The eXile The 2004 Quagmire Bowl!
Iraq vs. Chechnya By Gary Brecher ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) You Russians have something in common with us Americans. You might not think so at first. From what I read in the eXile, you guys have a lot wilder lives than we do. More sex, drugs, gangs that white people can join. Then again, you've got a 50-year life expectancy. It's a tradeoff, I guess; in America you get 70 years of being an ant in an office. But in one way our countries are totally alike: we're both stuck in quagmires. You're bogged down in Chechnya, and we're hip-deep in the shit in Iraq. So whose quagmire is deeper and stickier, yours or ours? The Russian quagmire turned France from great power to surrender monkeys It's pretty easy to make the case for Iraq as a military disaster. By now, the only people who won't admit it are the ones who think God personally ordered us to invade. I'm not sure where in the Bible they get that from. After all those years of sweating through Sunday morning Children's Service, I don't remember anything about how some kid from Oregon has to lose his leg to an IED in Ramadi. Maybe He was speaking in tongues at the time. The question is, how big a disaster is Iraq? Just a stubbed toe for us, or a long fall down the cliff? Same question applies to you Russians: is Chechnya a minor border skirmish or a big defeat? What really counts when you're rating screwed-up wars is if the war makes a permanent difference or not. For instance, I saw on the History Channel where they listed the top 5 military blunders of all time -- and they had Bay of Pigs and the USS Vincennes shooting down an Iranian airliner in the top 5! What a bunch of amateurs! Neither one of those sideshows made any difference. Bay of Pigs: we hated Castro before, during and after. The Iran Air duckshoot: zero difference to us or them. The Iranians have a birthrate curve like the 90s stock market; you'd have to shoot down a planeload of them every ten minutes to make a dent in it. We need to focus on military blunders that really made a difference. The clearest cases come from the old days, when losing meant being wiped out as a tribe, forever. I think that we can all agree, whatever our differences, that Carthage lost. The Romans took the city apart brick by brick, killed the men, sold the women and kids into slavery, and plowed the ground with salt so nothing would ever grow there again. That's what you call a major disaster. People meant what they said back then. These days it's hard to find total wipeouts like that. Populations are just too big and conquerors are just too squeamish. Back when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, people were saying it was the end, the whole Cambodian people were being wiped out, bla bla bla. I'm not saying Pol Pot was a nice guy, but you can't tell me Cambodia stopped existing or ran out of people. There are plenty of them right here in Fresno, selling noodle soup, and enough left in Cambodia to fleece the tourists just like God meant them to. Same thing with Rwanda or Burundi. Sure, lots of people got killed, but don't tell me the Hutus or the Tutsis got wiped out. They're already back at the old stand, hacking each other to death with machetes, little eager beavers dreaming of the next massacre. By now the whole "genocide" label is so cheap it gets used every time somebody bumps into a minority in the street. "Genocide! He stepped on my Air Jordans!" You want genocide? Talk to the Carthaginians. If you can find any. What total defeat really means in this half-assed modern world is when one of the combatants loses the will to fight forever, or at least for a few generations. Their country still exists; it just gets castrated. And that's where you Russians really come into your own. Russia's been a player, on one side or another, in some of the biggest military geldings in history. Deciding to invade Russia is the all-time military blunder. It killed the most powerful armies in Europe two centuries in a row. And the countries that attacked Russia lost so badly that they were never the same again. Actually you could say Russia destroyed three great powers in a row, if you count Sweden. Believe it or not, Sweden was a great power in the 1600s, one of the biggest players in the Thirty Years War. Then they decided to invade Russia, with the standard result: half their army was dead before they'd fought a real battle, and when the battle came, at Poltava down in Ukraine, the Swedes lost so badly their king had to run off to Turkey. And Sweden, to put it mildly, was never a player again. It's been peace, socialism and exporting blondes ever since. A battalion of armadillos could take Sweden these days. In 1812 the French had their turn at the "Invade Russia and Lose Everything!" arcade. Napoleon was riding high. French armies had been kicking ass all over Europe for 20 years. One-on-one, they beat everybody: the Prussians, the Austrians, the Brits. Then Bonaparte had the brilliant idea of invading Russia. All those victories in a row had made him a little crazy. Victory's a dangerous thing. You can easily learn the wrong lesson from it. Napoleon had beaten everybody in Western Europe, and