Spiraling Into a Lower Part of Hell
If war, as von Clausewitz once suggested, is the continuation of politics by other means, the nasty new turn of events in Iraq and Afghanistan suggests a politics of the damned. The riots that convulsed the Afghan capital of Kabul after a U.S. Army truck slammed into a bunch of stopped vehicles is only the latest piece of bad news from a land that seems to know no end of heartbreak. Afghanistan, however, is the Bush administration's quiet crisis, for it pales in comparison with the endless feed of bad news from Iraq, where things are almost infinitely worse.
In 1920, when the British tried their hand at taming the place, Gen. Sir Aylmer Haldane offered this piece of trenchant analysis: "The Arabs of Iraq respect nothing but force, and to force only they will bend." Prepare to hear the names Haditha, Hamandiyah, and Ishaqi--a lot. It's unlikely that many of the American marines, Navy corpsmen, or Army soldiers who may be implicated in one or more of the alleged shootings of Iraqi civilians in the three Iraqi towns are acquainted with Haldane's words of nearly nine decades ago. But if the allegations about atrocities committed in those shattered places are true, the spirit behind the words, tragically, is alive and well.
There are, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has famously pointed out, "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns." One of the few "known knowns" in any war is that the longer young warriors are asked to perform the impossible under impossible circumstances, the greater the potential for trouble. Perhaps America's military has not been broken, as Rumsfeld's many critics say. But the tragic news from Iraq and Afghanistan suggests the stresses may be growing unbearable.
This story appears in the June 12, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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