Mini-Mencken in the Making

Gary Brecher doesn't beat around the bush letting you know how he thinks [scratch that] feels about things. Here is a major part of his take on Haditha:

the Dems'mouthpiece, some old potato-face named John Murtha, is claiming Haditha is going to hurt us more than Abu Ghraib.

It's one of those times when everybody's talking crap -- left and right, pro and con, roadrunner and coyote.

Let's start with Murtha. At first, his argument makes sense. After all, we weren't actually killing people at Abu Ghraib, just messing with them. To an American, especially an old guy like Murtha, death is the worst, scariest thing in the universe, so killing is worse than shaming people.

Except the Iraqis themselves don't see it that way. As soon as the massacre story broke the US press fanned out across the Green Zone trying to get reaction quotes from the Iraqis, and all they got was shrugs.

One Baghdadi was quoted as saying, "This is just the way of life now." Nobody was surprised, nobody thought it was a big deal. For them, Abu Ghraib was way, WAY worse than a little massacre (probably about 30 dead when they get finished counting).

So why do Iraqis care more about shame than death? It comes down to demographics, population profiles. I've said it before and I'll say it again: war is just demographics in a hurry. And Iraq is a young country, not afraid of death. 40% of the Iraqi population is 14 or younger; only 3% is over 65. That's why the Iraqis went crazy at those Abu Ghraib pictures but just shrugged when the news crews stuck microphones in their faces and tried to get them riled about this massacre story.

Massacres are much easier to take when you've got a huge birthrate to replace your losses, and shame trumps dying to young males. That's why it's always been ridiculously easy to get cannon fodder: young guys like the idea of killing and dying, but go ballistic if somebody humiliates them.

We don't get this, because we're old, rickety folks. Compared to Iraq, the US is an old folks' home: 75% of us are over 18, and 13% are over 65. One thing you'll notice if you've been around old people: they care more about their smelly old hides than any kid ever did. So naturally a soggy old dude like Murtha -- just look at a picture of him -- thinks the Iraqis are going to care more about GIs killing people than about the non-lethal hijinks at Abu Ghraib.

But he's wrong, and all you have to do to understand why is think the way you did when you were young. At age 16, the median age for the Iraqi population, getting your locker trashed by the cool girls is way, way worse than death. I should know.

So think of Iraq as a high-school kid. Naturally, to him, sexual humiliation like Abu Ghraib is way, way worse than a piddling little massacre. I kind of admire that about them, the way they care more about some infidel flushing a Koran than about whole families blasted.

But I'm not saying this massacre doesn't matter. It does -- as a symptom of how Iraq duty is ruining the superb US Army we sent to the war. Nam nearly ruined our armed forces; driving Humvees down stinking Iraqi alleys waiting for an IED to kill you is going to mess with our people the same way. Massacres like Haditha turn GIs into death squads -- because death squads are the only way (aside from nukes, and I'll get to that in a second) to fight against urban guerrillas.

The rightwingers won't admit that we're never going to turn Haditha into Anaheim, and they're so vain and pig-headed they'll keep our troops there till they turn into classic Colombian-style throat-slitters. Worse yet, since we have no decent intelligence about who we're fighting, they won't even slit the right throats.

If it was up to me, I'd charge Cheney, Rumsfeld and Feith with treason for sending troops into Indian Country with no intelligence, so our patrols end up cruising the shit-stinking alleys of Iraq like ducks in a shooting gallery, letting the locals pick their time to join those wires and detonate the old artillery shell they buried at the intersection last night. You can't expect heavily armed Marines to shrug and applaud when that shell goes off and kills their buddies. They itch to show the neighborhood who's got the firepower. Sooner or later, they're going to do it the way one fire-team did in Haditha: going house to house killing everything inside.

And you know what? Those Marines were right, at a strategic level. Tactically, no; small massacres like Haditha just piss the locals off, recruit more insurgents. But strategically, those jarheads were right: massacre on a really big scale is the only solution. The shooters at Haditha saw the situation more clearly than the Generals who sent them out on patrol to smile and pass out candy, hoping to win "Hearts and Minds."

