the offsprings of war
Risking engagement in an unnecessary round of mule skinning here, but desiring to have the subject of the previous post fully outlined. I want to add a few more comments. It is not only that "advanced interegation techniques" against purported enemy combatants seeks justification through reference to a mass terrorism of Al Qaeda. It is notable that in the case of the detainee's at Abu Ghraib, this is almost certainly not the case. The men are - to the extent they are captured combatants and not just men swept up off the streets - a brutalist ex governing class brutally staking out its position in the New Iraq, or they are a brutalized underclass brutally staking positions in the New Iraq. They fight by a mutual strategy of murder, intimidation, and gorilla combat. And in their view they fight an occupying army that stood much ceremony on its easy victory.
This insurgency that seemed to take the administration almost entirely by surprise was at once damaging to, and caused by administrations war plan that: used a debatable doctrine of high-tech air-power intensive warfare, disparaging sizable commitments of ground troops or post-war planning. A doctrine that has a long and always debatable history. Since the time of Giulio Douhet, at least, air power proponants have claimed that the path to victory lay entirely in the air and was at hand - perhaps a budget cycle or so in the future. I can recall reading in technical journal (in my first incarnation as a clerk in a university library when I photocopied articles for inter-library loan) the asertion that the lesson of the first gulf war was that ground troops are unnecessary to winning wars and armies as we know them can and will pass away. I also remember reading, and within the past few weeks a quote in a new book on the history of American Air Power: LBJ to his Vietnam war strategists- "bomb bomb bomb, don't you guys know how to say anything else." This was a doctrine that promised easy almost effortless regime change, with disruptions only to contained installations and institutions. It made war an instrument in a foreign policy toolkit. It made the nations foreign policy, a tool of war.
It was to protect this policy this situation -into which American lives, civilian, reservist and regular military have been placed at mortal danger. As well as American prestige and moral authority. This situation arguably the pet project of one faction. It has led some people swiftly out of the land of civilization, with the quiet nodded assent of many, and pursued by fear into the vast unmapped frontier of reciprocal atrocity, lawlessness and torture.
5:14:11 PM ;;
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