“Don’t stay and die.”

I wish that his most recent book “Dying to Win” [1] was on the desk of every diplomat, strategy wonk and Pentagon officer.  I don’t think it would do any good to file it on Bush’s reading list between “My Pet Goat” and L’Etranger. [2][3]  “Dying to Win” contains material that our bibliophobic president definitely would not find pleasant bedtime reading.

Robert Pape should receive the Cassandra award of the decade for his extremely important study of suicide terrorism and his irrefutable, detailed, comprehensive statistical study of every documented suicide bombing since 1980.  His largely ignored conclusions were that the overwhelming raison d’etre for virtually all suicide attacks in the period studied involved an attempt to liberate territory of occupation from a force deployed by a democratic state.  Theological considerations were secondary, if present at all. [4][5]

As I have said a previous essay, Pape’s conclusions are counter intuitive with regards the conventional wisdom and all the assumptions upon which virtually every US foreign policy decision has been based for at least the last quarter century.  So what is an application of Pape’s study insofar as Iraq is concerned and can this information be used to effect a pull out from the theater of operations in Iraq?

In discussing these issues, I have no interest in addressing the Bush Administration’s  neocon agenda in the Middle east as I have already discussed their plans in Iraq which have nothing to do with US national security, fighting terrorism, the advance of Democracy in the world or even a concern for US casualties in any other sense than a PR problem. (see my prior essay, “Bush is Winning in Iraq”[6])

The target of my essay is intended primarily for those who are slowly beginning to awaken and wonder about the reasons for the colossal failure in Iraq and the failure of our whole Mid East policy.  Pape recently has spoken out on Bush’s announced troop build up in Iraq [7] and his suggestions for a plan to address the bad vs. worse solutions to the inevitable pull out in Iraq.[8]

Whether the pull out Pape suggests would be correctly  perceived by the insurgents as our renunciation of occupation or whether they would see it as merely the puppet master using longer strings remains to be seen.  At any rate, no matter what the plan, the al-Malki government is probably doomed to fall and many in the present Iraqi government will be slaughtered (are presently being slaughtered) as the correctly perceived US puppets that they are.  The salient question for the congress should be first and foremost - do we have any right to continue placing our troops in harms way when 60% of the American electorate and 80% of Iraqis want us out of there yesterday?

Republican Chuck Hegel has called for a no-holds-barred debate on the Iraq War. [9]  To pretend that the illegal invasion of Iraq is merely a mistake and not the cesspool of corruption, brutality, atrocity, theft and lies that it was from the day sanctions were imposed, is to somehow try to ignore the previously mentioned 300 lb turd in the punchbowl. [10]  Yes, we need to have a free and open debate on every aspect of this war.  It finally appears as if some Republicans might just have the stomach for it.  The question is, do the Democrats?

As I said, I am appealing not to the Bush administration for redress in these matters.  They care not a whit for the welfare of either the American or the Iraqi people and least of all for the support of the troops.  Their only interest is to do the bidding of the neocons, the Halliburtons and the Lockheed Martins of the world.  I am appealing only to those with the sanity to remove our troops from harms way now rather than later in a struggle whose outcome will be a disaster no matter which way we go.  It is my firm belief that the world, the Mid East and our country has suffered irretrievable damage at the hands of this administration.

We need to admit defeat in Iraq (in fact for obvious humanitarianism reasons and out of a respect for international law, it is imperative that we lose and lose big in Iraq), dismantle our “permanent” Crusader castles, turn the oil profits over to the Iraqis and get the hell out.  Pape’s argument for an offshore presence is perhaps advisable to prevent another Bosnia, but any presence of that kind should be wholly under the authority of the UN.   If Bush’s past actions are to be taken into account as well as his megalomaniacal desire to dominate the whole world, we need to totally disown the neocon strategy for this ill-conceived Project for a New Amerikan Century, go before the UN and apologize, stop being the worlds bully, establish a true homeland security, see to our own sadly neglected domestic agenda and lead the way toward a true stewardship of the earth’s fragile ecosphere and its peoples.

Robert Boldt

Footnotes

[1]  Wikipedia

[2] I heard unconfirmed rumors that, due to the small print and the total lack of pictures, Tony Snow read LEtranger out loud to Bush (in English) and that the President napped a lot during the reading. There has only been one example I have found that Bush has any idea of what Camus was about (see footnote [3])  Were Camus alive today, Bush would certainly have him on his hit list above bin Laden.

[3] The US president, often spoofed as an intellectual lightweight, quoted Camus in a February 21, 2005 speech in Brussels praising the US-Europe alliance and urging other nations to help Washington spread democracy in the world.

"We know there are many obstacles, and we know the road is long. Albert Camus said that 'freedom is a long-distance race.' We're in that race for the duration," Bush said in those remarks.  Seismic data emanating from the Lourmarin Cemetary in France indicated that after Bush uttered these words, Camus turned over in his grave.

[4]  Robert Pape noted in a recent paper for the Cato Institute, "Every suicide terrorist campaign since 1980 has been waged for defensive control of territory, to establish self-determination for a community facing the presence of foreign combat forces."

[5]  The University of Chicago political scientist has built a data set of every known instance of suicide terrorism anywhere in the world since 1980. At the conference (25 specialists spoke at a two-day conference on the "War on Terrorism" at Tufts University last week) he demonstrated empirically what most scholars who study Islam or the Middle East have long argued, namely that "the connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic extremism is misleading.
"
Indeed, the world's greatest perpetrator of suicide terrorist attacks is not al-Qaida or Hamas but the secular nationalist Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka. Most of their bombers are Hindu, but as Professor Sumantra Bose of the London School of Economics noted, Roman Catholic Tamils are disproportionately represented among the "Black Tiger" suicide bombers.

Pape argues that the widely used tactic of suicide bombing has a specific secular and strategic goal: to coerce a democratic state to withdraw its forces from territory prized by the terrorists. He asserts that this "strategic logic" explanation accounts for 95 percent of all suicide attacks worldwide.

[6]  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11861/42/

[7]  Pape agrees that we can't simply abandon Iraq. But...thinks President Bush's "new strategy" of a troop surge in Iraq is a bad idea.  He has two concerns about Bush's plan, which will send 20,000 more troops into Baghdad with a new mission to go after the Shiite militias as well as Sunni insurgents. It will not only increase the propensity for suicide attacks from Sunni extremists, but also will risk alienating the 15 million-strong Shiite population, vastly expanding the potential pool of opposition to U.S. operations.

[8]  Sending more U.S. troops into the heart of the nationalist and sectarian conflict in Iraq is precisely the wrong thing to do, Pape insists, and suggests an alternative to the surge: "The U.S. should transfer responsibility for Iraq's security to Iraqi forces and engage in offshore balancing." Navy and Air Force components could be stationed offshore "to intervene when necessary -- not U.S. combat forces on the ground." The U.S. should use these forces to make sure no side in the civil war uses heavy weapons to commit massive atrocities, as the Serbs did in Bosnia.

"Don't cut and run," Pape said. "But don't stay and die, either."

[9]  “We better be damn sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder. We better be as sure as you can be.” - Senate Republican Chuck Hegel.

[10]  http://mwcnews.net/content/view/11861/42/<

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