Russia to him was just a big wasteland full of ignorant serfs. If he could beat the best the civilized world could bring against him, how could he lose against these barbarians? He had the best and biggest army in the history of the world: 500,000 combat-tested men. Never mind the tactical brilliance of Napoleon as a commander; just try imagining the sheer logistical skill it took to keep an army that size fed and supplied using early 19th-c. technology. The French managed to take Moscow. But once he was there, Napoleon had this Homer Simpson moment: "Doh! I've just occupied the coldest country in the world at the beginning of winter, and the Russians took every bit of food with them before they bugged out!" That night, Russian guerrillas put the finishing touch on the housewarming by setting Moscow on fire. Napoleon looked out at the smoking ruins and told the army, "Guys, sorry, but it was a mistake... we're marching home to Paris. Gee, it's brisk out today! Wish we'd packed some gloves!" What his troops should have done was kill him right there. But fragging hadn't been invented yet, so they gulped down their last croissant, shouldered their packs and headed west. A grand total of 10,000 men made it back to France -- two percent of the half million he marched out with. And that was the end of France as a superpower. From then on, France was on the defensive. They fought well in lots of 19th and even 20th century wars -- don't give me that crap about the French being cowards -- but their days as an aggressive, confident country ended once and for all when they marched on Russia. One hundred and thirty years later it was the Germans' turn to try their luck on the steppes. Hitler was in the same situation: he'd just conquered all of Western Europe, losing only 30,000 men in the process. That's one of the most incredible stats in military history; you can see why it made the Wehrmacht cocky. I'm telling you, victory is one of the worst things that can happen to an army. It makes you stupid. The Germans never even made it to Moscow. And they fell much harder than the French. Since 1945 Germany's been nothing but lame hippies in metal-rim glasses skulking around trying not to offend anybody. Pathetic. Then there's the two wars that supposedly ruined the superpowers: Vietnam and Afghanistan. Nam's an interesting case. Sure, it bummed the hippies' high and wasn't the nicest thing that ever happened to the Vietnamese, but by the test I'm using here you can't say it was a really disastrous war for either side. Neither side lost the will to fight, and both went on to do well in other wars. The Vietnamese recovered fast enough to chop up a Chinese punitive expedition a few years after we left Saigon. And as for the US -- what did this "Vietnam Syndrome" actually cost us? If you Russians had had the guts to attack West Germany in the mid-70s, when the US was still bummed over Nam and led by dorks like Ford and Carter -- and you Soviets were at the height of your power -- then maybe our loss in Nam would've turned out to be a strategic disaster. Because we would've wimped out. No question. We'd've moaned and groaned, but by the time we were ready to react, you'd've been sampling the beer in Antwerp. You blew it, comrades; you could've had it all. Thanks to your big wimpout, all Nam meant was that for 15 years, right through Reagan's terms, we were real careful to only mess with small countries that couldn't hurt us. What's so wrong with that? That's the way the Brits did it all through the 19th century. Once France had destroyed itself in Russia, the Brits were on top, and they managed to stay that way right up to 1914 by avoiding big enemies. They specialized in vacuuming up third-world kingdoms whose armed forces consisted of a few dozen goatherders armed with sharpened sticks. When they finally did face a modern European army, in 1914, it was the beginning of the end for them. Picking on the weak, if you do it smart, is the best strategy of all. It works in high school, and it works just as well in geopolitics. We were lucky another way too in Vietnam: the Vietnamese don't hold grudges. From what I hear, Americans are welcome in Hanoi as long as they spend money. Nobody comes up screaming at you for killing their uncle or whatever. East Asians are like that: cool, businesslike people who don't waste time on the past. America was just one of a long line of empires who tried to mess with Vietnam; they didn't take it personally. Besides, they won -- and it's a lot easier to be a good winner than a good loser. Better still, the Vietnamese aren't part of any big international ethnic group, so nobody really identified with them. Even the Chinese don't like Vietnamese people much, and their littler neighbors -- the Thais, Cambodians and Lao -- hate their guts. So no longterm grudges resulted. Then Russia and America did something a lot more dangerous: messing with a big, excitable, wacko transnational group: the Muslims. You went into Afghanistan, then Chechnya; we hit Iraq twice. The Soviet Afghan war cost you Russians less, in lives and money, than Nam cost us. But the USSR collapsed for good right when the Afghan war was ending. That's kind of a bad sign -- it's