The Condoleezza clone leading our forces in Iraq

I thought that nothing could get lower than Condoleezza Rice’s bromide that we shouldn’t be worried about progress toward democracy in Iraq, because it took America a long time to achieve democracy, particularly equal rights for women—as though America in the 19th century, where women did not vote but were the freest women in the history of the world, was at the same civilizational level as a tribal Muslim country. I thought that this anti-American argument, which equates America’s political system to that of a Muslim backwater in order to make Muslims look better, was so patently offensive that no one but La Condoleezza would be vain and shallow enough to use it. I was wrong. Lt. General John Vines, the hard-headed-looking commander of the Multinational Forces in Iraq, being interviewed by Pentagon correspondents via video hookup, was asked why the terror insurgency still shows no sign of declining. Did he provide a military answer to this military question? No, he provided a moronic ideological slogan straight from the mouth of Condi: “After all, we had a transition that took years between our Revolution and the adoption of the Constitution.” As if there was the remotest similarity between America in the decade under the Articles of Confederation and today’s Iraq, where scores of people are being blown up by terrorists each week and the government only survives because of the presence of 150,000 foreign troops.

Oh, and guess what other evidence General Vines repeatedly offered during the press conference to demonstrate our progress against our enemies in Iraq. Guess. As though the same fraudulent argument had not already been used and discredited a hundred times before, this military man said: “In the last year we’ve had three elections … we had an election with a 70 percent turnout, something we’d be very happy to see in this country…” See? Even the top U.S. military commander is reduced to the gross absurdity of invoking the holding of elections as his main proof that we are defeating the enemy. By this reasoning, as I’ve said before, all we have to do is keep scheduling another Iraqi election every four or five months, and we can keep on “winning” in Iraq forever. Note also Vine’s Condolesque implication that Iraq is actually more advanced in the ways of democratic government than the retrograde U.S., since the Iraqis had higher voter turnout.

It is not necessary to follow each and every development on the ground in Iraq to understand this: a leadership that uses rhetoric so out of touch with reality, so insulting to normal intelligence, reveals by that very fact that it is not winning this war—which, as far as our side is concerned, is not a war but an exercise in ideological boilerplate.

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Ken Hechtman sends this amazing follow-up on the “holding elections shows we’re defeating our enemies” front, further demonstrating that our top soldiers, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are no longer functioning as soldiers but as the zombie-like mouthpieces of a bizarre hyper-Wilsonian ideology. He writes:

Also see this CNN interview with General Pace. Pace is Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest rank in the entire military. Twenty-eight Americans are killed in four days and this is what he has to say about it:

Asked if the attacks were a sign that the December elections had failed to diminish the insurgency in Iraq, Gen. Peter Pace said the opposite was true.

Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that with each of the country’s three elections, voter turnout increased, indicating that “the terrorists failed at each of their primary missions of stopping the vote.”

“What’s clear to me is that each of the elections has been a major blow to al Qaeda,” Pace said at a Pentagon news conference Thursday. “I think what you’re seeing now is a continuing attempt to disrupt the proper formation of the Iraqi government, and I’m confident they will fail.”

Who came up with the idea that the primary mission of the resistance was to stop the vote? In the most recent election, the resistance was on the ballot twice, National Accord Front for the Islamists and National Dialogue Council for the Ba’athists. As it happens, they’re so enamored of the democratic process they’re demanding the Iraqi (Shia/Kurd) government investigate vote fraud by the Shia/Kurd parties.

Anyway, guerrillas don’t assign themselves missions that require controlling large areas for long periods of time. So it doesn’t automatically follow that their primary mission is to stop us from achieving our primary mission.

A guerrilla army’s primary mission is always going to be the same thing: kill enough occupying soldiers so that the occupying power decides to give up and go home.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 13, 2006 05:25 PM | Send