AN APPROACH TO IRAQ EVEN WORSE THAN BUSH'S? OH YES, CHENEY UNCHAINED WOULD BE A LOT WORSE

I started reading ex-CIA analyst Michael Scheur's book, Imperial Hubris-- Why The West Is Losing The War on Terror months ago. I've finished 3 or 4 other books since starting it. I loved it at first. It was filled with denunciations of the Bush Regime and confirmed my own belief that Bush's ascension to the presidency was one of the most catastrophic national security disasters in the history of the United States, right up there with the War of 1812, the insurrection by southern bandits that came to be known as the Civil War, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

The first half of the book is filled with a spot on analysis of Bush's horrendous shortcomings as a leader. His detailed, minute comparisons of the relative leadership qualities and overall effectiveness of Bush and bin-Laden are among the most scathing indictments of Bush I have ever read in any context. On the other hand Scheur's critic of the failings of the Bush Regime-- while extremely accurate in many respects-- comes from an even more peculiar perspective. It's as though when "Anonymous" was first revealed to be Scheur, it was actually a cover by the real author: Dick Cheney, writing about why his apocalyptic wet dream, best laid plans, went awry in the hands of a half-baked ex-junkie, cheerleader. Basically, he says the only option America has towards dealing with "the Muslim world" is a military one.

And it is not the option of daintily applying military power as we have since 1991. "U.S. soldiers are unprepared for the absolute mercilessness of which modern warriors are capable," Ralph Peters correctly said in Fighting For The Future: Will America Triumph?, "and they are discouraged or prohibited by their civilian masters and their own customs from taking the kind of measures that might be effective against members of the warrior class." To secure as much of our way of life as possible, we have to use military force in the way that Americans used it on the fields of Virginia and Georgia, in France and on the Pacific Islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden. Progress will be measured by the pace of killing and, yes, by body counts. Not the fatuous body counts of Vietnam, but precise counts that will run to extremely large numbers. They piles of dead will include as many or more civilians as combatants because our enemies wear no uniforms.

This paragraph makes me think that the book was actually a joint work by Dick and Lynne Cheney. This is far more her semi-pornographic literary style. It could also have been co-authored with Scooter, another close Cheney confidant with a flair for the unspeakably vile.

Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills-- all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. Land mines, moreover, will be massively reintroduced to seal borders and mountain passes too long, high or numerous to close with U.S. soldiers. As noted, such actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations and refugee flows.

This, of course is why we have things like the Geneva Conventions, war crimes tribunals and it is also why Cheney insisted that the first thing Bush do is strong arm as many countries as possible to make the U.S. and its officials immune from war crimes prosecutions.

In this morning's Washington Post Anne Applebaum says there are no magic bullets for Iraq and goes on to list all the plans (by Hillary, Obama, the House Dems, the Senate Dems, the Senate Obstructionists, etc) that won't work. It sounds like she gets paid by the word and had to fill a column but had nothing to say. Her ending, while not as hideous as Anonymous'/Scheur's/the Cheneys', speaks to and of and by the utter intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Beltway Crowd that cheered us into this catastrophe: "Last weekend, I met a Marine about to depart for his second tour in Iraq. He wasn't exactly enthusiastic about going, nor was he particularly optimistic about what could be achieved. But he wasn't demanding to stay home, either. If nothing else, he felt obliged to stick by the many Iraqis who had helped the Marines and who might well be murdered if the Marines left for good. He had, in other words, perceived the only truth of which we can really be certain: that there are no obvious solutions in Iraq, only policy changes that could make some things better and some things worse. Maybe much worse."

Watch for Matt Bai's new book The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics which will bemoan how "American voters who once looked to newspaper columnists for guidance on politics now blog their own idle punditry." I'll take some idle punditry from a citizen blogger like Scarecrow or Glenn Greenwaldover the senseless-- but "professional"-- babbling of a Matt Bai, David Broder or Anne Applebaum any day of the week.