like, when the patient dies on the table it's hard to say the operation was a success. The truth is that the USSR was dying anyway, and it probably wasn't the Afghan campaign that finished it off. But the timing was real bad luck, not just for Russia but for all of what they like to call "the West." I'm not blaming you Russians too much for losing in Afghanistan. That's a tough place. The British, the smartest and most careful Imperialists ever, lost a whole army there in January 1842. Out of 700 British troops, 4000 Indian auxiliaries and 12000 civilians who marched out of Kabul, only a few dozen made it back to India. These battles where East beats West make a big, big difference. Take the battle of Adowa (1896), when the Ethiopian Army slaughtered 11,000 Italian troops. Sure, it was only the Italians who can't fight anyway, but to the Africans it was a miracle: we beat the whites! And unfortunately, you Russians have a long history of losing to non-Western armies. When you go up against Europe you kick ass, but you don't seem to fight as well facing East. A hundred years ago the Japanese got the Orientals all excited by kicking the Tsar's ass in the Tsushima Straits and Port Arthur. The Japs didn't calm down until we administered the ultimate chill pill at Hiroshima. And when you lost in Afghanistan, you went and made the Muslims think they can fight. When you're fighting Muslims, Morale is probably the biggest factor of all, because they're so damn emotional. If you stomp on them instantly, they fold. But just let them get the upper hand once, and you're in trouble. And they have this weird Muslim unity deal too. Muslims don't give a damn about each other under normal conditions -- run over a fellow believer in the street without a second thought -- but once an infidel army invades one of Allah's countries, suddenly every mosque from Jakarta to Manchester is screaming about Islamic solidarity. A lot of rich, aimless Saudi and Egyptian boys heard the call and drifted up to Afghanistan, to do summer camp with the Mujahedeen. That's where bin Laden got his start, going from a beanpole with cash to Allah's hairy Joan of Arc. When the Russians were beaten, these Jihadis all dispersed to their home countries to tell war stories and get the kids excited. In their minds, they defeated one of the Infidel Superpowers and destroyed it. Now they think they can do it again, and again. Americans like to blame Clinton for giving Al Qaeda inspiration, but the fact is, nothing inspired the jihadists more than their victory over the Soviet Union -- a victory that we funded and orchestrated. The Chechens got the message and declared themselves independent after the USSR fell apart in 1991. They picked the right time. Yeltsin's Russia was so feeble it could barely field a military brass band, never mind an effective army. When the Russian Army got around to attacking Chechnya in 1994, most of the top brass refused to help plan the attack at all. The Russian armored columns stumbled into Grozny with as much enthusiasm as Robert Downey checking into rehab. It was a classic of how NOT to do urban combat. The air force wasn't speaking to the Army, the Army wouldn't share intelligence with the security agencies, and nobody bothered to check what the Chechen resistance had planned. What they'd planned was to let the armored columns into the city, then blast them in the narrow streets. It worked. Whole columns of tanks and APCs were turned into giant BBQs in the alleys of Grozny. But winning is dangerous, if you don't have discipline. The Russians pulled out -- and the Chechens turned into monsters. The biggest industry in the country was kidnapping. They kidnapped more than 3,000 Russians in cross-border raids between 1997-99. To convince the relatives to part with the ransom, they released videos of some hardworking loony sawing off the hostage's head with a sheepgutting knife. Another video I saw shows the Chechen kidnappers shooting off a Russian hostage's finger, then laughing as he cries in pain. All these gory hostage videos coming out of Iraq -- it was the Chechens who were the pioneering filmmakers. Not sure there's an Oscar for most innovative Terrorist Film, but if there is the Chechens deserve it. Meanwhile Shamil Basaev, sort of a Chechen version of Nathan Bedford Forrest, launched incredible raids deep into Russia, which ended with hundreds of Russian civilians dead. The Chechens were so confident of Russian weakness that they actually tried to invade the Russian republic of Daghestan, take it over, and create an oil-rich independent Muslim country on the Caspian Sea. All this gore was good for one guy -- a little colonel named Putin. He sent the Army back into Chechnya with better plans and supplies in 1999. They did much better this time around -- wiped out the big rebel units in a few months, and took Grozny the smart way -- by razing it to the ground from afar before sending in Russian soldiers. It made him so popular that Yeltsin stepped aside, and Putin is still just about the most popular leader since, well, Stalin. But that just meant that the Chechens switched to guerrilla warfare, where air power and artillery are useless. That's exactly what happened