[IMC-Editorial] article submission

[dmitry marin]

America faces the French  scenario.

 

The siege mentality that war brings benefits the extreme right, be it in Israel, or the US. Now   the Great Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu,  said that the best way to resolve a conflict is through diplomacy. The second best way is through internal subversion of the enemy. The third is through a quick war. The forth and worst way is though a prolonged war. Bear in mind that the Bush fedayeen are already talking about their war on terror being a permanent enterprise.

 

The fall of Baghdad on April 9 can be compared to the triumphant entrance of the German troops into Paris in 1940. And yet only two years earlier, in 1938, before the invasion of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, the German military considered assassinating Hitler,  for they feared that such an invasion would set in motion a chain of events leading to the destruction of their country. They were demoralized and their plans thwarted by a series of quick and relatively bloodless German blitzkrieg victories that Rumsfield recently tried to replicate in Afghanistan and Iraq. And yet five years later French troops WERE in Berlin as members of the victorious global coalition. 

 

Hitler could have been stopped at the Maginot line, but was not. Bush could have been stopped in Afghanistan with much more immediate, apparent, and devastating results than failure to capture Usama. Even as the Taliban and Al Quida regroup and recently intensified their operations in that country, Bush’s propaganda victory remains unquestioned at home and, as Jonathan Swift said, in war opinion is the nine tenth of the matter. Afghanistan, like Kosovo, has not delineated the limits of American power, but rather was taken as an example of what we can get away with. Like Hitler after the fall of France, the Bush fedayeen feel vindicated by the sudden collapse of the unexpectedly strong Iraqi resistance. However, the Rumsfeld plan succeeded for the wrong reason- the enemy did not take advantage of its undeniable flaws. The balk of the Iraqi military were neither killed nor captured but simply left the battlefield like the bribed Taliban vassals before them

 

But good luck does not last forever, as Hannibal, Napoleon and Hitler discovered to their dismay. Bush may or may not be stopped in Iraq, but if he goes further sooner or later he will find his Stalingrad, his Belfast, his Vietnam, and his Mogadishu, even as the prospect of defeat resonates with the American public in 2003 no more than it did in 1963. Iraq does not look like Vietnam, but it does look like Algeria and the Iraqi people are no more enthusiastic about the Americans than the Algerians were about the French. The type of geo-political castration that was performed on both Germany and Japan by the Americans may not set well with many nationalist Iraqis.

 

What will be then the tombstone of the American power, to burrow Amatol Lieven’s expression?  Iraq?  Syria?  Iran? Lebanon?  North Korea? Afghanistan? Perhaps, the inability to control either occupied Iraq or Afghanistan will eventually quietly burry the Imperial project without much loss of life. A Gandhi-style nonviolent resistance and the IRA-stile terror may well accomplish more than either the Sepoy Revolt or the Iraqi Republican Guard ever could.  A much more bloody end is just as likely. It is  no more possible to predict the time, place and form of the new Vietnam than to accurately anticipate which turn of the roulette will finally wipe out a degenerate gambler. But, to quote George W Bush, the final outcome is not in doubt. 

 

Dmitry Marin

dmitrylaw at yahoo.com

 

Florida.


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