Of the dynamics at work within Iraq and the empty-suit Mecca of Washington DC, none is more depressing than the ambivilance over a simple concept I refer to often as the “right tool for the job”. Whether you’re extracting seeds from cotton, fixing a sink or building a software program, to achieve a goal within a reasonable amount of time, just as much attention as is paid to motivating your people towards success must also be spent analyzing the methods and tools that surround them. In the same way that one would not attempt to change a flat tire without a jack and something to loosen and tighten the lugnuts, occupying a hostile country in hopes of building it up into something great should not be attempted without the proper tools. In terms of the material, intellectual and physical tools at our disposal prior to invasion on up until today, the United States has never possessed enough of any to succeed.
The US Army soldier and marine are both similar in that the mindframe they are taught repeatedly to embrace is one of a hard, emotionless killer who is just as attached in a spiritual sense to the person fighting alongside them as they would be a blood relative. Make no metaphorical jump into the rhelm of politics when it comes to this, because it has absolutely nothing to do with the makeup of this physical tool our government has crafted over time. There is a job to do somewhere, a boulder needs hauling, some people or structures must be destroyed, and in the world today you’re not going to find any better tool to get either job done. This country’s military personell are unmatched tallent-wise when it comes to physical labor, killing people and blowing things up. Part of what allows this to be true is the systematic erradication of whatever excuses might cause a mere civilian to either stop working or not pull the trigger.
“Excuses are like assholes. Everybody’s got one” – Traditional, Drill Sergeant, Fort Lenardwood, MO (1996)
You desencitize the mind’s reaction to pain, fatigue, stress, remorse, and replace it with the idea that as long as one’s ability to focus on the fundamentals remains in tact, the body and mind will be able to get done whatever job it was trained to accomplish. The result produced is indeed a usefull one, but when removed from it’s natural environment and ordered to do things it is not comfortable with doing, the result is destined to underwhelm and ultimately fail. In the case of our troops in Iraq, this is the ‘what’ and ‘why’ that can help define what we have been trying to do ever since that first batch of Iraqi looters managed to break in and walk out with piles of free swag. The moment that there was no army to anhiliate, but instead a population to protect and police, our troops went from being brilliant to useless all at once.
Here you ask the professional killer to become something they’re not, and where before it was empathy for others that threatened to limit the killer’s usefullness, now it is suddenly a pre-requisite. A language barrier, indifference towards the destruction they have wrought, and a keen sense of belonging to something greater than what smoulders around them, represent assets once coveted that are now instead the equivalent of cement galloshes. The tool needed to accomplish the work our government needs done is not on hand, so in order to achieve a softening of ‘hearts and minds’, the job falls to our workforce of professional killers and some appointed suits who are also in well over their heads. Failing to understand the very nature of the troops they control, key elements are disregarded, such as having a National Guard unit oversee a mission-critical operation at Abu Gharib prison.
Categorized as some bad apples doing the wrong thing, a question of whether or not mistakes were made in terms of the intellectual tools that were chosen for use is never seriously considered. Experience aside, were the people involved in planning and carrying out the post-invasion plan in Iraq capable of doing the job in the first place? In this situation you were inserting a beurocrat with questionable expertise and leadership experience into a situation that allowed for the slimest margin of error imaginable. Yet even if the troops were fully trained and capable of maintaining order in the streets, resolving disputes and ensuring social functions like hospitals and schools continued to work, the lack of a proper intellectual tool deciding strategy would still have meant the disbanding of the Iraqi military, a refusal to engage diplomatically with Iraq’s neighbors and a misguided assumption that market forces could rebuild whatever was destroyed. Results in this regard corelate quite well with the results from a decision that made so National Guard soldiers were smiling behind human pyrimands, rather than filling up sandbags or driving trucks.
Which brings me to the final portion of this “right tool for the job” meditation, and unfortunately it involves what has to be the most shamefull aspect of all. Lip service has been paid to troops here, there and everwhere, but talk is cheap. In January of 2006 I reported on the lack of body armor for soldiers deploying, which also came with an order that whoever purchased Dragon Skin body armor with their own money would not be authorized to use it in Iraq without forefeiting their life insurance policy. In May of 2006 I reported on the details of a shell game being played within the Army to create new units and staff them with soldiers who had deployed once or twice already and hadn’t been given the amount of time off they were supposed to receive. The stop-loss soldier I spoke with then also detailed how the “new” unit’s equipment was all handed down and either broken or on its last legs, with none of it having been used or maintained for even the minimal amount of time that is necessary prior to deployment.
