Chris the psychotic psychic

With as nice and quiet as it’s been the last few days, I’ve been trying to divine in my mind what is going on and what we should do in the immediate aftermath of the war in Iraq.

What’s going on? Don’t know for absolute sure, but there is an interesting pattern of events starting to unfold.

Diplomacy is almost at a standstill; the UN can’t decide what to have for lunch, much less what to do about Iraq. The only new news on the diplomatic front is the coming “summit” in the Azores. This “one last attempt” at diplomacy seems to me to be weak and contrived – and destined to failure. I get the sense that we don’t want to negotiate with the French and they seem to be indicating that the feeling is mutual. The UN funeral procession has started on its final trip to history’s graveyard to join its ancestor, the utterly ineffective League of Nations.

Militarily, it seems like everything is coming to a head, real quick all the sudden. We’ve got the troops in place. The holes have been cut in the border fence between Kuwait and Iraq. The Iraqis are moving troops to the border, including gas capable artillery units. Scuds are active in western Iraq. We’re pulling the defensive screens off two carriers in the Med to send the Tomahawk capable ship through the Suez to the Red Sea, where they can fire off the missiles without their over flying Turkey. Five boats – 2 destroyers and 3 attack subs – passed through the canal today with the rest expected to pass tomorrow. And parts of the Iraqi Army have already attempted to surrender.

Anti-American sentiment is running extremely high in Europe, but the Europeans won’t admit it. Anti-French feelings are running very high in the US. We keep warning the French that there will be a backlash against their idiocy. The French continue to be obstinate, arguing that there won’t be a problem, because there is no reason to have a problem, because the French people love the American people, so there is no problem. We talk of boycotts; they just talk – mainly about anything other than reality.

There are rumors flying about of Saddam trying to preemptively start a war. Tony Blair made an impassioned speech to Parliament and is now saying that the British will fight beside us, UN resolution or not. Chirac and de Villepan keep saying there can be no war because the French have not approved of it. The Russians keep playing good cop/bad cop with the Foreign Minister Ivanov the bad cop and President Putin playing the good cop. Hans Blix tells MTV, those paragons of investigative journalism, that he is more worried about global warming than he is about war. Iraq is complaining about everyone “caving” to US pressure as their diplomats get expelled from one nation after another.

So where does this all leave us right now?

Diplomacy has failed. The French have become incoherent and the Russians are now stonewalling to try to extract the maximum financial gain from this as they can. The UN will soon be absolutely irrelevant. The city of New York should really consider evicting the UN and turning the building into condos and theaters. If the French are really so keen on the UN, let them host it, let them provide a quarter of the funding, and let them provide most all the military might. It’ll be impressive the first time the “new” UN goes into surrender war under the new all-white UN flag (designed by a famous Parisian designer, of course).

Saddam is going to screw up, big. I believe that he will try to launch a pre-emptive war. But what he doesn’t fathom is that if he drops one WMD round on, say, one Marine platoon, we will counter by taking out, say, an entire division. And we’ll do it conventionally. But there will be a disproportionate response. He gets us a little, we nail him a lot.

Should Saddam play it smart and just sit back, we will probably start the fight by Sunday anyways. Everything is in place, we already have big bombers overhead (see today’s B-1 attack) and we currently have two slightly naked carriers in the Med. We have to get those screen ships back to the carriers in short order. The air wing can protect the big ships, but with the missile boats around them it is so much easier and it allows the carriers to be almost exclusively offensive in nature. The air power is there, the sea power is there and the land force is in place and ready to go. I suspect that the summit on Sunday is to finalize the details of the invasion.

If we start on Sunday, I expect that we’ll have everything, except maybe Baghdad itself, by Friday. The actual “fight” itself probably won’t be much of a fight.

So then, what do we do afterwards? Who participates and what are our goals?

First, anyone who participates gets a say. That’s only right. Your say may not be very big, but you’ll get it nonetheless. If you don’t participate, you don’t get a say. That means no say for the French, no say for the Germans, no say for the UN. Right now, the Turks would not get a voice either. The only non-participant that I would listen to are the Russians – and that’s only because they’ve been honest since the start of this and they told us that their commercial interests were strong. So as long as they don’t actively battle us (like the French have) they should get a small bit of consideration.

I believe that many of the current commercial deals in place in Iraq, should stay in effect. Ones that are blatantly one sided, like the Total ELF Fina deal, should be scrapped. But if there is a viable contract (realistic consideration for both sides) the deals should stay. The new government should also keep at least a sizable chunk of their foreign debt to Russia on the books. Those debts appear, on the surface at least, to be legit. There needs to be some continuity between the old regime and the new regime. Commercial contracts staying in force is a great way to help that continuity.

Our overall goals should be simple. We want to help the Iraqi people to form a new, functional and responsive government. We want them to feel like their voices were the most important in the process. So long as the new regime respects human rights and is responsive to its citizens needs, it doesn’t matter what form it takes on (but those two conditions limit the number of forms it can take). Our only other goal should be to help in rebuilding the infrastructure – both physical and educational. Obviously after a war, the physical plant of the nation will need repair and upgrading. But we also need to put in place an educational system that will help the Iraqi people to experience their own Renaissance – which will help to make the nation more stable and less of a threat to us.

So there’s my assessment of what to expect. Maybe I’ll be right, maybe I’ll be wrong. But the tealeaves are telling an interesting, yet incomplete story right now. Time will tell if there really was a pattern developing in the disconnected blurbs above.