Anyway: Over the last week or so, I've made up my mind that we're failing in Iraq. This is a first for me. Although I felt that we were conducting an overly hasty, poorly planned and unnecessary invasion, there were at least two silver linings present:
1. We had not significantly affected the overall world order
2. Saddam Hussein is gone, and soon a better government will be in place.
I no longer have confidence in either of these statements.
Let's ask the question: Why did France choose to oppose the Iraq war? Clearly, there are a number of explanations, but the two that I find most compelling are:
1. Greed. France had extensive economic interests in Iraq.
2. Power. In economic and military terms, France is not particularly powerful. It's power is largely political. France must be considered a major player while they hold a permanent seat on the Security Council. Further, France weilds great influence in the EU, and may be attempting to solidify this influence as the EU continues to grow in influence.
Greed doesn't really bother me. Greed is a factor in almost any political decision that is made by any country anywhere. The power thing is significantly more troubling. The USA (and to a lesser extent, the UK) is being set at odds with the United Nations. The thought of the USA being set against the EU is a troubling possibility, and one which, while it certainly doesn't appear either likely or imminent, is far more realistic than it was 5 years ago. Having a major power division in the post World War Two alliance could be an enormous problem when China, India, or someone else begins catching up to us.
In regard to statement two:
http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/ne ... 6x.art.htm
Now there's enough troubling shit in that article that I'm not going to go over all of it again. The basic problem is, at this point, we have no coherent plan. We'll try to contain the insurgency, but we have not commited the resources to do so effectively. We will try to set up a stable, democratic government, but without the support of the Iraqi people, and without the defeat of the insurgency, the prospect of success is slim.Two years ago, the head of the Arab League was scolded by many for predicting that “the gates of hell” would be unleashed if President Bush proceeded with his threat to invade Iraq.
But when Amr Moussa reprised his statement to a meeting in Cairo this week, there was no dissent. Instead, the former Egyptian foreign minister, an influential figure in the Middle East, got nods when he said “the gates of hell are open in Iraq, where the situation is becoming more complicated and troubled.”
U.S. plans had called for Iraq's new government and Prime Minister Ayad Allawi to be gaining respect and organizing for national elections now. Instead insurgents appear more powerful than ever. By some counts, more than three dozen Iraqi cities and towns are in the hands of leaders hostile to the new government and the United States, and apparently able to dispatch gunmen and suicide bombers at will. The resistance that was spotty a year ago now launches an average of more than 50 attacks against U.S. or coalition forces a day.
Some of the most horrific attacks have been aimed at those cooperating with the United States and the U.S.-backed government: More than 700 Iraqi police officers have been killed.
Increasingly, the U.S. civil and military effort in Iraq appears aimed at keeping the country from sliding into chaos rather than moving ahead. That change was underscored this week when the Bush administration said it was shifting more than $3 billion from its Iraq reconstruction budget to boost security.
Administration officials also are warning that the bloodshed will get worse before it gets better. “We do expect an increase in violence as we approach the January election in Iraq, because the election is what the insurgents fear,” said Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of State, this week in Prague. Yet, he added, despite “having trouble with the insurgency … we feel along with our allies in Iraq that we are making progress on these matters.”
President Bush urged patience in a speech to the National Guard Association on Tuesday. “Despite ongoing violence in Iraq, that country now has a strong prime minister, a national council, and national elections are scheduled in January. The world is changing for the better,” Bush said.
But doubts that the situation can be turned around are rising, even among some Republicans on Capitol Hill. At a hearing Wednesday on the administration's request to reallocate the $3.5 billion in reconstruction funds to shore up Iraqi security forces, Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said the move was “an acknowledgement that we are in deep trouble.” Despite positive talk from the administration, he said, the money shift shows there's no “grand illusion that we're winning.”
“I think it's worse than we had expected and led to believe, and that is the benchmark,” says Lawrence Korb, a former assistant secretary of Defense under President Reagan who is now an analyst at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning group in Washington, D.C. “If I said to you that Saddam (Hussein) would be out in the spring of 2003, and in September 2004 you would have all this going on, you would say no.”
Adds Korb: “In the Sunni Triangle area, I would not want to go out (at) night.” In addition to the violence in the cities, insurgents “are going after people aligning themselves with the new government, and they show they have the ability to disrupt the oil, which is the center of the economic plan, even in the so-called safe south.”
“The bottom line is, at this moment we are losing the war,” says Andrew Bacevich, a former Army colonel who teaches international relations at Boston University. “That doesn't mean it is lost, but we are losing, and as an observer it is difficult for me to see that either the civilian leadership or the military leadership has any plausible idea on how to turn this around.”
While “it is certainly a good thing that Saddam Hussein is gone,” it is difficult to say that Iraq is in better shape, Bacevich says. “Iraq was a lousy place to live when Saddam was in power, and Iraq is a lousy place to live with Saddam Hussein gone and this growing insurgency” in his place, he says.
Wednesday's violence was light, compared to earlier in the week when dozens were killed in bombings. Three decapitated bodies were found on a roadside north of Baghdad. A car bomb south of Baghdad killed two. And a gunfight between U.S. forces and Iraqi rebels in Ramadi, an insurgent town west of Baghdad, resulted in about 10 deaths, local officials said.
While insurgents have gained control of some major towns and cities outside Baghdad, they can also strike with apparent impunity inside the capital itself.
Haifa Street, a major artery in downtown Baghdad that is crowded with shops, homes and government offices, is now known locally as “Death Street” because of the constant attacks there, says Munther Mohammed, 26. “Every morning when I go out, I say goodbye to my wife and daughters because we know we may not be coming home,” he says.
