VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE

“The main flaws are now plain. First, the strategy left very long supply lines exposed and vulnerable. Troops require water and tanks require gasoline. Without these, no force 250 miles from base will be useful for long. Second, Iraqi soldiers embedded in civilian populations – both those along supply lines and in Baghdad – can only be destroyed alongside those populations. Thus the Iraqis could force the transformation of the second strategy into the first. And, being military realists, they have done so. The dilemma is now acute. Retreat is unthinkable. George W. Bush’s neoconservatives (standing safely in the back) will figuratively execute any who quail. The level of violence will therefore be raised. Meanwhile, the prime stocks of precision munitions have been drawn down, and speculation about the future use of cluster bombs and napalm and other vile weapons is being heard. And so the political battle – the battle for hearts and minds – will be lost. If history is a guide, you cannot subdue a large and hostile city except by destroying it completely. Short of massacre, we will not inherit a pacified Iraq. For this reason, the project of reconstruction is impossible. No one should imagine that the civilians sent in to do this work can be made secure. To support “the groundwork” for this effort is to support a holocaust, quite soon, against Iraqi civilians and also against the troops on both sides. That is what victory means. You can watch the beginnings (if you have satellite television) even now, as injured children fill up the hospitals of Baghdad. The moral strategy would be to avoid the holocaust. To achieve that from the present disastrous position, the United States would have to accept a cease-fire, which would lead to the withdrawal of coalition forces under safe conduct. There would be no military dishonor in such a step. It would, however, entail the humiliation of the entire Bush administration, indeed its well-deserved political collapse. Too bad the moral strategy is not a practical one.” – James Galbraith, the American Prospect. How can a single person get so much so wrong?