I'm back from spring break travels with papers to grade and editors barking at my heels. I thought I would just stop in to marvel at how far downhill things have gone since just before spring break. I'll omit a lengthy dilation on badly American political marketing tactics work when applied to actual foreign populations and armies. Shock and Awe© predictably turned out more like Horrify and Galvanize, referring to its impact on world opinion and Iraqi/Arab resistance respectively. We have managed to turn an egregious despot and his thuggish army apparently into the heroes of the Muslim world. 

The messianic political aims of the war are already so much freedom toast, going the way of most war aims that do not involve seizing territory or defeating armies. Is there really no history major or sensible person in the administration who could have told them how these "liberating" invasions and "friendly" occupations always work out? (How did the low-key military occupation of Boston before the American Revolution work out? How about the efforts of the early British commanders, the Howe brothers, to defeat the revolutionary armies in a way that did not alienate American opinion?) Just when and where did any nation ever get goodwill and gratitude to grow from the barrel of gun?

Defining a war in the highly political and ideological terms that we have used in this case in effect places us at a tremendous disadvantage. Saddam Hussein will doubtless lose control of his country, but the very structure of the situation makes it almost impossible for the U.S. and Britain to truly win, in the terms they have set of capturing the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people and remaking the Middle East. Fighting for survival, Saddam and his army can and probably will do almost anything they can imagine without significant loss in their political standing, while, as loudly high-minded invaders, almost anything that our forces do wrong, no matter how accidental or isolated, has the potential to irrevocably shatter our political standing in Iraq and its region. 

It doesn't matter if the invaders avoid 99.99% of all possible depredations against civilians and their property. They are still an army wielding actual weapons, and inevitably innocent people are going to get in harm's way -- crowded markets will get bombed and cars full of children will get blasted -- when that happens all the brownie points supposedly earned for kind, considerate, careful military operations get wiped from the slate. American politicians and journalists can spin/excuse these incidents for a receptive American public by invoking some newly popular cliché like the "fog of war." They might even be right, but try explaining that to the hearts and minds of people who (unlike the vast majority of Americans) can actually identify with dead Iraqi civilians as fellow countrymen, co-religionists, or regional neighbors. We may know that our motives are noble and our intentions, but somehow that just doesn't do much to soften the feelings of Arabs and Muslims reading about bullet-riddled Arab Muslim children.