focal point

Reading the news reports out of Iraq, I am struck more than anything else by the utter chaos they portray. Even allowing for so much of the media’s obvious hate-America bias – and most of all, its infinitely vindictive anti-Bush bias -- it is clear the U.S. and its allies have totally lost control of events in Iraq. However it is spun, the situation is what military men of my generation would have aptly labeled a “Charlie Foxftrot” – phonetic alphabet-speak for “Cluster-Fuck” – a term of art used in those halcyon years before political “correctness” mandated all soldiers speak like Sunday-school teachers, lest they be charged with “sexual harassment.” Iraq would also be described as “FUBAR” – Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. Indeed all that is lacking is the appearance of a well-known Marine Corps sub-demon of the pre-PC era – no doubt banished since Tailhook: Needle-Dick the Bug-Fucker, infamous for fomenting grief, whether on the battlefield or off. Indeed, based on the media reports, ‘ole Needle-Dick is there already in Iraq and has clearly joined hands with that insufferable prick Murphy.

But what is happening is absolutely nothing to make light of despite my former-soldier’s penchant for indulging in latrine humor at the expense of the chain of command. Frankly I don’t know which disturbs me more: the fact Iraq is on the verge of becoming yet another in a long, miserable succession of U.S. foreign-policy failures dating to the ascendance of the State Department in aftermath of World War II (think Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iran, Lebanon, Somalia ad nauseum -- not to mention the breathtaking betrayal of our Israeli, British and French allies at Suez in 1956, which truly was “all about the oil”); the fact that the neo-conservative intellectuals in the Pentagon (the very officials I hoped would save us from U.N. treachery and diplomatic-corps folly) have now apparently been checkmated by the ruling clique of careerists, Neville Chamberlain clones and anti-Jewish bigots at State; or finally the fact that the loss of Iraq means not only the loss of the most vital strategic toehold in our defense against Islam’s 1300-year war on civilization, but also the loss of the 2004 election to the internationalist/appeaser John Kerry (who regards this 1300-year war as a mere crime problem). A Kerry victory would lead ultimately to the loss of the war itself, and -- via the inevitable triumph of the global caliphate -- the descent of humanity into such darkness as will make the post-Roman Dark Ages a time of enlightenment by comparison: a darkness so black humanity will never recover. That is what is at stake in Iraq. We need an Arthur, a Gwydion, and all we have is George Bush, with mounting proofs of his ineptitude, whether in Iraq or at home.

I have been convinced for some time now that part of the problem with the war against Islamic terror is that far too many people both in and out of government fail to take it seriously, memories of 9/11 not withstanding. Hence the war becomes a playing field for politics-as-usual (with the “usual” radically intensified by the antagonisms that divide the U.S. into to two increasingly hostile camps). Thus too it becomes a court upon which the mainstream media play out their malicious “gotcha” games – never mind that these morally imbecilic expressions of the competition for viewers and/or readers sometimes savagely wound the U.S., precisely as did the CBS broadcast of the Iraqi prisoner-abuse pictures last week. Which broadcast surely underscores my point. POWs are often abused, especially if they are terrorists or terrorist cadre. Hence -- if we truly believed ourselves at war -- we would have in place such stringent operational security measures, those photographs would never have been taken, much less leaked. The fact such op-sec orders were not in place mirrors a chain-of-command failure of truly staggering proportions. Had we attempted to fight World War Two with such careless attitudes and slipshod practices, we would all speak German today.

Because I long ago read The Ugly American, a novel by Eugene Burdick
and William Lederer about a notably homely American civil engineer (hence the title) who did more in a day for a Southeast Asian people than all the Lord Plushbottoms of the diplomatic service were able to do in a year; because The Ugly American was a novel so powerfully truthful it moved President Eisenhower to try to reform the diplomatic service; because I had covered politics and had been on speaking terms with some of the Cold War’s more astute politicians; because I study history the way some people study the weather; because in my own personal ethos, journalism is not a job but a way of life, something that one is and therefore can never truly retire from – and yes, perhaps because of this more than anything else – I still watch public affairs as closely as when I was paid to do so. And for all these reasons, and probably for a lot more reasons too subconscious to articulate, I have watched events in Iraq with suspicion ever since I ran across the text of a Radio Free Europe report speculating that the Bush Administration’s sacking of Lt. Gen. Jay Garner represented a profound defeat for the Defense Department and a huge triumph for the State Department. Garner, an up-by-the-bootstraps professional soldier who knows the Middle East intimately, had been viciously trashed by U.S. media – in retrospect, almost certainly in service to the same State Department clique that has repeatedly leaked damaging material about various Bush Administration plans and projects. Garner was hastily fired by the administration, and his replacement -- L. Paul Bremer, a State Department favorite and member of the pampered Ivy League aristocracy, a professional diplomat whose expertise is Northern European affairs (and not the Middle East) -- was clearly some kind of payoff, whether to satisfy a partisan political debt or reward a cabinet-level backstabber. Indeed, it was Burdick and Lederer all over again. But I still hoped for the best, if only because I recognize the critical importance of victory in Iraq.

Until a few days ago, all I had were growing suspicions I was watching yet another in the long and dismal successions of State Department Charley Foxtrots brought about by the lethal combination of arrogance, ineptitude, stupid optimism and the singularly American psychoses of a desperate craving to be loved by murderous savages rather than feared and respected by them. But now – little by slow – the story is coming out, and I can only pray it grows the legs it deserves. Here are two links to disclosures about what happened to Lt. Gen. Garner and what the dire consequences are: the first is to a scathing report in National Review Online, the second to a more general but nevertheless important column in The Palm Beach Post. And for anyone who doubts what is truly at stake in this war, I offer in conclusion an especially grisly report from Turkey, where the stubborn persistence of “honor killings” proves that Islam is probably beyond redemption.

posted by on May 3, 2004 03:19 PM