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Alternatives (Free verse) by Dovina

Let the war go on three more brutal years. Double our losses, double theirs too. It’s worth the cost if during that time technologists come to our cure for a sickness we all endure. If by then the carnage persists, admit we’re defeated, sit down with the winners. Save what we can of all we admire, And give them their wishes, as much as we must to stop the killings and grant us some peace. So, you with the math, the physics, the code, we give you three years of our blood and our souls. Go into battle with all of your heart, Root out the evil, force them to stop, because you, my friends, are all that we’ve got.

ecargo 30-Jan-07/7:20 AM
"Operation Enduring Freedom"--how pleased David Frum would be that you used the proper name. I think it was he who coined the term before going off to save duckies and bunnies. I always suspected there was a bit of irony in the moniker, but, hey, I'm just a little cynical.

What's winning? Is being mired there for the next god-knows-how-many decades fighting in an internal civil war "winning"? Are the Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds, in their various flavors, and anyone else with a yen for a share of wealth and power and some ancient festering grudge to avenge, going to start getting along if we drop enough bombs and fire enough rounds? Honestly, that's been one of the biggest fuck-ups of this entire war--we went in with no idea how to get out. The entire premise was bullshit, the "expert" predictions were bullshit, and the end result--where we are now--predictable and ignored. So is "winning" just "staying the course" and praying that--well, what? And I think you oversimplify how many people view the war. (Or maybe you don't.) I don't think Bush is "evil"--I think he's out of his league and ill-advised and pigheaded and determined to save his legacy at all costs. Like Dovina (apparently), he believes that the cost in blood and treasure is worth it to save him/us from "embarassment." All other things aside, there is no political or popular WILL to stay as long as we would need to stay--to spend the thousands of lives and trillions of dollars--to see any real improvement or real, measurable progress. Thus the opposition to benchmarks. Sending 20,000 additional troops is bunk. And no one else is going to step in with offers of aid at this point, because they know a losing proposition, in every sense, when they see it. There is no cavalry.

"Operation Enduring Freedom wins," you say, "or everyone loses." But I always come back to the same question--if this is, as claimed, simply a front in the global war on "terra," how, exactly, does ensuring that another several generations of Muslims hate us help us in the end?

As for "solutions," I have no fucking idea. I think we owe it to the Iraqis to help them get to some point of stability, quite honestly, but I don't know if that's even possible and I'm quite certain that neither the US nor the UK are going to commit to keeping troops there much longer (when Bush goes, so does our army, at the latest)--so where does that leave us?




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