Photomosaic of Iraq war dead as President Bush, from Michaelmoore.com.

People generally seem to overestimate the rationality of war. It is, for example, a common assumption that the Afghanistan war continues as a consequence of regular, rational assessments of whether it is achieving anything. In the case of Iraq, those arguing in favour of that war frequently assume that the occupation continues for the reasons stated by politicians.

What, it seems to me, is frequently underestimated, are the institutional and social pressures, particularly within US and British society, that enable war:-

• Their populations, still steeped in the heroic mythology of victory in WWII and free of any experience of invasion, have far less of the visceral horror of warfare that pervades other societies.
• They have huge economic interests in waging war, given their substantial respective “military industrial complexes”.
• Their voters and media seem strangely, enormously prone to minor personality cults in politicians, always hoping that a single person can bring about significant good/change, and spurning political parties like the Lib-Dems in the UK, which place greater emphasis on integrity of policy.
• The very existence of a large military places certain temptations in the path of politicians. If you have the weapons, so much easier to use them, than to struggle down the awkward, ambiguous paths of negotiation and peace-making.
• Their relative geographic isolation makes them, on the whole, less globally cosmopolitan, than the people of many other countries. We Anglophiles, I think, tend more than most to speak only one language (no, I don’t have stats, so you could take me down on this one). This, yes speculative, argument could be extended by noting that of the permanent five security council members, the two that share a language are the most closely aligned and effectively belligerent.
• These two nations are corrupted by power (permanent security council members), in the sense of being excessively prone to the unconscious assumption that because they are “leading democracies”, their policies are less self-interested and more righteous.
• They have strangely few women in politics, compared to many so-called ‘less developed’ countries (got stats for this one). I’m not as inclined as some to see women as automatically less belligerent than men, and indeed, institutional forces seem to make them proportionally more belligerent as they gain power, but this still seems an important factor.

Once wars are started, they acquire a dreadful momentum:-

• What seemed unthinkable can now be taken for granted.
• Fear of losing face if withdrawal might imply error in undertaking the conflict in the first place.
• Home populations become conditioned by familiarity into ignoring the dreadful implications of what stories and statistics the media still troubles itself to provide.
• The media troubles itself a whole lot less.

Somebody asked earlier why there should be a withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The reasons are simple:

• The occupation is not working to secure peace.
• The occupation is causing horrible and unacceptable numbers of civilian deaths. It is a racist occupation. I do not deploy the word lightly, and before rejecting my description, I ask you to consider how you would react if the UK army, intent on routing out a terrorist in a British village, decided that the deaths of 18 civilians was an acceptable level of “collateral damage”. I think it fair to suggest that you would be outraged and horrified. Yet no-one, least of all the US/UK forces, appears to be very concerned when those who die are not English-speaking soccer mums, but central Asian peasants.

Clearly, then, the US and British forces give very little value to the lives of those – Afghan (and Iraqi) civilians for whom they are supposedly securing peace and democracy.

You might be even more concerned at 18 deaths in a British village if it turned out that they were killed by a remote-controlled drone, and the forces concerned were not even so worried by the possibility of civilian casualties as to take the precaution of deploying a human-piloted aircraft so as to allow for more precise on-the-spot judgements.

I have not selected the number 18 at random: it is the number of people killed in just one incident, in Pakistan actually, by a US Predator drone based in Afghanistan, and piloted remotely from Nevada. See Foreign Policy in Focus for the horrific details.

Of course, many will argue that withdrawal from Afghanistan will leave even greater chaos behind.

I challenge these people to find me just one example from history where a determined guerilla campaign, much less overlapping campaigns, has been defeated by conventional military forces.

There is no such example. These situations are only ever resolved by fully inclusive political settlements that include even the nastiest and least salubrious parties to the conflict. South Africa and Ireland are clear recent examples.

So long as they reject negotiations with insurgents and Talibans, no-one should be fooled into thinking that the US and UK are in Afghanistan or Iraq for the sake of peace or democracy, or even the security of those countries’ people. These occupations serve only very narrow, selfish national interests; the arguments advanced for them publicly are pure spin.

What Progress in Iraq Really Means

Some key extracts:

• Number of Iraqis estimated to have fled their country: Between 2 million and 2.5 million.
• Number of Iraqi refugees admitted to the United States in July: 57; only 133 for the year to date.
• Estimated number of Iraqi deaths from the invasion of 2003 through June 2007, if the Lancet study’s median figure of 655,000 deaths was accurate and similar death rates held true for the year since it was published: Just over one million, according to Just Foreign Policy. (The Lancet study has been the single, on-the-ground, scientific report on Iraqi casualties in these years.)

Percentage of Iraqis who cannot afford to buy enough to eat: 15%, according Oxfam.

• Percentage of Iraqi children who are malnourished: 28% (compared to 19% before the invasion); Percentage of babies born underweight, 11% (compared to 3% before the invasion).
• Percentage of Iraqi children now considered to suffer from learning “impediments”: 92%, according to one study cited by Oxfam.
• Percentage of equipment the Pentagon has issued to Iraqi security forces since 2003 that cannot be accounted for: 30%. That includes at least “110,000 AK-47 rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets,” according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). According to the Washington Post, “One senior Pentagon official acknowledged that some of the weapons probably are being used against U.S. forces.”

The surge: a special report by Patrick Cockburn – Independent Online Edition > Middle East

This excellent report gets well behind the ritual superficialities reported by most papers and the self-deceiving tosh served up by the BBC, and shows how even the reports of the US Iraq study group, for example, demonstrate that there is a vast gulf between rhetoric and reality.

What, besides the troop “surge”, is the US doing to reduce violence in Iraq? Getting rid of weapons, perhaps? Nope, the brilliant strategists and managers at the Pentagon are losing weapons, hundreds of thousands of them, in Iraq:

Pentagon admits 190,000 weapons missing in Iraq

I’ve often argued that those who call Bush an idiot and a failure are labouring under the sweet but mistaken illusion that he is trying to honourably serve those who elected him, when in fact he has done a pretty good job of serving the interests of the rich, powerful and dangerous people who bought him the presidency.

Bush Didn’t Bungle Iraq, You Fools – Greg Palast