More cut-and-run nonsense, I see.
Posted on 05/21/2006 4:51:33 AM PDT by FerdieMurphy
We should not have gone to Iraq because going to Iraq implied staying and staying implied leaving. Now begins the leaving, and it will be bloody. All else is an illusion.
This weekend another Iraqi government, the third in three years, entered office under American guns in Baghdad’s green zone. Ibrahim al-Jaafari gives way to Nouri al-Maliki, though neither the defence nor internal security posts are filled. These are posts that matter, with their murky unofficial links to police, militias and Baghdad death squads.
The reason they are unfilled is that post-withdrawal Iraq is already up and running. Power has seeped away from the coalition and its still puppet ministers. It has moved out onto the streets of Baghdad and Basra — and into the morgues.
The jungle drums can read the signs. The British are back in helmets and tanks in the south, the Americans are back bombing and strafing villages in the west. The coalition has lost any ability to guarantee security to the Iraqi people, who must look elsewhere. In Iraq, optimism may always be a virtue but it has become fantasy.
This place is a failed state. There is no rule of law. Murder is unpunished. No foreigner dares to move except by air. Any Iraqi risks his life working away from home — and women risk their lives working at all. Interpreters wear balaclavas. Vendetta killings come not daily but hourly, measured only by body counts. Professionals are decamping to Jordan in greater numbers even than under Saddam. Water, power and petrol supplies are also worse.
At the end of this month Tony Blair flies to Washington to discuss with George W Bush how to escape. What was to be a neocon beacon of democratic stability has become a hell-hole of anarchy. Iraq is no longer just a mistake: it is the outcome of an intellectual and moral catastrophe from which the image of western democracy will take a generation to recover.
Bush and Blair have been shielded from this truth by years of sycophantic briefing, but they cannot be shielded from opinion polls. The war is overwhelmingly unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic. Since both leaders are planning their departures, they are frantic to have the incubus removed from their shoulders. Iraq policy is a matter of dates.
The best moment to withdraw was when the Pentagon originally intended, in June 2003, leaving Ahmed Chalabi to fight things out with the Shi’ite clerics after Saddam’s downfall. But the urge to “rebuild a nation” got the better of Bush and Blair. Another window was in December 2003, then June 2004, then December 2005, “drop dead” dates when control might have been handed over to whichever majority leader was ascendant. Another date is now, with a new government in place.
A crucial illusion of American and British policy is that the occupation is somehow maintaining the integrity of the state and its government. It is not. It is undermining both. In truth there is no state and coalition troops are merely squatting in camps dotted across the landscape, emerging occasionally to kill or get killed.
There are two consequences of each refusal to leave. First, the troops offer an ever more inviting target for insurgency and a magnet for anti-western guerrillas from across the region. This in turn boosts the militias as alternative power networks and encourages politicians to back them rather than the army. Second, each postponement of withdrawal undermines the independence and self-reliance of the current Iraqi leader. The American failure to entrench Ayad Allawi as a new Baghdad strongman last year and leave him to fend for himself was not democracy but stupidity.
Miliki’s position even within the Shi’ite majority depends on his appeasing the Mahdist gangs and the Iran-backed Badr Brigades linked to Ayatollah al-Sistani. The one certainty is that the presence of American power at his elbow will weaken, not strengthen, his credibility as a nationalist leader.
Washington and London still do not hear the message, that their occupation is hugely unpopular among Iraqis, except for those VIPs whose lives literally depend on it.
Withdrawal becomes harder with each postponement. Those with a vested interest in occupation are more entrenched. Bases are enlarged, contracts let, corruption extended. For the past year British and American policy has been rooted in the concept of “orderly transition” to a new Iraqi army, the latest version of Vietnamisation. Over the course of 2005-06 American and British troops were to be replaced by new army and police units. Last October the mooted date for this was May 2006. Such dates are meaningless when an occupier has lost initiative to anarchy.
The “new Iraqi army” strategy might have been plausible had the old army been reformed and a new nexus of power and loyalty established in Baghdad. That option has long gone. Despite quantities of training and equipment, an Iraqi army deployable nationwide is blind optimism. (Its officers dare not even drive home in uniform). Local troops are unreliable outside their home district simply because they are never going to outgun the militias. Soldiers can be brave as lions, but why kill fellow Iraqis and provoke revenge when the occupiers will soon be gone?
