Regardless of what the American sheeple believe, we're getting out of Iraq. We're getting out because we are being driven out, just like in 1973 in Vietnam.

The U.S. occupation forces in Iraq are now hunkered down "inside the wire" as we used to say. They go out on night patrols to set up ambushes, just like we did 35 years ago. But while the night belonged to us, the rest belonged to "them."

Rumsfeld has fucked this pooch so badly that most people in the military will tell you, under their breath and behind closed doors, that he has singlehandedly insured our defeat in Iraq because of his bungling.

We'll be leaving Iraq all right. No question. But remember, it's only cut and run if the Democrats do it.

There is a way we can stay in Iraq indefinitely, and make things peaceful very, very fast, with almost zero American casualties.

And, this administration is the group to do it. They've always been content with half-measures. They talk a good game, but they really haven't done the job right, you know?

And we have a model, more than one, really. There's Saddaam himself, who, if nothing else, knew well how to pacify a restive population.

Then there's Stalin, who understood these problems well, but his ways were on the crude side.

The best model is Marshall Tito. I've related the most relevant anecdote before. While this could well be apocryphal, it is instructive. Tito supposedly met with all the major ethnic factions in the former Yugoslavia, just after the WWII, soon after he took power. He sat them all down and said, more or less:

"ok, here's the deal. I'm in charge. If any of you fuck with me, at all, I will come into your villages. I will kill your men, rape your women, sell your children into slavery, burn you villages to the ground, and sow your land with salt. Questions? No? Everyone clear? Good. Go back home, and, above all do *not* fuck with me."

And there was peace in the Balkans for nearly 50 years.

If we here in the US could just grow a pair of nuts we could have Iraq pacified inside a month.

Rumsfeld is a wimp. If Curtis LeMay had been Defense Secretary for the last four years, you can bet your ass things would be different in Iraq. It would have been a kind of challenge: "Curtis, no nukes, but everything else? Everything else is ok by us."

If we were going to invade and occupy that country, our model should have been Tito, or Saladin or Stalin. Not Eisenhower in Germany.

Search and destroy missions that wiped out entire villages, taking families hostage when someone misbehaved, public torture. C'mon guys, you can do better than you are! These are just ideas off the top of my head. Go talk to David Woo over in Berkeley, I'm sure he can come up with better stuff to get you started. Or General Boykin. I bet he has some fine ideas along this line.

Chalk another one up to the Current Occupant's incompetence. He and his boys really didn't ever have the proper stomach, or cojones, for the job. And if they didn't, they never should have gone in there.

This one went the rounds 20 years ago, and I would just love to know if it was true, or even partially true. I never could confirm the story, which leads me to suspect it's apochryphal...nonetheless, like the story about Tito, instructive.

The scene is Beirut in the early 1980s, during the period when people were being kidnapped constantly. Supposedly (and only supposedly), two Soviet KGB agents attached to the Soviet embassy in Beirut were kidnapped by one of the sectarian factions roaming around Beirut. It might even have been an accident, although probably not.

At any rate, the Soviets apparently knew who had done the deed. They sent word through intermediaries that their people were to be released within two days.

No release.

A day or so later, according to the story, two close relatives of the man who planned and executed the kidnapping of the KGB agents, were left on the front porch of the kidnapper. These men had been tortured and killed, and their testicles stuffed down their throats.

The KGB agents were released later that day.

Now, I have NO idea if this story is true, or is just a form of urban legend.

What I do know is that if we were willing to start fighting fire with fire, we might have peace in Iraq under our occupation. But I know of no other way to have achieved that...once we got things so terribly wrong.

If we'd done it right at the start, left the army and Baath party heirarchy intact, and just removed Saddam, his aides, and his sons, we would not be in this pickle now. But we fucked that ALL up, and once we did, the old Stalinist methods of keeping the peace were all we had left. And, natch, we fucked that up too.

Two basic possibilities here.

Either the Bush administration knows what it is doing, or it does not.

If it does not, that simply confirms the fact that George W. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and all the rest of the stooges were never even remotely qualified to be part of a presidential administration. Although it was always completely obvious that Bush wasn't even remotely qualified.

If it knows what it is doing, what the hell is the purpose of this half-assed destroy-our-own-military strategy? To fuck it up so badly that our only choice is the false justification of "staying the course" so that we actually might achieve fixing everything that we have broken? To actually bring Iraq to such chaos and kill so many of our own troops that there is some sort of draft necessary for Bush's global jihad? To simply provide enough time for Halliburton to max out its war profiteering?

Look, if Bush gave a shit, which he doesn't, he would simply declare victory and leave. But the man doesn't care about human life, just his own messianic delusions.

This is what happens when complete idiots are elected to the Presidency of the United States. Utter chaos, utter criminality, utter destruction. Utter madness.

What a horrible irony that history has given us here: a man who lied about his own avoidance of service in Vietnam gives us his own Vietnam, and for which he is completely remorseless about.

Can we say Never again and mean it this time?