The cold, scary fact is that there is no way for a conventional army to defeat an urban guerrilla force militarily. The only options are withdrawal or smart genocide -- the cold-blooded, efficient extermination of the whole population of any city or region that supports the guerrillas. When those Marines went house-to-house killing, they were acting logically and thinking more strategically than their commanders, never mind the Moron-in-Chief. Mao would have nodded approvingly, and so would the Brit officers who wiped out 1/4 of the Boers' civilian population and pioneered the Concentration Camp. Stalin said it best: "No people, no problem."

Trouble is, one little USMC fire team just doesn't have the weapons to really do the job. If we were serious about transforming Iraq or the Muslim World, we could do it in minutes, just by turning the whole Sunni Triangle into radioactive glass, one big skating rink that could double as a tanning parlor. Wouldn't even need artificial lights at night, you could skate just by the glow.

Unless we act fast to change the planet's demographics, the Iraqis -- in fact, the whole Turd, I mean Third World -- will win by deploying the poor man's nuke: higher birthrate. I saw a picture yesterday that summed up what's really happening. It showed a few GIs taking a break in an Iraqi woman's kitchen, eating while she stared at the street. The caption was some crap about how the Iraqis are learning to love us (as if anybody ever loved a foreign occupying army), but to me, the real point was that the woman was eight or nine months pregnant, and three of her kids were running around outside.

My caption for that photo would be, "Who's Winning?" It's not the GIs chowing down in her kitchen. They're far from home, and they'll have maybe one or two kids. She'll have nine or ten. That's victory, the slow and sure kind. And hey, in the meantime, just to pass the time, her husband has a hobby: planting IEDs along our patrol routes. Then he comes home to impregnate the wife again. So he's beating us day and night, if you see what I mean.

The European countries can't even maintain their current populations. The US is doing better, thanks to those immigrants, but the hot countries, the poor countries, are zooming past us, their populations growing like crabgrass on AFDC. And picking off a few civilians here and there, like we're doing now, is useless. If Bush & co. really were the scary Darth Vader guys the leftists say they are, they'd have thought hard about this.

Unfortunately, those idiots can't see the big picture. In fact, they've actually cut back on birth control funding to the poor countries, guaranteeing that you'll grow old in a hungry, pissed-off world that wants your house, your SUV and your head on a stick, not necessarily in that order.

So what would a real Darth Vader, a serious American nationalist, do with a problem like the one we've got in the Sunni Triangle? Simple: either wipe them out or buy them off. That's what the Romans and the Brits, the real pros, would have done by now. (God, imagine if the 19th c. British Empire had had nukes! The whole planet would be a game preserve, totally unpopulated, except for a few country houses along the English coast, with some slave-breeding farms tucked away inland to produce maids and butlers as submissive as labrador retrievers.)

Brecher is right, of course, that the US is neither bloody-minded enough to build an empire nor single-minded enough to keep the Fourth Estate Fifth Column from demoralizing our sensitivity-trained troops, who have already been Oprahfied in a country wallowing in emotional bathos.

The Israelis were much smarter than we Americans. In 1982 they raced up to Beirut and just shelled it more or less indiscriminately. Then the US rushed Phil Habib in to talk to Yasir and get him and his PLO buddies out of town on the first boat to Tunis. Hitti gave the US word of honor that the remaining refugees at Sabra and Shatila would be protected.

When Sharon heard that, he had his cat's-paw Lebanese Phalangists go into Sabra & Shatila to stain Arab manhood with the shame of leaving his women, children, and old folks to be slaughtered. Sharon understood the Arab mind better than US Arab-American Habib, and smudged beyond repair whatever was left of American credibility and honor with the Arabs.

Remember what Hafiz Al-Asad did in Hama, shelling the part of the city controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood into rubble and killing 20,000 inhabitants.

Sharon and Al-Asad and Saddam Hussein are brutal savages, but in the short term they establish order and control in their areas of activity---the peace of the dead, perhaps, but as Brecher understands, in the long run, the demographics are on the side of the Asiatic peoples, just as they are on the side of the Hispanic/Latino and Brazilian hordes to the south of the border.

Bush doesn't understand that, but he has been snookered by the Wall Street Journal crowd and the "moderates" to succumb to blandishments from the liberal Oprahfied Kofi Annanites.

I guess the "American Century" was from 1945 until the US gets swamped by immigrants. Looks like diminishing returns are already beginning to set in.