Police are more important to local security than soldiers, and they have everywhere distanced themselves from the occupation. The only peace in Iraq is where local police are in league with whatever power structure, clerical or criminal, is locally dominant. Battles in the south are largely between Mahdist and Badr gangs and their offshoots. These fights will be resolved only when one or other emerges as dominant. The coalition has not the remotest leverage over this.
In much of Iraq everything points to a looming conflict between Shi’ites and Sunnis. To all who know these people, this is an utter tragedy, brought on by the coalition’s continued presence and its failure to establish order. All recent experience of such conflict, whether in Ulster, Palestine, Sudan or Yugoslavia, sees it resolved into population movement and ethnic cleansing. This is now proceeding bloodily in and round Baghdad. It will bring an awful residue of ghost districts, refugee camps, revenge attacks and safe havens. In Yugoslavia the solution, abetted by western intervention, was partition. In Iraq America began the same process by guaranteeing de facto autonomy to Kurdistan. That logic must now be followed to its conclusion. Partition was always the most likely outcome. This view is at last gaining traction in Washington, advocated by Joe Biden, the Senate foreign relations chairman.
A template is offered by the constitution negotiated a year ago by Zalmay Khalilzad, Washington’s Baghdad proconsul, and approved by the voters. Its chapter five allows any of Iraq’s 18 provinces to be grouped into regions, each with an allotted share of oil revenue and an option of assuming responsibility for legislation and “organising internal forces . . . police, security and regional guards”.
This could not be more specific. Provincial governors in Sunni and Shi’ite regions may vote themselves, individually or collectively, a similar autonomy to that enjoyed by the Kurds. It is clear that this will embrace formal and informal military and police units. Dreadful problems would remain, including the governance of Baghdad and of the mixed areas bordering Kurdistan. But at least there is a constitutional framework for decentralisation such that military responsibility can be handed over to new regional commanders. That could begin at once if coalition forces can bear to surrender their bases. The alternative is an eternity of the present stasis.
In southern Iraq the British have already handed three provinces over to local forces, obeying the old Arabist maxim: find the nearest strongman and give him guns. What the Americans do in central Iraq is their decision. American troops are desperate to leave, though what happens to a dozen gigantic bases is beyond imagining (perhaps they will become refugee camps).
This is in part Britain’s war and that part should be Britain’s to end. Iraq is no longer about nation building or democracy spreading or reputation enhancing. It is about getting out in the best possible order. The route is mapped in the Khalilzad constitution. The endgame of yet another western intervention will be yet another partition. But at least the sooner the better.
What, in Bush's plan, do you see that will prevent the inevitable warring of religious factions in the next 30 years? When (if) the US leaves Iraq, the thugs will come. Greed is eternal. Religious animus is eternal. Iran is the perfect example. They had a chance at democracy and they failed. Which color will you be wearing if news reports are correct?
Troops will eventually draw down to well below combat levels, but the U.S. will maintain a military presence in Iraq for years to come.
After all, we still have bases in Germany, Japan, Italy and Korea. Iraq will join that list.
If you meant that a civil war is inevitable SOMEDAY, then you're just mindlessly carping.
As are you if you believe the opposite.
"Hmmm... I humbly disagree that the Iraqi people are backwards. They live their lives they way they have always done it - up until now, they've known no other way"
In otherwards they are backwards. Arab society collectivley is poor, corrupt ackwards given towards violence and fanatcism. Some have worked there way out of that but many have not. They are the most dysfunctinal culture on earth. As I said they are doing better then I expected. But, I would really take a good look at things if I was in the administration and utilize all of the inteligence that they have before I would in.
As a defie, I have a little trouble listening to anyone these days.
One of us will be right and the other wrong. We'll see.
This is an interesting switch. Now we have an Englishman steal Joe Biden-Biden's ideas. Nothing new under the sun, I guess.
"Sounds like parts of the U.K."
And which parts would that be?
"Nation building" can be quite messy and it has none of the dramatic glory of a World War One counter-attack at Belleau Wood or the World War Two storming of the Normandy beaches.
However, "nation building" does make the difference between between a lasting victory that has lasted to this day as with the European Pax Americana after World War Two and a wasted victory such as World War One where the job had to be done all over again 21 years later at the ultimate cost of 40 million European dead and over 400,000 American dead.
