The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

It's a good thing. Vice President Dick Cheney will shortly make a tour of the Middle East to notify the governments there that the US intends to take Sadaam Hussein down to Chinatown. Cheney will not be asking for their permission or even their assistance to go forward with this initiative, but informing them that now is the time for comment and helpful suggestions. The US is in the position of having to make up for twenty years of doing nothing when American soldiers, foreign bases, embassies and ships have been attacked (the Marine barracks in Lebanon, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the USS Cole). International maniacs have operated with a free hand. The 9/11 attacks, being acts of war, obviously changed that.

What disturbs me now is the probability that the US may try to accomplish the eviction of Saddam using proxies, surrogates, and video warfare gimmicks. The US government has been allergic to the idea that military action can produce casualties. Our tactics are geared to remote control action -- cruise missiles, drone planes, smart bombs. This apparently worked in Ahghanistan because of the country's inherent wretchedness and anarchy. The Taliban wasn't a government so much as a gang in possession of the ruins of a nation. I doubt that I am alone in wondering whether the US can accomplish anything like that sort of easy victory in Iraq.

Anyway, the objective in Iraq is not just to shoot Saddam in the head, but to take physical possession of his science projects -- the nuclear experiments, the germ labs, the nerve gas stockpiles, the rocket assembly facilities, etc. We wouldn't be threatening Sadaam if it weren't for these things. We have in the past and continue in the present to leave unmolested all kinds of rancid despots and murdering thugs, and we would have left this one in place too if he had fully cooperated with UN inspectors three years ago.

But American soldiers are going to have to penetrate the heart of Iraq on the ground in order to disarm it, and we'd better be psychologically prepared to take casualties.
Robert Kaplan makes the interesting point in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly that before long, American relations with a de-Sadaamized Iraq and de-mullahfied Iran could be much friendlier, since both countries have large populations of young people who are sick of living in police states. Meanwhile, Kaplan says, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Pakistan are apt to slide into militant Islamic despotism, creating a new set of problems. Ultimately, he says, radical Islam will burn out due to its sheer administrative incompetence -- its proven inability to run a state or an economy.

Here's some unrelated good news: It appears that Governor Howard Dean of Vermont is getting ready to run for President. Dean, a three-term Democratic governor, is a medical doctor who will be running just as the Amercian medical system is about to crash and burn. Dean is a good, smart man and a very straight talker. He will compare favorably to George W. Bush.