Cobras and Cowboys

Cobras and Cowboys

By John Taylor; 2006 September 04

I have been listening lately to a Book-on-CD history of Bush II's Gulf War II, called Cobra II, written by two authors, one a general intimately involved in planning, and the other writer, one of the "embedded" journalists who witnessed events first hand from the ground. The Bush regime called their plan to invade Saddam's Iraq "Cobra II" because "Cobra" was the name of Patton's plan to drive inland against Nazi Europe after D-Day. Neither author (in what I have heard so far) seems to catch the irony of the name, since Patton's plan was thwarted at the crucial moment by Dwight Eisenhower, who refused him gasoline to refuel his tanks at the crucial moment, thus allowing the Germans to regroup and fight on for over a year. Military opinion today agrees that this was a blunder of the first order, that Patton could have routed the Nazis and shortened the war considerably if he had been enabled to carry out Plan Cobra.

Cobra I was hardly a fiasco, it eventually got the Nazis. And Cobra II got Saddam Hussein, quickly and with relatively little bloodshed, no question about it. But the problem was not the war but the occupation that had to follow. Imagine a cobra biting its own tail before it enters the fray and you have an idea of how Cobra II worked behind the scenes. As the poison enters its system it starts to sway drunkenly. This is how you run a war? The authors favor another analogy; they compare the plan to an accordion. Rummy, the unelected defense secretary, would get a hold of Cobra II and the numbers of troops would shrink to a few tens of thousands. Downsize, like a good CEO. No need for old style bureaucratic thinking, strike quickly with few troops, it is the new kind of warfare. Cobra II would then go back into the hands of the generals and they would think, we have to occupy a country of twenty million people, seal its borders, and on and on. We need something closer to a million troops. So the accordion would stretch out. So it went, back and forth, and needless to say Rummy won out. The result was quagmire.

The result was the confused aftermath of the war, first documented by a Swedish embedded journalist (you can see a full interview with him on the DVD version of Fahrenheit 9/11) where confused troops, untrained and unprepared for policing, would go from door to door throughout Iraq bursting into homes in the middle of the night, often using tanks to break through the front door, arresting suspects and trying on the spot to read Arabic documents without knowing a word of the language and, as documented on video, physically and sexually abusing their often innocent captives. By now the accordion was in its full fat phase but it was much too late. Not only were they alienating the people they wanted to save, but they had, in an earlier narrow phase sadly short of manpower left the borders unsealed and let loose millions of stockpiled weapons into the growing ranks of insurgents.

It is evident now that the plan they should have been looking back to was not Cobra but, well, any invasion plan. The Nazis were past masters at it, they took over all of Europe and got good reviews for their competence in taking over a nation intact. Hitler, meddler that he was, never thought of downsizing the number of troops needed to take over and run an entire nation. The exception was Barbarosa, the plan to invade Russia. Then, the Nazis sent in troops unprepared for winter. The reason they messed up then was the same reason Iraq II turned into a quagmire, interference from the top. Rummy was in a political position, albeit unelected (unlike Hitler), and was playing armchair general, just like Adolph. Adolph had the excuse that he had been right several times while the experts were wrong, so his arrogance was understandable if not excusable. Rummy, well, enough said. I shall watch the rest of this man's career with considerable interest.

Another book that has grabbed me lately is "Fast Food Nation, The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, by Eric Schlosser. This is the best, most gripping and incisive journalist I have read for a long time. His method is simple: if you hear somebody blathering on about freedom, look around for his slave driver; if you hear another praise independence, dig up his co-dependency. Those who vaunt themselves as lovers of small government are always heavily dependent upon government subsidies. Schlosser with surgical precision uncovers every hypocrite's big lie. Let me tell his story in capsule form.

It took America almost a century to get the "trusts" and combines into line with anti-monopoly legislation to allow a true free enterprise system where buyer, distributor and seller all had equal access to information. In the 1980's Reagan in one blow dismantled the whole structure and in the name of free enterprise destroyed free enterprise. He allowed the big middlemen to dominate at the expense of small farmers and other food producers and the general public. They squeeze farmers, they squeeze nutrients out of food (using chemicals to restore taste and aroma), they squeeze their minimum wage workers and then say to the general public, hey, we have lowered prices haven't we? The result is a system which looks like an hour glass. At the top are about two million full time farmers (smaller than the present American prison population), in the middle a very small number of corporations, and at the bottom several hundred million consumers.

Fast Food Nation portrays how this accelerated out of control. The fast food vendor does not pick out meals that are best for our bodies but those which require the least expense, especially in labor costs. They sell a soft drink for a buck fifty that costs 9 cents in syrup; they sell fries for the same, with expenses also in pennies. They even get you to do the work of putting away your plastic meal. If you do it from youth it does not seem expensive, it seems natural.

Schlosser has a knack for picking out the worrying, telling detail. For example, in Colorado, in the middle of cowboy country, he visits a high school and finds only one kid wearing a cowboy hat. The entire cowboy culture of my youth is dead. Cowboys, the ones who take care of the brown part of your hamburger, are not only not heroes, they well on the way to being utterly forgotten by the upcoming generation. And the cattle ranchers brought it all upon themselves. If you believe in freedom really hard you end up as a slave -- it says so right in the Kitab-i-Aqdas. These are slaves that nobody laments because they are going extinct so quickly. Now there are just lackeys for meat distributors.

You can react to this in your own way, but to me our situation is parlous; fast food is not only the cause of the obesity epidemic but threatens something far more dangerous. By allowing this squeeze on our food resources we are opening ourselves up to potential famine. You cannot automate the prime profession, the farmer, out of existence and get away with it. I read this kind of thing and start to break out in a cold sweat, for though few of us today have experienced famine first hand, the accounts are there in history books. Millions die slow and horrible deaths. May God protect us.