It makes the difference between fighting the Gulf War in 1991 and then fighting the Iraq War in 2003 and fighting Iraqi War III 12 years after that and Iraqi War IV 12 years after that.
In the end, however, it all boils down to strategic considerations. Some wars require fighting for vital national interests and other wars can be totally ignored without any strategic consequeces whatsoever.
If Iraq were in the middle of Africa, America could simply yawn as we watched radical Iraqi factions plunge the country into genocidal bloodbaths just as we did in the cases of Rwanda and now Darfur and, no matter which side won, it would not affect American vital interests in the least. The only effect such a war would have on most Americans would be a slight guilt attack but, after Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton apologize about it, America would go back to talking about how terrible it was that Barbaro broke his leg at the Preakness and America, as a nation, would care more about who will be the next American Idol than America ever cared about about a few hundred thousand dead Rwandans.
Unfortunately, however (from a strictly Realpolitik perspective), Iraq and Iran sit right smack in the middle of the region of the Planet Earth that controls the world's largest known oil reserves. Whoever controls the Persian Gulf controls the economic life's blood of Western Civilization.
Imagine the strategic consequences of Iranian and Iraqi radicals controlling the oil valves to Western Civilization. The Peacenik waving the "No Blood for Oil" banner in front of CNN cameras did not bicycle to the demonstration.
Before the Iraq War, America dealt with that prospect by keeping U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia which brought about the Osama bin Ladin "no infidels on sacred Islamic soil" problem which brought us 9/11 and the War on Terror.
Imagine Iraq turning into another Egypt (certainly not perfect today but infinately better than the radicalized Egypt of Nasser) and imagine such an Iraq leading to the overthrow of the radical Iranian mullahs by a new generation of young Iraqis who are sick of having radical Islamist cramming religious fanaticism down their throats. Imagine those two nations safeguarding the oil valves to Western Civilization.
At that point, America could take it's major military marbles and stay out of the Persian Gulf as it did prior to the overthrow of the Shaw of Iran.
Right now, for such strategic stakes, America has lost as many dead in the entire Iraq War as the U.S. lost in the Guadalcanal campaign alone.
After Guadalcanal, the U.S. still had years of major combat ahead against the mighty Japanese Empire but the U.S. had the stomach to finish the job.
Today, we have years of what, from a military historical perspective, would be considered very low intensity combat ahead of us if we do not wish to surrender Iraq to an enemy whose only military capabilities are suicide bombings and planting road side bombs in the middle of the night. (For historical perspective, the British casualties at the FIRST DAY of the Battle of the Somme totaled 57470, of which 19240 were fatal).
The difference between 1943 and 2003, however, is that in the 21st Century, even at the very start of a war, the American liberal news media and the Democratic Party do everything in their power to demoralize the American Home Front.
As a result, regardless of what some say about 21st Century America as a "hyper-power", the America of the 21st Century has become a nation with a glass jaws that, even after the war on the battlefield ends in a victory on a scale never seen before in military history, finds it very difficult to even stomach the unglamorous and messy business of finishing the job by "mopping up".
And in what category do you fit?
Same here.
I was, and am, all for retribution for what the muslims did to us on 9-11 and what they continue to do to us within and without our nation.
I draw the line at building them a nation. Give them seeds and a shovel (I was going to say a fishing pole, but they're limited as to where it could be used) and bid them farewell.
Yep, eventually parts will be and all the oil too.
RE: # 19: you can't help but wonder what percentage of Brits feel the same as this socialist.
The author drops this accusation about corruption yet provides not a single point of evidence to support it.
We have only to look back at the time before and after WWI to see how great their "diplomacy" and partitioning was.
Time wasted here is reading the vile you spew about.
You are always so busy insulting FReepers that you can't think of anything else to add to the discourse.Begone!
Oh, never mind, you'll just change your screen name and return to haunt.
Quite a few. I was just in England and Ireland on R&R. The Irish, as charming as they are, are just as bad, if not worse.
The Brits and the Irish kept trying to bring up politics when they found out I was American, and I kept waving them off of the subject. I will give them credit for respecting that. Once I made it known I didn't want to discuss it (I learned long ago it's pointless and leads to contention and anger), we moved on to talking about more fun things.
See?
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