Saving Face

As a youngster - long long ago - I learned that when China or Japan committed grave errors of policy requiring significant correction, they did everything in their power to save face while retreating from their errors. If one of these nations made a disastrous misstep and was forced to back down from the blunder before face could be saved, the Gods would be outraged. Neither of these great cultures and powers could be seen as having created a fiasco before they could withdraw from the field of diplomacy – or battle. There was no way that the error could be admitted; there had been no mistake; surely those observing the situation were wrong. My world history teachers snickered at this primitive requirement of the oriental mind. How backward could a mindset be?

Today, the great nation of the United States of America is caught in a trap of its own making. It attacked a smaller weaker nation for reasons that did not pan out. American citizens were told that that Iraq posed a mortal danger to them, that the national leader, Saddam Hussein, had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use it against our personnel or facilities or those of our allies in the region, or, just as importantly, he would sell or transfer these weapons to our deadly enemies, al Qaeda or its surrogates, with which he had been working against the U.S.

If anything, the war went far better than expected and the government of Iraq was overthrown within a few short weeks, but the basis for the invasion, WMD and conspiracy with al Qaeda, was never proved. Great shuffling of reasons was undertaken and it was determined that we hadn’t just attacked to disarm Iraq but, more importantly, we would deposit upon them an almost carbon copy of Western democracy which would deliver Iraq into the family of free and prosperous nations. This was good since the citizens had been suffering under the painful yoke of Saddam and his henchmen and they yearned to be free and were prepared to welcome our troops as liberators.

I won’t go on with this baloney. We’re occupiers; they hate us and, while terrified of the possibilities, want us gone. We’ve tried many different strategies to set up a democratic regime to deliver peace and prosperity to Iraq but no matter how hard we’ve worked it simply hasn’t happened as anticipated.

The vast majority of the American people have wised up; the Republican leadership which enabled this fiasco is rising from its slumber, and even George Bush is acknowledging that the adventure is not going as planned or as it was recast a dozen or more times. Our Iraq adventure is the greatest foreign policy blunder in American history.

The Republican majority has quietly determined that it no longer has confidence in the president of the United States and his administration. Signals are everywhere. U.S. Senator John Warner, Chair of the Armed Services Committee, returned from Iraq with a message that the situation was not going as advertised and quickly had to be changed. The U.S. Army flat out stated that its pacification program for Baghdad was not successful, even Virginia Senator George Allen, one of Bush’s great sycophants, admitted that a change of tactics was needed.

It’s a mess and a failure.

We’re now in a great waltz to the exit. But we just can’t admit we were wrong and get the hell out. If we did that, our great rivals, China, Russia and the European Union and our enemies in the Axis of Evil, Iran and North Korea, might get the idea that we failed and were just rushing for the egress, weaklings dragging our tails. We couldn’t let that happen because we’d lose face.

But we have failed, and if you think that China, Russia, France, Germany, Iran and North Korea aren’t completely aware of our predicament, there’s a bridge over the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan in which you need shares. We’re in the process of changing our strategy at warp speed. There is a commission preparing options for the administration to disentangle us from this fiasco. But the report won’t be available until well after the elections that are coming up in less than three weeks. The bottom line – take it to the bank – we’re going to begin disengaging from Iraq in a New York minute starting in early 2007.

All of this commission b.s., all of this waltzing, all of the options will be designed to get the neoconservatives and evangelicals who encouraged these incompetent fools who got us into this quagmire to get through the election with some semblance of their dignity – and a minimum of lost seats in Congress.

Hundreds of additional soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqis will die or be maimed so that we can get out in a face saving manner. More billions of dollars will be squandered and our military forces will be weakened so that a small coterie of fools and a large number of their enablers can save face. And our real war on terrorists will continue to be operated at half speed while it happens.

How quaint that these backward oriental civilizations that I studied as an adolescent had such profound influence on modern America. Whatever, we must endure what we must to get out of this mess. We’ve got to save face!

Vote Democrat! The Republicans in Congress have walked in lock step with these fools who have taken us down the awful path; they must be punished for their folly.

Blog on!

Wild Bill