to us in Iraq War 2. In the first stage of the war, we wiped out the Iraqi Army, using armor and air power. That left it up to the urban guerrillas. They took over, and they've been kicking our asses ever since. So you Russians really are in a weirdly similar kind of mess as us. In some ways your situation looks better. For one thing, there aren't that many Chechens left. There were about 1.3 million people living in Chechnya in 1991, but the population has since shrunk faster than a penis in icewater. First, the Chechens ethnically cleansed the ethnic Russian population, about 200,000 of them. Then, in two Chechen wars, the Russians killed about 200,000 Chechens, while most of the rest have run off to refugee camps or Moscow (where I hear the cops spend most of their time harassing them). The UN's best guess is that there are only about 300,000 people left in Chechnya today. That's pretty damn close to a genocide, and yet it hasn't resulted in victory, because there are still 300,000 people, and hundreds of thousands more dispersed, alive to take revenge. The Chechen rebels are betting that by taking the war to Russian civilians and killing as many Russian troops as they can, they'll make the war unbearable for Russia over time. That whole strategy, which is basic to guerrilla warfare, is looking less and less effective. It turns out that Russian and US public opinion isn't nearly as sensitive to casualties as people thought. I remember a few years ago, snotty military historians from other countries talked about "the Mogadishu rule," which meant that us Americans were too fragile to stand any casualties, since we ran from Somalia after losing 18 men in a streetfight. Well, last time I checked we'd lost over 1200 men in Iraq, and I don't hear much grumbling. I remember columnists saying if US dead totaled more than 1000 by election day, Bush was finished. We had over 1100 KIA by Nov. 2, and he won easily. Us Westerners aren't the pussies the "experts" said we were. We can take it. Hell, if you ask me we kinda like it, having a war on TV when we get home from work. Some of that footage from Iraq is so cool to watch -- do we have to pretend we'd rather listen to stories about handicapped kids or new downtown parking? A quagmire -- I looked it up -- is just a swamp. And lots of animals love swamps, especially big ones. Elephants will walk miles to roll around in the mud. So maybe we're swamp critters, comfortable in the quagmires. But if you've ever watched those nature documentaries, you know elephants are always getting stuck in their mudholes, sinking deeper and deeper till they're hyena food. Of the two quagmires, Iraq's probably the nastier one. Size is part of it. Chechnya's a little chunk of worthless scrub and mountain cliffs with no friends except the Ingush, whereas Iraq is a big country full of oil, with close ties to 500 million Arabs, not to mention 1 billion Muslims. The scariest thing about Iraq is that we can't just leave, the way we did in Nam. Vietnam just doesn't matter that much -- it's off the trade routes, doesn't have any oil. Iraq matters. Always did -- the Assyrians and Babylonians and Hittites were fighting for it before Europe was even a rumor. Leaving Iraq now would be like trying to run from a nuclear explosion, the way Schwartzenegger does in that stupid ending to Predator. If we leave, the Iranians and Iraqi Shiites take over. We end up with a Greater Khomeini-land stretching from Pakistan to Syria. Nuclear-armed, battle-ready. And convinced that Allah's number one priority is punishing the Great Satan, us. There are so many little ironies here, it's not even funny. Like Israel. The Israelis were all for us invading Iraq; they thought they'd be more secure. I wonder if they still think so. If we can't handle Iraq -- and that's pretty clear by now -- how the Hell are we going to deal with Iran? We need to come up with some kind of counterweight that will keep the Shiites off balance. One simple way is creating an independent Kurdistan. That would keep the Iranians busy for the next hundred years or so, because Kurdistan would cover a lot of Western Iran as well as Northern Iraq. No way Iran would let the Kurds get away with taking that territory, and it would be our turn to sit back and enjoy the game while the Kurds and the Iranians bashed each other. The trouble is, Kurdistan also covers most of Eastern Turkey, and the Turks will go totally insane if we destabilize their borders. If there's anybody I really do feel sorry for in this mess, it's the Turks. They deserve better. They've been our only real ally, and we reward them by turning their neighborhood into Compton. The Brits would do it, and not think twice about betraying their allies. They always were smarter and colder than us. But Bush? No way he'll do something as smart and realistic as back the Kurds. The best bet is that it's going to be more of the same for the next four years, a weird soundtrack of car bombs and press conferences. "Kaboom!" "Democracy!" "WhooOOOOM!" "Freedom!" MTV-style videos of some poor sucker getting his throat sawn in half while that skinny PR general in Baghdad talks about elections. It's attrition that will decide it. We're betting