> [Best article on the Iraq war I've seen in a while.]
>
> Living in a Fantasy
> At Home and Abroad
>
> By: Nicholas von Hoffman
> Date: 6/26/2006
>
> The United States must send an army to Iraq that is large enough to pacify
> the country. That’s a half-million men and a few women standing on every
> street corner in every city and village, not a few desperate and harried
> Marines rushing to and fro to smother (with decreasing success) the newest
> and worst outbreaks.
Pretty good article, but two caveats: (1) adding more troops would change nothing. It would just create more targets for the insurgents to shoot at. And (2) there's a deep continuity between this ghastly war and the history of the US Empire.
I think the US oiligarchy thought of the war as a kind of petroleum-based Louisiana purchase, a way of acquiring the 51st American state from pesky brown natives who just wouldn't do what their masters told them. (This may explain their cultural identification with Israeli settler colonialism). It's ironic that their inability to recall their own history ultimately bit them in the ass: the 19th century US Empire succeeded on the basis of localized ethnic extermination and generalized settler colonialism.
But the US military can't murder millions of Iraqis without triggering its economic self-destruction (East Asia and Europe would pull out their money, and the US would implode). And I don't see hordes of USers lining up to till the IED-strewn fields of Fallujah.
-- DRR