Jokerman, two points: 1. Thanks for reminding me of that all-too-rare moment of sober semi-eloquence (that sounds post-Black Hawk College). I would now update the comment by adding that I still reject the outcome of Monopoly even when you start even...that is with "equal opportunity." Start even or start unequal, it always ends up the same: with one winner and everyone else bankrupt and owned by big Mr. Moneybags. It's like Chomsky says in one of his interview books, severe inequality of wealth would be no less morally repellent (and corrosive of democracy) even if everyone started off with equal opportunity. And once you get the outcome of class injustice, it undermines equality of opportunity in the next round. Faux egalitarians like John Kerry and Barack Obama talk about "equality of opportunity." True egalitarians (radicals) talk about eqality per se. God knows there's always been and will always be enough natural inequality between people; there's no reason to compound the inherent existential injustices of nature and humanity with vile, socially constructed, self-perpetuating and oppressive modes of economic exploitation and inequity. 2. Call in sick to the Lords of the modern packinghouse Jungle. Bring Bolivarian comrades in a Citgo-fueld car to DeKalb, IL on May 1, 2006. There will be a human rights and immigrant rights rally on May Day (at Martin Luther King Commons) --- a holiday started in North America which is forgotten there and now more widely known and celebrated in Bolivia than in Chicago itself.

Posted my extremely long message twice, but have now edited one copy to read, "Posted my extremely long message twice, but have now edited one copy to read,...."