they run out of suicide bombers before we run out of tame Iraqis. It's hard to say; with the way our Iraqi "allies" are getting slaughtered, the supply has to be running out, but then you have to wonder just how many willing suicide bombers they have left. I mean, I can see becoming a suicide bomber. Hell yes; if I'd grown up in Iraq I'd probably volunteer. There can't be a sweeter feeling than putting the pedal to the metal in a V8 stuffed with fertilizer bomb, heading downtown to blast your country's enemies. But I'd feel just a little doubt. Like, am I really going to get 64 virgins in Heaven, when I can't even get the fat girls with acne to look at me down here? What if the virgins up there hate me just as much as the girls in my class did? Maybe I better park this thing somewhere quiet, let somebody else deal with it...leave the motor running and go get a falafel. See though, the lesson of Chechnya and Iraq both is that people are a lot crazier and more comfortable with violence than we thought. So I'm betting that they'll never run out of bombers and Jihadis, and we'll never run out of GIs from rust-belt ghost towns. I think the party will just keep going, and going, and going -- killing and killing and killing, like the Energizer bunny on PCP. Maybe in four years America will get tired of Iraq, in time for a new president to pull out discreetly, like a date rapist saying goodbye. By that time, we'll be in some very deep shit with the whole Islamic world. You might want to cancel that cruise down the Nile you had planned. And Europe by now is so full of Hajjis that even Paris is going to be a dangerous place for Americans. They're getting uppity over there -- a bunch of Moroccans just killed this Dutch director for badmouthing Allah. They left a note pinned to his chest with a dagger. They're not shy these days. Baja is about as far as it'll be safe for us to go. When we do leave, get set for something big and nasty and religious, like your least-favorite relative. Right now we're being like assistant coach for the Jihad, killing off all the Islamic guerrillas who are too dumb or too brave (too brave is a very bad thing for a guerrilla). The guerrillas we killed in Falluja were too brave. The smart ones left. So we're weeding out the insurgents, making sure their best and brightest survive. Four years from now these super-Jihadis will have risen to the top, and when we leave they're going to grab power and start sliding toward the Mediterranean like a giant slug. By that time, this war will have cost us so many trillions, and I do mean trillions, that we're going to have trouble maintaining the infrastructure in Ohio, never mind Iraq. Whoever takes office in 2008 won't have the option of putting more money down the Iraq toilet. We'll be lucky to afford camera crews to video the Jihad, let alone stopping it. At least it'll make good TV. I'm not saying Iraq will bring America down. That's too dramatic. Like I said, countries and tribes just don't disappear any more. We'll be in a big, long lull, a coma. Whether we come out of it or not will be luck. If things heat up somewhere else -- and I'm still praying to Shiva and Allah for a big Indo-Pak nuke war -- then maybe the US can float through and come out fine. If somebody jumps us quick, like you Russians should've done in 1975 if you wanted to take Western Europe ever, then we're in big trouble. Meanwhile, back in Chechnya, you Russians are in for the same weather prediction: partly bloody, with no change. You're going to be fighting the Chechens forever. You know that. Even if you leave. You've driven them so crazy by now they'll never let up, even if you get out. They already proved that after Yeltsin pulled out; they just followed you back into Russia, hacking and burning and kidnapping. You're in luck, though, because it's not going to be as big or as expensive as our little Iraq adventure. With less than a half million people to draw from, they've got a limited supply of martyrs. And even though Russia has this birthrate lower than the Salton Sea, you're big enough to absorb all the apartment-building and subway bombs they can throw at you. You soaked up the Wehrmacht, after all; you can soak up a little terrorism. There'll be a good living for the mercenaries you send to Chechnya, and a promising career in martydom for young Chechens -- and for the rest of you it won't matter, unless your particular apartment building or subway car gets gexogon-bombed. And at least you're not trying to pretend you like the Chechens, or you're only doing it for their own good. That means you'll only be spending money on killing them, not killing them and then trying to turn them into Americans, dumping hundreds of billions on them to buy them off, like we are in Iraq. You won't go bankrupt from Chechnya as soon as we will from Iraq. So ha ha, you poor Russians, we win the Quagmire Bowl. Our Iraqi quag turns out to be bigger and suckier than your pitiful little Chechen mudhole. But like I said, winning's a tricky thing. This is one competition you're better off losing. ===== Nu, zayats, pogodi! __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The all-new My Yahoo! - What will yours do? http://my.yahoo.com
