it usually has these last months, to Military issues and the injustices and stupidities of the back door draft, the Grandparents being hauled off to Iraq and the appalling human damage to the people doing the heavy lifting.
Then he got serious and told me about a discussion he'd had a few weeks ago with a colleague still in uniform.
They had agreed that the neocon strategy was fundamentally at odds with every rational soldier since we invented them. You keep a reserve force so that, when your forward people break the enemy's line you can throw extra resources in to cement the success because the most dangerous moment is just when victory seems to be within your grasp and, if you don't have the wherewithall to grab it you can snatch defeat from its jaws. But you also keep reserves back because if the enemy breaks your line you need to be able to pour extra resources in to stop the gap.
Bushco has placed the reserves in the front line, along with all the rest of the force. These guys are very clear, there is no reserve, it doesn't exist, when things light up in Taiwan or Korea or Khazahkstan or any one of the myriad places the US has a military agenda; there is no-one, no-one, to fight.
Regardless of the ethics, the economics or the geopolitics of Iraq, it is a military blunder of cosmic proportions.
I asked him what will happen when the US military breaks. He didn't argue the validity of the question for a second, his response was, "we don't know, nothing like it has ever happened before. And I'm scared".
This guy is Special Forces, he has been in places, seen and done shit that you and I will never want to imagine in our worst dreams, and he's scared.
Please note, the brass hat with the brass balls is, wait for it, ....... scared.
His wife tried to lighten the moment by pointing to the Pentagons' legendary bureaucratic stupidity and then suggested, "no wonder we're going to lose in Iraq".
Nobody laughed. Nobody argued. These people are frightened because they can see what is coming, and they know that they can't change the outcome now. The US military is going to break. They don't know how it will happen, but they know where; Iraq, and they know when; soon.
And when it does, everything goes on the table. All of it.
Its going to be a New Year rather more interesting than most of us had hoped for.
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