Just pawns

Simon Jenkins has written a brilliant analysis of where we are in Iraq. This seems very much to be the truth of it. We cannot "win" because we are not even in the game. We are just there to be shot at. Our leaders are stalling as they try to work out a way to say "fuck it" that sounds like a victory speech.

Iraqis are going to die. Lots of them. They are going to die whether we stay, go or anything in between. This should be a cause of enormous sorrow to us (although, of course, it doesn't disturb most Americans, who only care about their own dead). As Jenkins says, the suggestion that Iraq will descend into civil war if we leave simply ignores that there are no sides to have a civil war, no government and insurgents, no army and guerrillas, just a morass of competing interests. Of which we are just one more, and our men and women are dying for what? Just to be a piece in a game that we cannot "win", that we have no comprehensible goal in, that we never had a chance to win.

It is no consolation to me that I said that Iraq would be a quagmire, while the troops were speeding through the desert and the rightists were crowing about the easy victory. No consolation that I knew the inky-finger election was a sham and that the puppet administration had no support and no mandate and, it should have been obvious to all, no writ beyond its own assembly building. Above all else, being right is no consolation when those who are wrong continue to do the wrong thing, over and over.

The least we can do is get out. Now. We can stop killing and being killed. We aren't doing anything else. We have to swallow our pride and say we failed. In time Iraq will sort itself out. It's not going to be pretty, but it's not a picture now with us trying to run the place. It never was going to be. Iraq is a fake country, a map fiction, not a reality, and never will be anything else. Saddam was able to force that fiction into a quasi-reality (just as Tito did in Yugoslavia and the Soviets did with their union). But we are not Saddam. We are not ruthless or strong. We are just another piece in a game we cannot win. It's time to pack up and go home and let the other players finish Iraq as they see fit.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:37 am