October 27, 2003- The Long Haul

Back on September 11th, 2001, when the instant War On Terror started, President bush warned everyone that it was not going to be a quick and easy war, that it was going to take time because it was a new type of asymmetrical warfare that the Pentagon was not used to fighting. Bush assured everyone that America and its forces of good would ultimately prevail over the evil forces of terrorism but that there was no way to even estimate how long that would take, so America had to gird itself for a war that would possibly last a while. These words have come to pass, as the war has been going on for over two years now with no end in sight, and no real progress either. The same Taliban dudes that America said that they blasted the fuck out of Afghanistan a long time ago have started to return and have gained de facto control of some Afghan border provinces and are once again becoming a real threat to American forces. Iraq remains a cauldron of chaos and unrest, just about one hour before I started to write this column, there were five more car bombs exploding in Iraq killing yet more Iraqi citizens and US troops. So it is safe to say that the end of this War On Terror is nowhere in sight. The Pentagon seems to be starting to realize this and is starting to act accordingly. When asked by an American soldier about how much longer the war might last, Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that he could not say, that this would be like saying when a city would no longer need the Pigs or firemen. Now, there is no city on the planet that is about to do away with its Pigs and foremen, so that comes out to a fancy way of saying never. The Pentagon is starting to feel that this war is going to become like the Cold War was, something that drags on and on and on for decades on end. Oh the Pentagon has not given up on winning this war, they still say that they will emerge victorious, but they are preparing for the long haul, and a very long haul at that. What the Pentagon is now saying is that they are going to have to completely overhaul the military in order to be able to fight this new asymmetrical warfare properly. Rumsfeld has said that he does not feel that it is possible for the military to change quickly enough to successfully fight the war, and that the alternative might be to fashion a new institution instead. That alone would take decades, as the political wrangling and fighting that would accompany that move would drag things out indefinitely. So they had better start now, and they are. What the Pentagon is starting to do is reposition American troops and use them to encircle parts of the world deemed to be hotbeds of terrorism, read the Middle East. The Pentagon is closing its military bases in Europe that were its lifelines during the Cold War, the places that put America face-to-face with the Soviet troops, making sure that they always knew that the USA Was on the trail. Now that the USSR is extinct, these troops are no longer necessary where they are at, so they are being moved to the Middle East to let the terrorists know that the USA is on their trail now. This is what the pentagon refers to as forward defense, where they send the American troops where the terrorists congregate and strike at them before they get a chance to strike at the United States. This is a fine philosophy and all, but it has one big flaw, and that is the fact that doing this with the troops exposes them to attacks, and that is what is happening in Iraq right now. So the troops are under a constant state of assault due to this tactic, which leaves very little time for actually winning the war anytime soon. The American military is not used to fighting a war where they are continually under siege and have to be on the defensive. So as long as the war stays that way, and there are no signs indicating that it will change anytime soon, America can only hold their own and fight to a stalemate and not be able to win the war. This is the shit that Rumsfeld is referring to when he speaks of changing the military. He knows that America can no longer just go into a country with all guns blazing and decimate the whole place and gain victory right away, Iraq proved that. America blew into there and took over right off, but that has not translated into any sort of a victory, not even by Pentagon standards. What looked so good on TV when it happened was just that, TV stuff, it was not reality any more than That 70's Show or anything on MTV are reality. Just like those type of shows, the war just looked good for the cameras, and what you saw what not at all what you got. The reality is something that is not playing out to well for the TV cameras, what with images of bombs exploding and missiles flying and people being killed and maimed and the like. So the Pentagon is realizing that they had better start to change the way that they go about their business or else things will never end here. They are going to have a problem telling the American people this, so that is why they are starting slow like this. They have to find a way to tell the people that this war will drag on for a long fuckin' time and that America will not just come in and conquer anything. When most Americans will hear this, they will hear that America is losing the war and that is what the Pentagon does not want anyone to think. Because if they start thinking that,then they might not be as supportive of the war effort as they have been thus far. The Pentagon needs that public support even more than it needs the public's money, because without the support, the money will not come to them like they want. So they have to couch everything in soft terms right now so that they can start to get the people used to the fact that America just cannot win this war without its military changing significantly, and that this change will not happen quickly. For it will take years on end for the Pentagon to significantly change the way that they go about things, they have been very stuck in their ways for a long time now. America has had this attitude of military superiority for many years, and that attitude has come due to superior military firepower. Now, they are fighting a war where superior firepower does not matter so much and they are not quite sure what to do. About the only way that they can learn is from the experiences that they have fighting the war, learning on the job, so to speak. No classroom or strategy room shit will work here, for this is all new territory for the Pentagon. They have to see what this type of warfare is all about first, and then adjust accordingly. That is a process that is going to take many years.

