11-09-2004, 03:48 PM
After his recent victory, Bush assured his Zionist supporters that the war in Iraq will continue – till the country is ‘stabilized’, which is very essential for the ‘security of Israel’.
In practice that means continued fighting for his next four-year presidential term. France ‘kept fighting’ in Algeria in the 1950s as America did in Vietnam in the 1960s and as the Israelis are now doing in occupied Palestine. It has never worked anywhere. In Algeria, the French employed over three times as many troops, nearly half a million, to fight roughly the same number of Iraqi resistance-fighters as America is now fighting in Iraq. They lost. America had half a million soldiers in Vietnam and gave up. After forty years of warfare against the Palestinians, the Israelis have achieved neither peace nor security.
Wars of national ‘self-determination,’ to use President Woodrow Wilson’s evocative phrase, can last for generations or even centuries. Britain tried to beat down (or even exterminate) the Irish for nearly 900 years, from shortly after the Eleventh century Norman invasion until 1921; the French fought the Algerians from 1831 until 1962; both Imperial and Communist Russia have been fighting the Chechens since about 1731. Putin’s Russia is still at it. There was no light at the end of those tunnels.
At best, ‘keep fighting’ in Iraq can be only a temporary measure as eventually America will have to leave. But during the period it stays, say the next four years, my guess is that another 40 thousand Iraqis will die or be killed while the US armed forces will lose perhaps 5,000 dead and 40,000 seriously wounded. The monetary cost will be hundreds of billions.