The View From 1776

The Canard That George Washington Would Not Have Gone Into Iraq
By Wayne Lusvardi

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Joseph J. Ellis begs the answer to his own question at the start of his column in today’s Los Angeles Times:
 
IT’S A RIDICULOUS question: “What would George Washington do about Iraq?
 
He then proceeds to spin the revisionist case that Washington would never have been tempted with “imperial” ambitions by going into Iraq.  Ellis writes:
 
Can a powerful army sustain control over a widely dispersed foreign population that contains a militant minority prepared to resist subjugation at any cost?” Washington would recognize the strategic problem immediately, because it is a description of the predicament facing the British army in the colonies’ War for Independence.
 
Excuse me but let’s back up to September 11, 2001. Nineteen terrorists, mostly from Saudi Arabia, or with fake I.D.’s making them appear to have been from Saudi, commandeered four commercial aircraft and used them as weapons of mass destruction to destroy highly symbolic commercial and government buildings of the U.S.  As far as we know, these mass murderers were in part funded by a cabal in the Saudi Royal Family with tactical assistance of rogue members of the Pakistani Intelligence Service.  In other words, the U.S. was blackmailed to either intervene in Iraq to stop the (phony) threats of Saddam to use nuclear weapons and to contain the expansion of the radical Islamic Revolution from Iran into a weakened Iraq.  Any U.S. President that didn’t intervene in Iraq would thus be viewed as feckless and would eventually face the blackmail of high oil prices and economic inflation a la President Jimmy Carter.    
 
War is always based on bluff and deception from the Trojan horse to modern times.  Saddam’s deceptions were used against him as a rationale for invading and deposing him from power. Bush and Tony Blair adroitly used Saddams deceptions against him.   
 
It is a very old tactic promulgated by the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and others: get someone else to fight your war for you.  The Saudis and the Pakis didn’t want to oppose Saddam or the Iranian Mullahs.  So they devised to blackmail the U.S. by using a pretend rogue terrorist such as Osama bin Laden to send a message to the U.S.: either intervene in Iraq or we will continue to destroy your embassies, naval vessels, decimate your commercial aviation industry, destroy your government buildings and raise oil prices to the point of provoking a world-wide economic depression.
 
Yes there is an uprising of radical Islamism, but it is not the cause behind the Iraq War or even the Iranian Revolution. In a counter-reaction to modernization, many Muslims have experienced a resurgence of the outward manifestations of their religion.  Opportunists have seized on this for their political purposes by funding the most radical elements of Islam and fomenting a Potemkin Islamlic Revolution. In the Middle East all Muslim religious leaders are funded by the government (i.e., theocracy).  This same tactic was employed in the Mid East by the Germans prior to WWI as famously described in the book Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire by historian Peter Hopkirk.       
 
No American politician or political party, whether Republican or Democratic, will tell you that we have relented to blackmail or they would risk political ruination.  Both political parties have had to create a fiction of “Weapons of Mass Destruction” and other ploys to galvanize public opinion in favor of intervention in Iraq.  Now one of these political parties has chosen to exploit the apparent “phoniness” of the Iraq War to regain political power. But this is merely changing the players and not the outcome of the play; except for perhaps yelling fire in a crowded theater causing pandemonium with people trampled in the process. Sure the intervention in Iraq appears to have been bungled both strategically and tactically.  The reason that it appears so is that we were facing blackmail and had few, or no, good options.  That’s why the U.S. looks like “Imperialists” in Iraq to journalists such as Joseph J. Ellis.  Maybe it is a good thing to finally stand up and tell the Saudis and the Pakis and others to fight their own war.  But what will be the consequences: a larger war, a world-wide depression, mass unemployment, dirty nukes thrown on our ports wreaking devastation on our economy and panic in our population? 
 
The media is only interested in selling news and creating controversies in a class war where in the final spin the knowledge class always trumps the business class because they control the media (i.e., the knowledge class always “knows best"). They aren’t interested in telling you what is going on any more than the politicians. Politicians at least often have good reasons to avoid telling us the truth lest the consequences of truth telling result in calls for a ruinous larger war of retaliation against "our friends the Saudis” and economic catastrophe at home.  
 
We don’t know what Washington would have done in Iraq but we do know how he handled blackmail in the French and Indian War.  Washington was sent to preempt the French from building forts in Ohio County (claimed by Virginia). He built Fort Necessity which proved inadequate and initially had to retreat.  He was blackmailed into signing a confession because of the “Jumonville Affair” in which he was accused of assassinating a diplomat who was supposedly only on a non-military mission in Ohio County. Perhaps troops died and Washington lied because of the Jumonville affair.  Eventually, he turned the tables on the French and drove them out of Fort Duquesne. Washington may have preached non-interventionism at the end of his military career but his actions proved otherwise.  He was the harbinger of the Neo-cons who knew that you can only face blackmailers by seeming to capitulate, then turning the tables on them at the first opportunity.  
 
President Thomas Jefferson faced the threat of terrorism and blackmail with the Islamic Barbary Pirates seizing commercial vessels of the U.S.   He decided to send U.S. Marines and the new U.S. Navy to lay siege to Tripoli to fight terrorism and blackmail at its source.  
 
Where the Populist Democratic Party of Peace and Pre-Emptive Surrender (PPES)  will lead us in facing this Islamic-veiled blackmail  and terrorism is an unanswered question.  Many in the public feel an emotional catharsis and sense of power after a clean-sweep of the Republicans in the recent past elections for Bush purportedly lying about and bumbling the Iraq War. This was the same sort of exhilaration experienced after we backed President Bush in his war on terror after 9/11.  Machiavelli once warned of the fickleness of the public.  

Who knows what the truth is about the Iraq War.  But the blackmail hypothesis above is the only explanation that seems to make sense about the so-called “phony” war and why the U.S. would have blundered into occupation of Iraq, which was a  perceived but not a real imminent threat to U.S. security, instead of mere containment of Iraq and Iran; or why it merely had not left Saddam in power.  

Note: Pulitzer prize winning columnist Joseph Ellis apparently lied to his college classes that he served in the Vietnam War and was suspended for one year without pay.  

Wayne Lusvardi, Pasadena, California, is a Vietnam War veteran and blogs at http://www.pasadenapundit.com/
Wayne receives e-mail at waynelbox-blogger@yahoo.com

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