Paul, Just to reiterate that I agree that Iraq and Vietnam are "apples and oranges" in strategic terms, however I think there is a very important dimension of symmetry which is being overlooked. To explain, I will have to make a few observations about Vietnam before relating them to Iraq. To start with I must state (and I hope you will keep reading beyond this assertion) that the idea that the US had a "maximal" aim of creating a Phillippines-like state out of South Vietnam does not hold water - no matter how well documented. I make this claim on the basis of both logic and evidence. The logic is quite simple - if the US was concerned about a 'viral' threat from modernisation, industrialisation and rising living standards in North Vietnam, then the creation of a secure client state in South Vietnam would have achieved nothing to counter this. There is ample evidence that right from the beginning the intention was to destroy as much of Vietnam as possible and then allow the Viet Minh (and the wider communist world) to "win" the war and be burdened with an economic, ecological and psychological basket-case of a nation. To list some of the evidence: - The purging of US intelligence officers in the late 40's and early 50's. As with Iraq's WMD's that does not mean that the war's architects disbelieved the assessment that partitioning Vietnam was unsustainable, but rather that they didn't want anyone to know that they knew that. - The choice of Diem as leader when he had obvious limitations to his powerbase (although I must admit that Lansdale seems to have been genuinely convinced that he'd found another Magsaysay) - Pushing the Viet Minh cadres into armed resistance. (I should note here that I do not accept that the ARVN was in any important way independent of US command). In order to achieve this they had to kill 90% of the cadres thanks to their degree of discipline and North Vietnamese opposition to armed conflict. I'm sure you will agree that this shows a very strong determination to start a war. - Arming the Viet Minh. The notorious colonial-era watchtowers that functioned to supply virtually all of the Viet Minh/PLAF arms for a number of years. Apparently the GVN insisted that they be maintained as symbols of power (typical despotic oriental thinking, right?) and Harkins just shrugged his shoulders - if your allies are stupid gutless corrupt asians what can you do? Of course, in reality he could have just ordered them to stop manning the towers. - Creating enemies I. Officers like John Paul Vann pointed out in no uncertain terms that indiscriminate - or rather completely random - shelling and bombing by the ARVN was creating enemies out of apolitical peasants. Harkins, we are told, chose to disbelieve his own officers and instead believe ARVN officers. Ask yourself how likely that is. When US forces arrived in large numbers they pursued exactly the same tactics, but now rationalised under the strategy of "attrition" and conducted in a far more delibarate, high-tech manner. Normally, of course, attrition would involve bombing an enemy country, not an allied one. (My point being that the strategy was 100% incompatible with the 'maximal' aim). - Creating enemies II. Strategic hamlets that restricted peasants but not PLAF. - Creating enemies III. The Pheonix programme - a pilot project that specifically targetted NLF cadres (abhorent perhaps, but effective) turned into random indiscriminate murder and torture of innocents. - Attempts at "nation-building" were either dismally half-hearted or were undermined. The exception being the Montagnards, whose hearts-and-minds were won with great ease (and who, not coincidently, could never have been a sustainable political entity in themselves). The fact is that if you give subsistence agriculturists medical clinics, tractors, fertilisers and whatnot, they are not going to turn around and throw Marx in your face. - Faking intelligence. Politicians lie to the public, as we well know, and it is conceivable that the military might lie to politicians (as is generally held to have happened in Vietnam). In Vietnam, however, officers were forced into falsifying intelligence by the MACV who then, and this is the astonishing part, based their military strategy around the false intelligence - or so we are told. But does it make sense for a military command to get its officers to falsify intelligence (thus crippling themselves somewhat) and then build a strategy around data they know to be false because they ensure that it was. This is stretching credulity (or it should be, but most historians seem to buy it). [The following are all strategic and tactical practices which maximise civilian casualties but are also counterproductive if the idea is to "win" the war militarily or politically. The majority of these have their equivalents in Iraq, and many of these practices are followed without any alteration in Iraq despite being acknowledged (or blamed) as having helped "lose" the Vietnam war] - Free-fire zones (and their insane proliferation). Speak for themselves really, don't they? Orwell would have been impressed. - Other Rules of Engagement issues, most notoriously the "If they run, they are VC" rule. - Search-and-destroy/sweep-and-clear. Although the US publicised certain large-scale successes with this tactic, generally speaking it allowed enemies to escape unharmed, while ensuring that civilians would be killed accidently by, understandably, fearful US troops, or massacred by murderous US troops indoctrinated into hatred. The fact that 80-90% of firefights in the war were intitiated by PLAF/PAVN attests to the fact that enemies were able to avoid combat during "sweeps" and soon re-infiltrated the "cleared" areas - as has happened in Fallujah. - War without fronts. This is the corollary to "sweep-and-clear" - the rejection of an "inkblot" strategy. Not only did this facilitate a far wider destruction of civilian infrastructure and civilians than would have been possible if areas were properly secured against the enemy, it also had a notable psychological effect on US ground forces - increasing fear and hatred. Iraq has far exceeded Vietnam in this aspect. In Vietnam entire cities were basically safe for troops (and journalists). In Iraq there is only the "green zone" and military bases. - The high troop rotations, particularly those for junior officers. 3 months for company commanders! I'm no military expert, but what sort of freakish insanity is this? The people who make the on-the-spot high-pressure tactical decisions in the field are only deployed for 3 months? Everyone agrees that this was militarily disastrous, and many people said so at the time but were ignored. The explanation now advanced is that the military was dominated by a ticket-punching careerist culture, but why exactly would the top brass care about the careers of junior officers at all, let alone so much that they would undercut their own war-fighting capabilities? I could probably go on if I wracked my brain a bit, but you probably get the idea. The pursuit of a 'maximal' aim was never compatible with the the putatively less desirable strategy of maximising destruction. Those who believed that the US was, indeed, trying to create a stable client state were not the real architects of the war, no matter what their position in government. This is where the systematically falsified intelligence and the 'magical mystery tours' come into play. 'Stalemate' theorists, like Ellsberg and Gelb, simply don't take into account the fact that the 'decision makers' that they study were being hoodwinked, even though they know it to be true. Ellsberg said that 'Imperialist' explanations of the war, e.g. Kolko, Chomsky, seemed compelling except for the fact that they could not be reconciled with the thoughts and decisions revealed in the Pentagon Papers. Unpalatable though it may be, the answer is glaringly obvious, the decisions had been made elsewhere, and successive Cabinets (though I wouldn't necessarily say Presidents) had been led by the nose. There seems to be a precedent, therefore, of deciding to wage war simply to destroy not to "win". This is of course pathological insanity, but it makes a certain sense if one accepts a zero-sum premise. After all, you can never be sure that today's ally or client might not be overthrown, but you can be sure that the dead stay killed. In a zero-sum game every life taken, every tree killed, every "structure" burnt, is a little victory. One does not, therefore, have to reach a certain target for victory, one simply destroys as much as if politically feasible. It's neat and it's certain. Does this have relevance, given the different strategic situations you mention, to Iraq? On the one hand one would tend to think not, just on the grounds of oil's strategic value alone. On the other hand, however, the symptoms are all there, including the recycling of many of the "mistakes" of Vietnam. One can even look back and see a determination to inflict a destruction on Iraq going back to the 1985 arms deals with Iran (prompted by a desire to prolong the war, I would say, more than any other factor). The question is why? The only answer I can think of is a little scary, or would be except that I don't think it can be pulled-off. After the Iran-Iraq war, April Glaspie gave the, now infamous, "green-light" to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Operation Desert Storm hurt Iraq badly, of course, but it was as nothing compared to the effects of later sanctions and bombing. One of the things that does not seem to be mentioned much about the OIF was that prior top the invasions it looked as if the sanctions had just about run their course. Informally they were getting looser, and people around the world were beginning to understand that Iraq had no WMD's. European countries, and probably many others, were finding it hard to justify maintaining murderous sanctions to an increasingly informed public. The Coalition then invaded with too few troops to occupy the country. They made the requisite number of "tactical errors" needed to start the insurgency (notably the very hasty dismissal of the entire Iraqi army). They were then completely stalemated by an insurgency of at most 30,000 fighters. They gave away most of Iraq's money in an extraordinary orgy of corruption and thievery, leaving nothing for geniune reconstruction. Somehow they have managed to avoid fixing any infrastructure and, despite giving it a high priority, have allowed oil production to drop. They are doing almost everything possible to ensure that the Iraqi people hate them, and doing amost everything possible to ensure that they can drop greater and greater numbers of bombs. There is some evidence (e.g. the 2 SAS and the US mercenary caught and different times with explosives) that they are deliberately provoking sectarian violence. I'm not going to list aspects of the war in Iraq, I imagine that anyone could think of ways in which the US is promoting violence and making the military situation worse for itself ("thousands of tactical errors"). The thing is, though, that they can't stay there forever. It is politically untenable, unless there is a military takeover of the US and they declare war on the entire world (well I guess that is a possibility). They can't even keep the suggested anti-terrorism strike forces there and continue bombing, at least not for that long because they could never sustain a "legitimate" government that invited them to keep bombing the country. What then is the point? Well, for a start not only do Bush Administration members get rich because crude oil prices rise, but also it alleviates some of the US's economic woes. Treating oil as a zero-sum game is as loopily reductionist as treating anything else in the real world as a zero-sum game, but from their evident frame of reference it makes perfect sense. It increases the value of US oil assets, while forcing the US consumer to be less profligate with petrochemicals. It may hurt US economic activity, but it will retard China's growth. It's nuts, but these are desperate times for the US. The frightening thing about such a model of US behaviour is that there is no end-point. You push it as far as you can. You destroy as much of Iraq as you can get away with (without letting on that you are doing so) for as long as possible. But if you can, you don't stop there. Consider that Bush has not only threatened Iran and Syria (and is actually attacking Iran now), but that he evinced a desire to attack Saudi Arabia. Suddenly Shi'a/Sunni strife is, supposedly, spreading through the entire Middle East. Consider this - in Realist terms (which have their uses) the countries of the Middle East (excepting Turkey and Israel) have a lot in common in terms of national interest. In fact they make a natural economic and strategic bloc, including those countries with little or no oil. This is not about pan-Arabism or pan-Islamism, rather a regional identification that is increasingly expounded by Iran as much as by Arabs. When you consider their shared "strategic prize" it can perhaps be likened to a giant beginning to wake. While I don't think I've presented the case very well with regards to Iraq and the Middle East, I might leave it there because I really need to get some work done.

