Win Ugly

"The assessment is that we would succeed, but there would be higher casualties and more collateral damage. We would have to win uglier"--a senior defense official, quoted in the Los Angeles Times

Ah, yes, Bush. Your Air Force General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent his classfied Military Risk Assessment and Threat Mitigation Plan to Congress yesterday (where do they get these wonderful titles from, Bush?) It indicated that our military readiness is now at "significant risk." Not--those good folks at the Pentagon hastened to add--not that we're not prepared to get out there and fight in any contingency. And win. Better believe it. No, it's rather that our win would cost us more in terms of time and human lives than we had counted on.

Nice thinking. We would not for one moment want others to think us weak, and attempt to take advantage of our weakness; those evil doers in North Korea, for example, or Iran. Nor would we want them thinking we're not ready to deal with any other hot spot in the world--like the Taiwan Strait, in case China should decide to translate its long-standing threats into action. Hey, we'll rush in anywhere (not Darfur, though: not enough at stake there, for this country) to do battle with evil in the name of democracy. "There's no doubt what the outcome would be," opined another senior official: "but it may not be as pretty."

Pretty, I suppose, as in your Rumsfeld's Shock and Awe. It plays well on TV: a few big flashes and bangs, and it's all over. A bit of collateral damage on the side, but hey… Then it's a nice "Mission Accomplished" photo op--very pretty, too. And then, oh, well, there's a couple more years of "insurgency." More American deaths (it turns out that our troops were dangerously underequipped in the first place, because Shock and Awe was going to take care of the problem and our people would be welcomed with flowers and open arms. Wasn't that the story? And then a bit more collateral damage, as in Falluja. And, in the past few days even, two years later, in the country's capital. So the vaunted American military ends up in the situation your Myers now describes. Let's not say "weakened." Let's just say, likely to take longer to achieve our goals. And to cost more lives. According to our Military Risk Assessment and Threat Mitigation Plan.

Meantime, we spend countless zillions of dollars developing high-tech weaponry to protect against the most improbable of threats, and cut taxes to assure that we go deeper into debt as our military budget escalates and our preparedness plummets. Does all this make sense? Should we not step back at some point and re-evaluate our thinking, Bush? And not only our military planning, but the intentions behind it? Aren't we beginning to look just a tad foolish, as the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world?