The serendipity of strategic mayhem

All this antiwar disgruntlement, much of which is based on the critical needling of the Bush administration for its lack of a real strategy in Iraq, should now be laid to rest. For it appears we do indeed have a strategy to pacify Iraqis: We're either locking them up or tossing them out. Given enough incarceration and forced relocation, few will be left to fight on -- us or each other.

Pure genius: the "nation building" of inmates and refugees.

As for the first group, the New York Times reports "the number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush, with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today from 16,000 in February." A whopping eighty-five percent of the luckless are those pesky Sunni Arabs. While about 1,800 claim affiliation with Iraq's Qaeda franchise, roughly 6,000 others say they're "takfiris" -- rabid antiShiite warriors and future Christiane Amanpour interviewees.

U.S. officials say "those statistics would seem to indicate that the main inspiration of the hard-core Sunni insurgency is no longer a desire to restore the old order ... and has become religious and ideological." But that would be wrong, they further say, and no one would know better the internal workings and motivations of Iraqis than culturally tuned-in U.S. officials.

No, the Sunnis plant bombs and shoot at others because they're unemployed and broke; inventive but hapless subjects of the capitalist vision we've bestowed on what was once a troubled nation.

Said naval captain and jailer John Fleming: "Interestingly, we’ve found that the vast majority are not inspired by jihad or hate for the coalition or Iraqi government.... The primary motivator is economic -- they’re angry men because they don’t have jobs. The detainee population is overwhelmingly illiterate and unemployed. Extremists have been very successful at spreading their ideology to economically strapped Iraqis with little to no formal education."

Let us look past the good captain's self-contradiction -- that of asserting limited ideological hatred for the (Shiite) Iraqi government while noting the extremists' ideological success -- and go straight to the nut of it all: I don't know about you, but if my father had been shot, my brother beheaded, my wife had no food to cook and my children had no school, it wouldn't take much propagandizing to inspire me to take up arms and start taking out my enemies. But it's not like we could have foreseen this foreseeable eventuality, right?

Yet, at least that's 24,500 Iraqi Arabs off the violent streets. And we're working on the other 25 million, one heartbroken family at a time.

While a couple million Iraqis have fled their homeland altogether -- mostly the educated and professional; precisely the demographics required to rebuild a nation after someone rudely dismantles it -- "the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000 ... since the American troop increase began in February."

So, the real-life "surge" effect has been that of "American-led operations ... driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before," resulting in the de facto "partition of the country into sectarian enclaves."

The serendipitous upside, of course, is that there are now fewer Sunnis to shoot at Shiites in Shiite districts, and fewer Shiites to shoot at Sunnis in Sunni districts. Still, there remains the problem of what these relocated refugees and eventually released jailbirds will do for a living in their new digs.

Perhaps McDonalds can launch a franchise on every corner of every street of every bombed-out hamlet, and Iraqis can all flip burgers for each other. Their purchases can go on American vouchers; Iraqis will form the world's first, literal "Fast-Food Nation"; and their worrisome ranks can be further thinned to disappearance from diabetes.

I probably shouldn't submit the absurd. The idiots in the White House might be inspired to new strategic heights.

Comments

[Vanna]

Iraq is a dry run for the United States. Katrina is a dry run for natural disasters of the future. It's a simple matter to stop U.S. transportation and let a few hundred thousand diabetics or asthmatics die for lack of medication. State-sponsored terrorism, native-militia terrorism, rioting and street crime will take care of many more, and the remnant will be happy to scuttle into internment camps "until things settle down."

They have those in Gaza, don't they? They can be maintained for many years of dirt, disease, and death.

[Mooser]

So can we at least call it by the right name? Which would be:

The War ON Iraq