How long?

How long is forever this time?
How long until one night, you don't come home again?

-Willie Nelson-


We read in the Washington Times that at “a closed-door conference last spring at Fort Carson, Colo., home to the 7th Infantry Division, Maj. Gen. Robert W. Mixon Jr., the division's commander, invited scores of retired generals and admirals in the Fort Carson area to hear the commanders and give them feedback.”

Last Spring, when things were going better in Iraq than they are at the moment, the consensus of the gathered brass seems to have been that another ten years of American presence in Iraq would be needed. I have just a little intuition that this is a very optimistic prediction, as predictions of ultimate victory by Generals so often are. Cynicism aside, I say this because a factor in their calculations is the same tattered and tawdry assumption that the vast majority of Iraqis will welcome our presence. The same fable we were given by the Rumsfeld mafia before the invasion. Another assumption is that our superior technology will increasingly be able to outsmart the bomb makers and saboteurs. These assumptions have the same fishy odor as the nearly identical predictions I read about ultimate victory in Viet Nam.

To the Vietnamese, that flag waving, carpet bombing, defoliating, mine laying and prisoner torturing juggernaut we like to call Freedom looked an awful lot more like colonial exploitation and foreign domination. Buddha knows they had enough experience with foreign domination and the lies it rides in on.

I think it looks much the same to a large enough percentage of Iraqis and because the US also represents the religion of the Crusaders, maybe it looks even worse. In short “winning the hearts and minds” of a population already flirting with civil war is the stuff dreams are made on; dreams and disasters.

We will be there about ten more years and they will thank us for it, say the generals all of whom must have been in the boy’s room smoking weed the day the history class talked about wars of attrition: the kind of war that the people with the least to lose tend to win.

How long is another ten years? How long is forever?