To the soldier it’s a matter of survival and having the ability to do their job, but to the bosses it’s nothing more than a number within a box on a spreadsheet that can be handed over in case anyone ever asks for it. The unit requires ‘X’ amount of 5-ton trucks to fulfill a readiness requirement. Even though an audit that could delay deployment of the unit will never actually take place like it should, having the physical item on hand is key, regardless of whether or not it is even running or prone to break down and leave its occupants exposed to an enemy attack once everything is flown back into Iraq. Marines face the same exact issues all the way to the middle of 2005, when an inspector’s general report stated that: “the estimated 30,000 Marines in Iraq need twice as many heavy machine guns, more fully protected armored vehicles, and more communications equipment to operate in a region the size of Utah.“
And so here we are in January of 2007 and the President is insisting that an escalation of the war is necessary, yet what has he done to rectify these issues regarding a lack of equipment in the last two years? Apparantly he’s taken a hands-off, Katrina style approach in dealing with the problem. Clearly his prefered style of leadership, to lean heavily on the proven efficiency of Madison Avenue, spreadsheets and fart jokes. Hence the news being generated by this report: “The Inspector General found that the Pentagon hasn’t been able to properly equip the soldiers it already has. Many have gone without enough guns, ammunition, and other necessary supplies to “effectively complete their missions” and have had to cancel or postpone some assignments while waiting for the proper gear, according to the report from auditors with the Defense Dept. Inspector General’s office. Soldiers have also found themselves short on body armor, armored vehicles, and communications equipment, among other things, auditors found.“
Aside from that, the years have gone by without any sort of media attention paid to the immoral practice of stop-loss. Soldiers I served with rightly called the policy “conscription” years ago, and on July 4th, 2005 deadissue ran a piece (An Army Poised to Snap) questioning whether we in America actually deserved to celebrate our nation’s birth or gawk at fireworks for a night:
…The Army’s stop loss policy was greatly increased in scope during the summer of 2004, and stands to affect approximately 7000 active duty soldiers and 4000 National Guardsmen and Reservists. A former Army captain, who served in the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, characterized the current treatment of soldiers under the stop loss policy as “shameful”. “Many, if not most, of the soldiers in this latest Iraq-bound wave are already veterans of several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he wrote to the New York Times. “They have honorably completed their active duty obligations. But like draftees, they have been conscripted to meet the additional needs in Iraq.”
With a Republican Congress blocking for Bush all these years, the apathy enthusiasts over on the right were able to basically get away with calling our stop-lossed soldiers suckers, with a ‘Support the Troops’ bumper-sticker, though zero tollerance for any of whom the fine print demon had bent over and used like a prag in the pokie. Such is the case with a Frist-Delay-Bush connection in full swing for so long, it is almost unreal to consider that logic actually has a seat at the table now. Though it’s not going far enough in my opinion, because as long as our failure in Iraq can be written off by ideologues as the product of a handfull of high level officials’ incompetence, you can be sure we’ll be at it again somewhere else before too long. You can also be sure that unless we wise up in the meantime, the same tools that failed before will be thought of as definite strengths.
As the outcome of this war is obvious already to everyone but the shills and our anti-science caucus here at home, what comes next is a framing of what “really” happened, and it will greatly resemble the past four years in it’s illogical certainty. People will attach themselves to an explaination that sings softly into their ears, and much of the fundamentally impossible aspects of what we attempted in Iraq will be forgotten or lost in the echo chamber. Much will be said about adapting the military to do this and not so much of that, but regardless of how that all pans out, they’ll still be trained as professional killers. Perhaps they’ll be more sensitive and image-conscious by then, but is that really what we want? Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the military that specializes in death and destruction, leaving the ‘hearts and minds’ garbage for someone else to deal with.
With that in mind, it is quite clear that the right tool for the job didn’t exist during the Vietnam War and it damned sure doesn’t exist now. Rather than spend the next couple decades hashing out the short list of events that triggered our defeat in this war, I’d prefer the population simply becoming aware of the futility in an idea that a nation can drop bombs, occupy another nation and be loved for it by the very people we just made homeless, unemployed and/or surrounded by the lifeless bodies of their family, friends and neighbors. High-brow military people will indeed work to cast aside this basic truth in the years to come, but for the sake of our grandchildren, some of whom will be wearing military uniforms whether we like it or not, the least we can do after all of this would be to embrace the idea that what we tried to do in Iraq is a bad idea under any circumstances.
The mantra concerning consequences if we leave is just about the only argument still remaining in the pro-war cache of bullshit, though the notion that dissent at home emboldens are enemies abroad is most often the one that ends up being trotted out. Clearly for the sake of the remaining brain-dead, emotionally driven stooges out there who aren’t able to comprehend anything outside of the “fight them there so we’re not fighting them here” bottom line, it is a byproduct of our tendency to assume that reality is taking a break on our behalf simply because of who we are. That someone could actually believe the enemy we are fighting is not already emboldened on a level far surpassing our own, or that they quake in their sandals for even a moment over a fear of the United States or our military, is precisely the thing that needs to be chucked out the window prior to China calling for payments on our bar tab.
We are not invincible, and all the abstract patriotic concepts within our culture believed in 100% by every citizen all at once will never change that. The challenges we face as a nation will only be solved if the lessons from our past are embraced, and rather than viewing each one we face with the assumption of success as a birthright, we must instead view each as job that requires the right tools. If none of them are within reach, it is tantamount to ritual suicide for us to simply surge forward regardless.