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The Business of War

Lip service is abundant everywhere you point your ear. We hear day after day, from both the adminstration and Congress, that our goal is to win the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan and on Terror. If you try to reconcile rhetoric with action, what that actually translates to is that we want to successfully manage these wars to a conclusion that probably looks nothing like the traditional war winning that comes to the minds of most of us History Channel addicts.

Let me explain.

The first rule of the consulting business is that in the absence of a clear solution, there is certainly money to be made by prolonging the problem. In fact, many fortunes have been made by those who've developed such expertise.

Before 9/11, our economy was heading quickly away from the gains made during the Clinton years and this was due in large part to NAFTA, globalization, outsourcing and a host of other ideas that seemed good at the time. One could argue that Bush inherited this, and I agree with that, but he also lacked the skill to deal with it intelligently. Then he received a gift from Osama.

One of the first things to happen in the war room under the Whitehouse, according to Richard Clarke (who was present at the time), even while the dust settled in New York, was a very clear order to link that event to Saddam Hussein. They'd been looking for a way to justify what they had wanted to do all along, and now they had it.

The invasion of Iraq was a business decision made for a number of reasons. It was initially intended to consolidate the power of the U.S. to guarantee continued profits to multi-national corporations by controlling a resource-rich part of the world that could not be controlled through any competitive advantage of the U.S. over China, Russia and India. It required a more definitive (forceful) approach. Second to that was to bolster a dipping U.S. economy by firing up its military industrial complex. The social impact of a war, in someone else's country, is an economic lift across the board in this country. In the case of a middle east war, the oil markets go wild too, and that has a broad reach. Manufacturing needs materials, demand drives prices, gobs of money gets dumped into every corner of society. The only problem is what I call the "Rogaine Paradox". To sustain this illusion of prosperity means the need for endless war. Once you stop the blood-letting, the economy quickly reverts back to it's pre-war state and the speed of this regression is what makes the difference between a recession (a slow downward trend) and a full-on depression (a crash landing).

This is further illustrated by the range of opinions on what we should do. Ideologically, the further right, the more support for continuing the conflict. The further left, the more support for rapid withdrawal. This is natural because the right is usually more pro-business while the left is usually more pro-social. While the right answer is probably somewhere in the middle, there may not even be an answer.

The fact is that we're there. We've drawn deeply off the crack pipe of war and now the choices are grim. Continue the war - with its loss of life and treasure, reputation and strength, or withdraw now and face the economic reality. As for the other arguments against withdrawal, such as what unpleasantness will fill the vacuum left behind in Iraq, that is where my own opinion solidifies.

We've lost the war in Iraq. That's not just my opinion. It's being said by senior military and goverment officials everywhere. Maybe they're not using the "L" word (yet), but they seem to be uniformly convinced that there is no military solution. The Iraq Study Group report, due out in a few weeks, will most certainly underline that assertion. We've lost the war in much the same way as we did in Vietnam. The military has no ability to defeat the insurgency or even provide effective security in Iraq and popular support for the at war home is disappearing. So, what do we do? Hang out for another few years and let the body bags pile up a little higher before finally escaping off the embassy rooftop? Or getting out now, taking our lumps for it, but being able to look back in 2 years relieved at how well we've healed since we pulled out those 2 years ago.

Despite lip service to the contrary, it just seems too obvious that the plan was never to get in and get out, like was suggested by Rumsfeld prior to the invasion (you may remember his "six days...six weeks...I doubt six months" estimate). And the Pentagon and other war-making agencies are full of seasoned smart people who had to have known better. The fact is, they did. Could anyone be so inept as to not think there would be insurgency, sectarian violence, an influx of foreign fighters, backing of major factions by other countries in the region (Iran and Syria), tribal loyalty over nationlism in the Iraqi police and security forces, retribution against decades of abuse and a non-startable democratic government where nothing of the sort had existed in the lifetimes of most of its members? It was as if the war was planned, sold, and prosecuted by the Poofters Froth Junior High Cheerleading Squad, with the consent of Congress.

But that's not what it was about. We want a big footprint in middle of that region and we're willing to sacrifice a lot to put it there. Heck, look at the price of conquest in WWII. Germany and Japan had their sights set on something and look what they put into it. Something like 50 million dead before either one of them decided it was over. Of course they lost big but the point is that on a new-world-order scale of things, our losses and those of the Iraqis aint shit to these neocons. They want to reshape the planet and civilization and their ideology tells them they have no choice. Well, like every single other conquest in the entire history of conquests, this one will not turn out the way they hoped. Chaos is the constant nemesis of pragmatism.

Not only is the war lost, left to whatever political or face-saving maneuver we can devise to get out of it, but the neocon dream is sidelined, at least while they are not in complete control. Bush still has his legacy to worry about. In fact, that's about all he really has to do anymore since he's not going to get too much done pushing his existing agenda. He is already going to go down in history as presiding over one of the worst strategic blunders in human history but how will that chapter end?

We went willingly to war, lured like compliant little consumers by an astonishingly brazen marketing campaign. As the money machine began to hum, and the pigs jostled for position at the trough, the messy reality of war began to overwhelm the project. With no controls in place, it has taken on a life of its own and we are virtually powerless to control it. Is it any wonder that any concensus among the war makers, sparse as that may be, is the realization that there really are no good ideas and "stay the course", in all its vernacular forms, is merely a euphemism for "hang on for dear life". That's no way to run a business.