What Passes for Progress in a War?
Where philosophies are concerned, there is no more deceptive landscape than politics. This because politics owe more to changing opinions about something than getting to the truth of matters. Ordinarily, the truth is the single most important thing in any debate, but politicians know that misperceptions are just as powerful whenever and wherever there is an absence of known facts. And people in this day and age are suffering from something of an information deluge. Since we have so much information to consider, we will have less time in which to consider anything at length, all on our own. Imagine that there was a time when tribesmen spent an entire day mulling over some simple saying given to them by their holy man, and how that inner exploration would suffer in a world where one hears perhaps hundreds, or even thousands of sayings a day. The point here being that we live in an age of assumptions since there is less and less time for truly critical thinking.
Lately I've been reading that there is progress being made in Iraq, a notion which began with a decline in casualties occurring in that war torn nation. On the surface of it there seems to be a direct correlation between a lowered casualty rate and something we might refer to as progress, but any sorts of statistics require interpretation precisely because there are often so many variables at play that any number of things could have produced a result, and without objective consideration of said variables we are prone to come up with a simple assumption, a misconception which will have the ironic result of disinforming us rather than educating us about something. "Lies, damned lies, and statistics"; these things can only be lumped together when statistics aren't properly analyzed or when they are improperly presented.
Let me tell you precisely what top level analysts of international affairs are trained to do. They're trained to think about the unthinkable. To peek into the darkness where better angels fear to tread. And political correctness is the first thing that you have to toss out the window just to remain objective.
Where am I going with all of this? Well, I have a very serious question that's been on my mind since they announced a decline of casualties occurring in Iraq. Forget that I don't necessarily trust the Pentagon or the CIA to deliver accurate and timely information to the public about such matters, but proceeding from the temporary assumption that such is actually true, the first thing I do is look for every possible variable which might account for the decline. And one of them is that Blackwater is no doubt laying low while being under heavy scrutiny for having killed innocent civilians. My point? Mercenaries do what they do for the money, not out of any sense of loyalty or honor. And this leaves the possibility that Blackwater is, in effect, acting as an agent provocateur in Iraq. Since they are a private company they're not going to be subjected to most military checks and balances, they simply escape most of the protocols. They operate in secrecy, have the blessings of the CIA, and have no really apparent loyalties to our military unless one just wanted to assume that their CEO was a stand up guy who could turn down any amount of money rather than be corrupted. Moreover it makes much more sense to me that Blackwater owes it's very existence to a conspiracy to overthrow the elected government of the United States of America, to essentially train an army of mercenaries with the eventual goal of armed insurrection, the type about which we were successfully warned by one General Smedley Butler. In short, Blackwater looks to me like the future Brown Shirts of America. Their logo, like so many other things these days, even appears in the old Nazi red, white and black.
It would be one thing if this were simply a nagging suspicion. But there are so many reasons to believe this, at least where I am concerned, that I would have difficulty listing them all here.
Nothing about the "Muslim religious extremist" model ever rang true to me. The actions of such people always looked to me to be more like typical resistance, the type of asymmetric warfare anyone would be forced to engage in when faced by a much stronger military than one's own. Having done a lot of study in the area of theology, I could never account for ways in which religion corrupted things like politics prior to politics having corrupted things like religion. Religion just becomes part of the political landscape, in some cases used to inspire the masses, in other cases used as an excuse for political maneuvering. But in the end wars are always about things like land, resources, freedoms and ideologies, and seldom if ever actually about religion itself. Battles fought about religious freedom are, perhaps, fought in the name of religion, but freedom always remains the real issue. And it's not hard to see that religions which are about beliefs and not facts, may be used by unscrupulous politicians as the fulcrum in their movements because they can then begin to ignore facts in favor of some other thing: Beliefs. And they can then make their appeals to emotions rather than reason itself. In this way a war over oil and land becomes something else entirely within people's minds, even though it would be impossible to prove that any of the participants in the war found religious belief to be more compelling than things like money or freedom. Here it isn't even reasonable to think that people are ever that unreasonable unless their religiosity extends from their insanity. And while insanity is known to exist it is not very well known for it's ability to organize.
So some time ago I began asking myself about suicide bombers. Nobody goes and blows themselves to smithereens to be with sixteen vestal virgins, even for such things heaven can wait, I'm sure. The types of things that could account for suicide bombings are much better explained by psychology than religion; It could be that people become absolutely despondent and have chosen to end their lives anyway and have decided to take with them as many of the people as they can who they are blaming for their condition. Enemies with nothing to lose are dangerous enemies indeed, and here we have people who have perhaps lost many or even all of their loved ones in the war and feel as if they have nothing left for which to live. That's a possibility. It's also a possibility that some of these suicide bombings are the result of intimidation. Quickly, if someone took you by gun point and said to you, "look, either you kill yourself in this way or we kill your entire village and blow up your neighborhood, torture, rape and kill your family", what would you do if you believed that they could actually make good on their threats? This would explain such events as the one that was reported in the press about the man who drove a car into a crowded market place and began screaming to everyone to get away from the car because there was a bomb inside, and after the explosion was found to have his hands tied to the wheel, just in case he had any second thoughts or decided to run away. It's a much better explanation than he was simply a religious zealot. Moreover, whoever tied his hands to the wheel would hardly seem to think that such acts were in any way connected to religious belief. Quite to the contrary. But here is the problem: Without accurate forensic analysis and investigation we most often wouldn't know precisely why anyone had become a suicide bomber even in view of some statement left behind, and chances are that all three of these situations have occurred, suicidal despondency, extortion and belief in martyrdom, though the last seems like the least likely to be the truly important factor. At least to this former analyst and amateur theologian.
The question then is who tied the man's hands to the wheel and why? Here I'm afraid there could be no simple explanation that would make any real sense of such a situation, though it's not hard to believe that whoever did the actual tieing of the hands did it for the money. The rest is simply as criminological, someone somewhere wanted to send a message to someone somewhere. And money made it possible.
The other question then is this: Was Blackwater responsible for so many deaths, both civilian and military, that when they came under investigation for war crimes that the casualty rate in Iraq dropped quite noticeably? Unthinkable for most folks, but not for analysts trained to ask the most difficult questions, and to wonder at the most likely answers. But the fact is that a statistician couldn't dismiss the possibility since the decrease in casualties neatly corresponded with the curtailing of Blackwater's operations. Prior to this the much touted "surge" produced no such results, was known really for having produced an increase in casualties, and it isn't reasonable to attribute the decline in casualties to the surge so long after the fact and ignore the other events which neatly coincide with the decline in casualty rates. But admittedly at this point, only time will tell with any certainty whether or not such occurrences are best left to conspiracy or coincidence theorists to make sense of them.
