get over it. get over your implicit assumption that destruction requires destruction as you know it. get over your assumption that people are only radicalized by destruction. a man i seriously respect once told me to stop campaigning for jackson. we deserved Raygun again, he said. It would be the only way we would learn. Flush the country down the toilet with Raygun's policies and out of the ashes would arise something better. Having lived through an economic crisis in the rustbelt where there were literally no jobs, having lived out of the back of a ford pinto wagon for three months, homeless, having stood in snaking long line of people looking for an unemployment check, i couldn't understand why he wanted suffering. a political sociology course with this man a couple of years later revealed the answer: he schumpterian leftist, with a leftist notion of creative destruction.
evict it.
we are vicious pigs b/c we attacked a country because, we claimed, they had WOMDs and were definitely chewing at the bit to attack us. if not now, then later. remember, the Shrubya, wearing his heaven's gate stare, speaking to his koolaid slurpin' followers, stood there and told us that we are fighting the war now, so our first responders didn't have to fight it later.
it turns out that they have no WOMDs, they hardly put up a fight and what fight they will put up will be no match against us. that's what happened in /91, it'll happen again. it's always been about a far superior military machine up against a gnat. and yet, we felt obligated to use military might to get what we wanted.
additionally, there are many forces that want us there or, rather, want Saddam ousted. The fact of the matter is, they are thinking no differently than those here who say that it's better to be the target of terrist (tm) attacks on the part of ultra-reactionary alQ/Obl Llc because at least that will ignite the series of wars that will eventually undo capitalism and make a wedge for the emergence of socialism. so too, forces in Iraq would rather be subject to US "liberation" than Hussein's thumb. Who knows what the future will bring, but maybe, at least, a fighting chance.
Collectively, these people who have waged this war are syphilis infested dripping donkey dicks out to infest the world with their disease. and yet, no matter how it turns out, they will manage to convince enough people that they are harmless, out for mutually assured pleasure for all: just do it my way, baby. Whether they kill a lot of people in the process or not, the end result will be that they will tell everyone over and over and over that the one-eyed pony is clean and disease-free, ribbed for your pleasure, too.
look, we have been successful. but foucault and others have shown us what the results of such success often are. we have managed to force them to proceed in ways that they might not otherwise have pursued. they are spending exorbitant amounts of money on tactical weapons that are hitting their targets, minimizing causalities. they are putting ground troops in there first because it's safe AND because they know they could NOT get away with a massive bombing campaign. a massive bombing campaign would have been too imprecise, too many causalities, and they know that they'd have the world to answer to, not mention the antiwar movement at home.
the result: they are going to get their quick, clean, decisive victory. there are too many forces in Iraq that also want it that way--want it in the same way julio and jamil want to go sign themselves up for military service to pay their way through college, that is.
it doesn't follow that they can win the peace or that they even want to. no, in fact, what they surely want is no peace at all.
technology has changed the way they fight wars. peoples' struggles have changed the way they fight wars. they change; we must change.
quit feeling sorry for yourselves b/c you thought the antiwar movement must depend on outrage against a machine that worked the same old way it always has. no blood, no bodies? it is still surely a disgusting war machine.
the nature of capitalism is to shape shift and adapt, to protect itself so it's difficult to find its heart and thrust a deadly stake through it. To recoil and to despair that it is difficult is not an option, not here in the belly of the beast. It never feels like we are winning when we're in the midst of it. It never _will_ feel like we're winning when we're in the midst of it. But, if you stake your sense of the worth of the struggle on feeling like we're winning, on needing to feel like we're vindicated==what, so we can tell some slobbering neo-con tool for the admin that they're wrong--we will sure never manage to keep up a struggle that will take years and years.
Power tool: Oliver Burkeman reveals how a hi-tech weapon that promised blood-free combat changed the way America thinks about war http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4630027,00.html