Why do we persist in blundering into war?
When another dramatic story sprang out of Iraq recently — that ISIS reduced the flow of water through a dam on the Euphrates to shrink the river and give them easier access to the government forces on the other side — no one here paid much attention.
They should have. For water-as-war is as old in Iraq as the gates of Babylon or the fear of the Persians.
But the story appeared to pass in a day, and once again I was left only with America's ongoing history since World War II of futile and foolish wars, wondering where everybody is. The Pentagon has five sides, but doesn't seem to be capable of understanding that history has at least as many.
When I was in Iraq in 1983, on one of eight visits in all that I paid to what was once ancient Mesopotamia, our group of journalists covering the brutal Iraq/Iran war was taken out to the front lines outside Basra in the south. Dead Iranians were strewn across the ugly desert, their bodies covered with sand in grotesque forms.
To get to the front and to the dead, we had to pass through various forms of Saddam Hussein's water warfare. Parts of the desert had been flooded, from river or dam water, to freeze and halt the Iranians in their movements. The famous Arab marshes in the Iraqi south had been dried up by Saddam to punish the marsh people. Everywhere, Saddam had moved water expertly to thwart his enemy.
Once back in Baghdad, I went to see the Indian and Turkish military attaches, whose countries were advising the Iraqi military. Both told me that Saddam's use of water as a weapon was virtually unique in history. The Turk said, “This war will be studied by military historians for decades.”
Thus, the military water story drew me in, making me wonder how and why our leaders could consciously miss all this. And I did not soon get answers, for since World War II, we have shown an alarming propensity to go to war with peoples and nations whose psychology and predilections we little understand.
Take Vietnam. It could hardly be argued that this was not a post-colonial war. We had taken the place of the French colonialists. Yet, our political leaders, plus the Pentagon, argued that it was a clear-cut battle between communism and democracy, which of course turned out to be hogwash.
A core problem there? The North Vietnamese's intentions were infinite — they would fight forever, because it was their country. But our presence and promises were finite — we were in it only for the time it pleased us. Why, we could mow them over without misplacing a hair of ours!
Did we understand Somalia, when we blundered in there on the beaches in 1992? Not at all. Muslim Somalia had been all-but-occupied by the Soviets, who had built sports stadiums, public buildings and gigantic, unwieldy structures all over the capital. It was hardly a surprise when we left with our tails between our legs and dozens of Americans killed in “Blackhawk Downs.”
But our lack of understanding of our “enemies” — and we never exactly figured out why they WERE enemies — reached a crescendo of ignorance when we invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and threw in Iraq for good measure, largely because Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had always wanted “their” wars.
Frankly, the absence of weapons of mass destruction was the least of the lies and misjudgments. With a history of foreign invasion, the Iraqis could not but hate us. Ignoring all of that history, in we marched — to save them, naturally!
Any student of both Iraqi and Afghan history could have told George W., Cheney and Rumsfeld that the region was an ever-fighting patchwork of tribes, towns and cities, and even of rivers, marshes and waterways that changed with the ebb and flow of nature and history and was never exactly amenable to foreign decision-making.
But never bothering to pick up a book before they invaded, George, Dick and Don were stuck in the deserts of Ramadi, Fallujah and Tikrit before you could phone a psychoanalyst to beg him take a look at the three.
The question that is now bugging the nation is, Why are we so constitutionally incapable of fighting these awful “little wars” — and why do we persist in doing so?
In a recent edition of the new middle-ground Republican journal, The American Conservative, publisher Jon Basil Utley argues convincingly and depressingly that, “Too many parties now benefit from perpetual war-making for the U.S. to ever conclude its military conflicts.” Others argue that the military actually WANTS the wars, the better for its members to rise in the ranks.
Meanwhile, we have no group of scholars in the Pentagon such as Gen. Douglas MacArthur brought together in 1944 to teach him about Japan, so our military leaders have no professionals in human nature to lend them intellectual support.
One wonders how long our beloved country can make such mistakes — and depend upon our military to bomb us out of them. With each minute that passes, the respect we once had for ourselves diminishes.
Georgie Anne Geyer can be reached at gigi_geyer@juno.com.
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