The street is a microcosm of the American problem. When insurgents start trouble, as they did with an attack on a U.S. armored vehicle there on Sunday, the U.S. response sometimes aggravates the Iraqis. Sunday's counterattack by U.S. forces, in which an attack helicopter fired a rocket in the area of the burning vehicle, killed Iraqi civilians, including an Arab television newsman who died on camera.
“The people who are fighting the Americans are real men, heroes who are defending their country,” says Saddam Arak, 29. He repeated a common belief among some Iraqis that the CIA and Israeli intelligence are responsible for planting bombs to destabilize the country. As proof, he points to the site where the U.S. helicopter fired, killing five, including the reporter.
“The Americans fired into a crowd when it was very clear they were unarmed. If the Americans pulled out, things would go very fine for us,” Arak says.
His feelings are not universal, though. “Bullets are flying all around us, but look, this is our life,” says Sadey Abdulamir, 72, as he plays backgammon at an outdoor café with other retirees in Karada, a relatively quiet district in Baghdad. He recites an Arab proverb: “Clouds will not remain forever.”
His friend, Mahmoud Alwan al-Nashmi, 77, blames foreign fighters for the latest series of attacks in Baghdad that have mostly killed Iraqi bystanders. “These outsiders are being paid to destabilize the government of Ayad Allawi.”
“The Allawi government is losing control. The Americans are losing control. It is the mujahedin (holy warrior) resistance who are in complete control,” says painter Mazin Mohammed Aboud, 20, resting in the shade of a palm tree near the Tigris River. “I foresee no progress, no stability. I'm seriously thinking of leaving the country.”
The last time the United States was enmeshed in a larger and more protracted conflict was in Vietnam a generation ago. Comparisons between the two are frequent now. The Iraq war marks the first time since Vietnam that U.S. troops have been involved in sustained combat for more than a few months. And for now, at least, the Iraq war seems to have no obvious end in sight.
Part of the problem America faced in Vietnam was the inability to define the end — what President Lyndon Johnson called the “light at the end of the tunnel” — or to measure progress in getting there, says Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who now heads a Washington think tank.
North Vietnam's willingness to sacrifice its sons guaranteed continuation of the fighting, Krepinevich says. The United States was not outfought. It was “out-bled” — the same strategy the jihadists apparently mean to duplicate in a different form today, he says.
Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, a libertarian group that favors an American pullout, says historical comparisons are imperfect, and Vietnam doesn't fit as well as the Soviet experience in Afghanistan or the British fight in Northern Ireland.
Terrorist tactics used by the insurgents in Iraq were learned in those earlier conflicts. The Soviet-Afghan war turned out to be a breeding ground for terrorists including Osama bin Laden.
Carpenter warns that if the United States doesn't get out of Iraq soon, the conflict could become the same sort of catalyst for terrorism that Afghanistan was.
“It's avoidable if the U.S. terminates the mission as soon as possible. But if it drags on … it is going to be a rallying cry for Islamic radicals around the world,” he says.
But time cuts both ways.
Retired Marine colonel Thomas Hammes, a contractor who trains foreign fighters allied with the United States, says Iraq will take time. “Insurgencies last 10 to 30 years,” he says. “It took the British 12 years in Malaysia” to end the Communist uprising after World War II, and the British were losing for the first three years, he says. “We certainly have the capacity to get it right” in Iraq, he says. “But it is an incredibly complex situation.”
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism specialist at RAND, agrees that patience is needed. But he says the United States has already “squandered a lot of precious time.” He points to bungled efforts such as poorly training Iraqi police and relying on air power to battle the insurgency, which turns civilians against the coalition. “Helicopter gunships become potent propaganda,” he says.
He says Iraqis desire democracy and that as bad as the situation seems now, it could get much worse, especially if the majority Shiite population becomes inflamed with fundamentalist fervor. But a crucial element is giving citizens “the fundamental sense that the government protects its citizens,” and that is not happening in Iraq, he says.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cast it a little differently this week, at a news conference in Missouri. Iraq is making progress, he said. “At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed and we'll have enough of the Iraqi security forces that they can take over responsibility for governing that country,” he said.
Rumsfeld's closing quote is exactly the problem. Is that seriously his plan to move Iraq forward? I hope it's not, because it's fucking retarded. If we have taken any lesson from Chechnya, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Balkans, about half of Latin America, Israel/Palestine, the American Revolution, and, hell, just about any military conflict you want to name, it should be this: People will never tire of dying for a cause they are truly committed to. The insurgency is committed. The Iraqi police (who have high rates of insurgent infiltration and high rates of defection) are not. If we think that we, at any point in the visible future, will be able to pass the responsibility of taking care of Iraq to the government and police force that we have set up, we are sadly mistaken (unless by "taking care of Iraq" we mean "watching Iraq descend into violent anarchy").
If we leave now, Iraq falls apart.
If we maintain status quo, we continue to lose our effectiveness by the day.
The only other option is to increase our military actions in Iraq. Basically, we would have to re-invade a country that we have already conquered. This would be incredibly humiliating from a political perspective, and would certainly do nothing to make Iraqi's trust us more. Furthermore, I doubt USA puppet government number two would be any more effective than USA puppet government number one was (if I were an Iraqi, I certainly wouldn't take it seriously).
So what is has boiled down to is:
We entered a war on pretenses that we (probably) thought were legitimate, despite intense criticism of said pretenses. Now that said pretenses have been shown to be totally illegitimate and unworthy, we are stuck in a warzone that we have lost control of. We have no way to gracefully exit the situation, and we have destabilized the balance of power around the world.
Opinions?
