Sunday, May 18, 2008
The Old Fart's vision of victory is a chimera
As illusory and vaporous as that of Our Dear Embattled Leader, but no less expensive in men, money and materiel because they can not see or understand it. William S. Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, explains the different nature of what he refers to as Fourth Generation Warfare.
If we are to see Iraq and other Fourth Generation conflicts as they are and not through the looking glass, we need to use words more carefully.There is no power in someone like Maliki of Iraq just because we say so, and our continuing insistence that there is only leads us further into the Big Sandy. And the Big Fool says to push on.
Because there is no state in Iraq, there is also no government. Orders given in Baghdad have no meaning, because there are no state institutions to carry them out. The governmental positions of Iraqi leaders have no substance. Their power is a function of their relationship to various militias, not of their offices. Maliki has no militia, which means he is a figurehead.
The Iraqi "army" and "police" are groupings of Shiite militias that exist to fight other militias and take orders from militia leaders, not the government. Government revenues are slush funds militia leaders use to pay their militiamen. All of these phenomena, and many more, are products of the one basic reality: there is no state.
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