Doug’s Darkworld

“OK, c’est un désastre.”

In a rare moment of candor Tony Blair, the United Kingdom’s prime minister, agreed that the invasion of Iraq has been a “disaster.” Gee, hundreds of thousands dead, Iraq effectively ruled by armed gangs, American and British international prestige at an all-time low, attacks on coalition forces up to 180 a day…sounds like a disaster to me. In fact it’s been pretty disastrous for a long time, did Tony Blair miss the memos? And to put it mildly, Blair’s statement has been a propaganda bonanza for his enemies, both domestic and foreign.

Even worse by my way of thinking, Blair went on to claim that the invasion and occupation were well conceived and executed, it was those nasty Al-Qaeda and Iranian people who screwed the beautiful plan up. In other words, the occupation of Iraq is going badly…because our enemies are fighting back! Is this man a military genius or what? Imagine a football coach saying something like “We had a winning game plan, but we lost because the other team didn’t follow our plan.”

Such is the power of propaganda and group-think, people base their strategy on how they think the world should be, and then are dumbfounded when things don’t go according to plan. That’s why we have been hearing “stay the course” for years in Iraq now, the plan was for the Iraqis to gratefully accept their new status under our beneficent tutelage. Since millions of Iraqis clearly weren’t interested in playing their designated roles as grateful liberatees, all Bush and Blair had to fall back on was explaining how the plan will work someday. There was apparently no back up plan, note previous comment about sound military thinking.

This sort of self delusion is by no means limited to the invasion of Iraq. The Japanese thought that the US didn’t have the stomach for a long war, they were wrong. Hitler thought that bombing London would bring England to its knees, he was wrong. Napoleon was convinced the Russians would surrender if he captured Moscow, wrong, wrong, wrong. Note a theme here? Forcing people to bend to your will is not as easy as it looks. Fantasizing that they can be forced to your will is a recipe for disaster. Many people realized long ago that “sitting in Moscow waiting for the Russians to surrender” wasn’t a strategy. It only took Napoleon a few months to figure that out, three and a half years in Iraq, and Blair is just starting to get it? Yikes.

(The 19th century painting reproduced above, “Napoleon’s Retreat From Moscow” by Adolph Northern, is public domain under US copyright law.)