OK Paul. Time to grow up. Smell the roses (or shit, as it may be). The simple truth to all this, in my humbe opinion, is that all our socio-political and international problems come down to one thing - and its really very SIMPLE. Your statistics pretty much sum it up. The rich just keep getting...well....filthy....while we just keep getting ....well...cleaned. They each have an indoor toilet. We all share the outdoor toilet. The wars keep going on and on and on. Why? Simple. Iraq seems to be going down the shithole fast. Why? Simple. We keep building permanent military bases in Iraq. Why don't we just leave? Simple. The military has just gained approval from Donny boy for a strategy for fighting "terror" across the globe. Going where we want to go, when we want to go, gaining no ones permission, and causing whatever trouble we want to cause to protect America from those evil terrorists. Why would we want to send Special Ops troops all over the globe? Simple. The simple answer to all these questions involves...well....unrestrained greed. We have wars because the military industry is one of the richest, mpst powerful, industries on earth, and a few very important people make a LOT of money on it, and want to insure they continue to do so by always having a war or two. Working right in tandem with those folks are the oil interests, who want war and constant instability to keep the price of oil up ...and well...REALLY up. And of course the huge construction and service industries that provide support and land huge military and construction contracts want those dollars to keep coming on in. We are talking here about billions upon billions upon billions of dollars profits - the wealth of the entire world, being steadily transferred into those coffers. And if you look at the history of American politics, you will see that every Administration is composed of ex-construction/oil/military/law fat cats who enter government service at high levels and return to business as usual afterward, like a huge revolving door. It's all about money. The whole American political-economic system was built by the elite (excuse me, "enlightened leaders")to serve their purposes and not ours, the people (rhetoric of the Constitution aside). They also set the psychological tone of the country - which is at its base, narcissistic, paranoid with fear, and blindly wedded to a very profitable sports and entertainment industry to keep us on the couch, unblinking, lights out in the critical analysis room of the brain and under control. It's all about PR, America's finest invention and greatest art - making us all believe the image of a freedom-loving country fighting for the interests of the down-trodden of the world, seeking out and overcoming evil wherever it may make itself known, opening up free markets. How many of us know the real truth - that their country is the most evil, strongest, most aggressive empire ever to rule the world? We rule not through military might (though ours is the strongest military in all of human history), not do we rule by moral imperative (as if we knew what morality was, or even that it existed in this relativistic world we live in) - no, we rule by economics. We crush nations big and small with our econmomic power which is pervasive througout the world and is unforgiving and cruel and heartless and ruthless. And if that doesn't work, we cause political instability and perhaps a revolution. And if that doesn't work, then we send in Donny and and the Special Ops Thugs. I could go on, but you're probably sleeping by now, and there is really no point. We have a situation here. There is only one weapon left for the people - one - only one. That weapon is the people ourselves. Don't count on the system to correct itself. It won't. It was ingeniously designed from the beginning. It would be near impossible - no, I take that back - impossible to change its structure. It is all, and I mean ALL, about GREED, pure and ...well..simple.