That fact of it taking so many years is what could ultimately cost America the victory here. For the problem is having to experience things first before being able to adjust to them in this case is that we are talking about war here. What that entails is people getting maimed and killed in great numbers as that is what war is all about. These will be the innocent Iraqi and Afghani civilians and the American troops being maimed and killed here. When the American troops start getting maimed and killed that will be on the American media, but wait, the pentagon has started to deal with that. From now on, the media will no longer be allowed to be on hand when the remains of American casualties are brought back to America. Previous to this, every time a military cargo plane landed with servicemen's remains, a TV camera was on hand to record the solemn procession as the coffins were unloaded from the plane. At first, the administration used these events as propaganda, the fallen heroes return home and all, but now they look at it differently. It was OK when there were only a scant few coffins being unloaded, but when the number of them started to increase, it did not look so good for the Pentagon. If these solemn ceremonies take place once every few weeks, it is OK, but if they start to become a daily staple of the news, then they are no good at all. Then, the American people start to get pissed off that so many of their soldiers are coming back in boxes, and that would make them turn against the war effort, it did with Vietnam. There is no way that the Pentagon wants to go through that type of experience again. So from now on, the dead soldiers will be brought back quietly, with no one except their families knowing that they are coming. That way, the Pentagon can do a cover-up job on the exact numbers of casualties that they are suffering, They will continue to quietly release them, but when these numbers are released as afterthoughts, and there is no more dramatic footage of dead soldiers coming back, many Americans will not realize just how things are going in the war, just that they are still going, and that is what the Pentagon wants. Since they do not release enemy casualty figures even though they have them, if they can hush up the American casualty figures, they can just make it look as if the war is progressing as they want it to, albeit slowly. Then the public does not catch on to the fact that the Pentagon is essentially using their soldiers as guinea pigs to find out what kind of war they have to fight nowadays. Since this war is going to go on for decades, this is essential to the Pentagon's effort. They do not want the American people to know that they are essentially conducting experiments with the American troops in order to figure this war out, that does not look good or look like leadership at all. The Pentagon has to do whatever it can to keep the drums of patriotism beating for as long as they can. If this war will indeed drag on for decades, they have to make it seem as if you are unpatriotic if you are opposed to it. That is the only way to keep the American people from freaking out over the immense costs of this war as it drags on for years on end. Since the Pentagon wastes money like no one else, and overpays for everything, years upon years of this war shall take its toll on the American economy. In these early years of the war, there has been a surplus of money at the Pentagon, and they also have been able to con Congress out of immense sums of money to further the war effort. That money that the pentagon is sucking out of the American taxpayers is money that cannot go to things like education and healthcare and restoring the cities of America, it all ends up going into the war effort. After a few years of this, the money is going to start to get stretched rather thinly. As the Pentagon wastes more and more of it, the rest of the American people will get less and less of it. The ordinary America's life will start to suffer due to this shit, while the war effort drags on endlessly. The logical thing will be that the American people start to get fuckin' sick of the war effort swallowing up much of their tax money and start to turn against the effort. The only way that the pentagon can counter that is to make it unpatriotic to criticize the war like it is now. They just want things to stay the way that they have been with that. This is going to be much harder than learning new warfare will be. For as social services are cut out of American life and the war drags on forever, the people are sure to get sick and tired of it all. How long the Pentagon and the White House can beat the patriotism drum and expect everyone to comply is uncertain at best. Because no matter how much they try to hush up casualties and sweep war reporting under the rug, they will never be able to do that completely, people will go to the media with the real stories of what is going on. The Pentagon knows that the longer that this war drags on, the better chance that America has of losing it because they will loose support at home. They also know that they are in this shit way too deeply now and that they have no choice but to fight a long protracted war. Maybe if America had a plan before they rushed into all of this, these things would not be happening, but that is not the case. Now they have to deal with the fact that America is going to be at war for at least a generation and that this war will affect every American sooner or later. So the Pentagon can come out with all the star-spangled propaganda that they want about how they will eventually win this war, but the fact is that they fell right into the terrorist's trap of dragging America into a long drawn out war and the last time that this happened in Vietnam, America did not emerge victorious and the chances of them emerging victorious this time around decrease exponentially the longer the war drags on, so settling in for the long haul here was what the Pentagon wanted to do the least,but their immense conceit and arrogance made them rush into it all without plans, and now they have to pay the price, but, as always, it will not be the high ranking Warmongers at the pentagon or the asshole in the White House that will pay the price for all this foolishness, but it will be the average American people that bear that cost, the people that can afford it the least. That is all that will happen in the long haul, and that will serve no productive purpose at all.