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The bitter wars of peace.

Article Excerpt
God of our fathers, known of old--



Lord of our far-flung battle line Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine-- Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget--lest we forget! Kipling, Recessional

Certain species of tank fish have a horrifying habit, long the talk of school playgrounds: one fish will attempt to swallow another but be unable to complete the task, whereon the second fish will eat its way out the other side of the first. The event serves as a lesson to the young that nature is not only cruel, but macabre. It may equally serve as a motif for the current moment, for it is by now becoming clear that the Americans have bitten off more than they can chew in Iraq. Some day soon, some unlucky American soldier will be the one hundred and thirty-ninth to be killed by Iraqi guerrillas in the labyrinthine streets of Baghdad or Basra. At that point, more US soldiers will have died in combat after the 'end' of the Iraq war, than were killed during it. This is historically unprecedented--the only prior events remotely like it have been cases where occupying imperial armies have fallen victim to tropical diseases or the like. The Gulf War was seen by many as the first war that did not deserve the name, due to its one-sidedness. It could more readily be seen as the last in the series of colonial gunboat 'wars' that the European empires visited upon places such as Zanzibar. The Iraq war is the one which did not occur,...

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