Keiran, I hope this comment goes right behind yours and so seems to be a response to it but I am not sure it will as I'm unclear on how the new system sorts comments (for example my response to jokerman went above jokerman's comment though his was of course first). You may have noticed that the last Iraq-Vietnam piece I did was no. 2 of 3 installments. Number three is all about the destruction and exit that you speak of following Chomsky no doubt; so the argument is still incomplete. This is the main way they are different --- apples and oranges along with the predictable parallels also with numerous other actions that are part of the continuous American Empire project...Number three should go up soon I trust; without it its incomplete. I'll wait until it goes up for further discussion.

Paul

You mention Iraq in this blog, so I hope I&undefined;m not breaking some blog etiquette by referring to your recent article on the dangers of overplaying the Iraq-Vietnam analogy (parts 1 & 2 at least). What concerns me, which detracts in no way from the validity of your article, is that there are so many parallels that are real (many of which you have outlined) and that no-one seems to be asking why. Although I take your point about imperial continuities, it does not explain the US proclivity for making the same mistakes in tactical terms.

Here is my positive contribution - I am positive that things will never change as long as we continue to think along the same old lines. It is time to completely overhaul this system, come to an understnading that government as it exists is a sham for a special elite class. Until we recognize this we are doomed to "glass half empty" conversations. There is nothing slavagable.

Paul, you once said that life is not like the game of Monopoly. We do not all start at Go. We do not all start with the same amount of resources. We do not all collect $200 every time we pass Go. You then suggested one way to play would be for someone to start the game already owning a monopoly of a few colors (complete with hotels), someone start with a few bucks and 1 of the low cost properties, someone start with a few bucks and nothing, someone start with nothing, and finally, the last person starting with a huge "IOU". Adjust the "Go" salary as appropriate. Well, my wife and I took the late Pope Poopypants' suggestion that "the family that plays together, stays together" (I think that is what he said), and began playing Monopoly every Sunday night. Sometimes, friends would join in as well. Once we tried under your rules. Wouldn't ya know it? The rich guy (I thought it should be me) at the start of the game won? What a surprise. After that night, I don't remember us playing again. As you said..."LIFE IS NOT LIKE THE GAME OF MONOPOLY."