Letters to the Editor
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plus ca change
this among many sentences caught my eye
"This first Western invasion of the Middle East in modern times had ended in serial disasters that Bonaparte would misrepresent to the French public as a series of glorious triumphs"
I'm reading right now in Woodward's third tome "State of Denial" how the Whitehouse kept the figures of the insurgency highly secret whilst they were escalating dramatically during 2004/5. Lately we had that report by O'hanlon's on Iraq's rosy future. Petraeus's opus will be next, although the last I heard the Whitehouse is writing it and that he won't be testifying in public to the congress.
When Israel took their off the shelf plan to attack Hezbollah after the kidnap of the two soldiers last June, I distinctly remember Olmert saying "we will destroy hezbollah" implying a "once and for all". I thought about this at the time, for not very long and it occured to me that he must be insane.
Hezbollah is an indigenous and highly popular movement with incredibly tough and well trained fighters. Their sectarian backing is at least 30% of the population. Israel is going to destroy them with an aerial bombing campaign??. The usual rogue's gallery of neocons Bolton/Blair/Bush/Rice etc.. piped up to give Israel more killing time with the transparently weasely 'sustainable' ceasefire gambit, but really! what a deluded fool Olmert was!
At some level, a military campaign has to be a set of practical aims on the ground, if your overwhelming aim is as incoherent as using [mostly] an air force to destroy a popular indigenous resistance movement, then it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you will live to regret the initial grandiosity or your public pronouncements.
Bush with Iraq is of course in an even more invidious position than Olmert or Napoleon. As I say to anyone who cares to listen, both Afghanistan and Iraq will end in retreat and defeat for the West, but the leaders who tooks us in, don't want the loss of face involved, so they manufacture dire threats to world safety if we leave, not forgetting that old good money after bad trap, "if we leave now we will have sacrficed lives for nothing" i.e let's throw more good lives on the pyre. There's nothing new here, it's always the next administration that has to clean up, it's just the way these things work.