One of the gems from Ken Wilbur – before he vanished off into vaporspace with Spiral Whatever – was the concept of “pre/trans confusion.”

4GW is either very old – the same tactics insurgents used against the romans – or nothing at all. The call for 5GW, for 6GW, for nGW seems to be layering more and more layers of obfuscation on top of a remarkably simple concept.

We need to get much, much better at occupying countries if we are going to be doing any more of it.

Running an occupation is not warfare in the conventional sense. It is certainly a military activity, but it is sharply distinct from war.

The problem here is that nobody likes to think of America has having an army of occupation, so we come up with terms like 4GW and so forth to disguise the simple fact: we’re an occupying power and have not traditionally played that role, so it’s all learning from scratch.

To think of this as netwar against insurgency simply continues the idea that we’re fighting a war. We’re not: we’re occupying. It’s a different activity, with different goals, even if the body count and hardware look very similar.

This is the pre-trans confusion. We need to be studying older, more fundamental forms of conflict – occupations – rather than moving on to newer, more ethereal forms of conflict. Iraq isn’t some highly complicated nGW trauma, no no no – it’s a botched occupation.

NGW is about saving face. Occupation is about stabilizing the situation.

How, exactly, we leave is all that matters – that and, of course, making sure that we learn exactly what lies were told to get us into the war, who told them, and why.

I tread a very fine line between thinking as a “friend of the military” and a humanitarian. A lot of people think the two are different, but again and again it seems to be that the surest way of preserving civilians is to not start wars. The second way is to swiftly and effectively finish wars that had to be started.

We broke rule #1 in invading Iraq: that is a war that the evidence (no WMDs) shows we did not need to fight. And I agree very much with the political case that evidence was being distorted or outright fabricated to make that happen. On the other hand, now that we are in this war, the correct thing to do is leave without causing more bloodshed.

This means getting swiftly oriented to the reality of what is happening, which means carving a deep gash through the nonsense about nGW and getting back to the basics: failed occupation that was not planned for correctly, that must be righted or our exit will result in a slaughter. To preserve lives means walking the line between staying put and taking hits while trying to rebuild infrastructure, and simply leaving.