"I think we are winning. Okay? I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05
"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.
The three-year anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has been the occasion for numerous looks back at the results. This one gives a variety of views: To be there or not to be is first question for U.S. about its future in Iraq San Francisco Chronicle 03/19/06.
Bruce Cain of UC Berkeley favors the US setting a firm timetable and withdrawing our troops from Iraq. He thinks the guiding policy should be this:
The question is not simply how long American troops should stay in Iraq, but also what the United States can realistically accomplish for Iraqis. If our goal is to turn Iraq into a stable, secular democracy, the United States will be there until hell freezes over. But if we abandon the misty-eyed idealism of the Bush administration and set our sights on a more realistic path, we will intend to prevent genocide and let Iraq evolve into whatever form of nonaggressive state it is ready to become.
David Biale, professor of Jewish History at UC Davis, says:
[W]e ... have sown the seeds of our own defeat in Iraq: anarchy, civil war and religious fundamentalism. ...
Our presence is a major incentive to the insurgency and a goad to terrorism. The sooner it is removed, the better. Not that peace will reign in our absence. Since we broke the jar, no one can catch the escaping snakes.
We were told that Iraq is not Vietnam, but with each passing month, it looks like that tragedy is being repeated, not as farce, but as catastrophe. As in Vietnam, so, too, this war will be prolonged by the argument that we cannot afford to cut and run or dominoes will fall.
In the end, as in Vietnam, we will cut and run, for the dominoes are already falling. The only question is when we will leave - and how many more Iraqis and Americans will die in the process.
Steven Greer, a propagandist for Republican state television (aka, FOX News) says we've got to keep our testosterone flowing and things are going great, and our soldiers in his view apparently bear a distinct resemblance to comic book heroes:
The American fighters deserve our deepest gratitude. We admire the discipline, courage, moral clarity and vigor with which they face our adversaries in Iraq. Their sacrifice is a signpost of an unyielding national defense. Their tireless efforts have rebuilt hundreds of schools, numerous hospitals, and countless roads, not insignificant accomplishments.
It's a real problem that this kind of talk, which sounds like something from an unimaginatively written high school graduation speech, has become a standard way of talking about our soldiers in war. What he describes here are cartoon characters, not real live human beings. No wonder people who see them this way are willing to send them off to kill and die based on the most frivolous reasons. If they're cartoon characters, war is just a cartoon show for old farts back home to enjoy on TV.
Arguably, in early 2003 the war against Iraq was in the win column. Three years later, things are less optimistic. Insurgents fear American soldiers but believe the Iraqi people have a glass chin. While our elected leaders criticize, sectarian violence simmers. ...
These modern-day insurgents seek to weaken our nation psychologically and politically. They are waiting for us to fold. They seek to prevent the military battle from becoming decisive against them by attacking our resolve. ...
We must press forward in Iraq. The political process there is working. Iraqi security forces are stepping into the fight against the insurgents. Al Qaeda is under tremendous pressure. Good is winning; evil is losing. (my emphasis)
Well, alrighty then! Fortunately for us, we have FOX News to sturdy our Will and Resolve.
William Lind, a conservative critic of the war, paints a picture for which there's no room in the cheerful war of the FOXists:
We are moving toward two related wars, one with Iran and one with Iraq's Shiite militias. If, as is increasingly likely, the United States or Israel, or both, attack Iranian nuclear facilities, a possible Iranian response would be to cross the Iran-Iraq border with four to six divisions and roll us up.
We no longer have a field army in Iraq. Our forces are dispersed in penny-packets, fighting insurgents. Iraq's Shiite militias, some of which are spoiling for another fight with us anyway, would pin us down and cut our lines of supply and retreat to the south while Iranian forces, perhaps with Syrian help, encircled us. At that point, we would lose an army, and probably the misnamed War on Terror as well.
This is very similar to the warning that Gary Hart has been making.
Martin Nolan is still cheering for the war. But this is a good saying that he comes up with: "The Bush doctrine is the Bush gamble". Unfortunately, it's our soldiers' lives, the lives of Iraqis and the security of the United States that he's gambling with, and doing so recklessly.
Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution, famous for his descriptions of what went wrong, is still regurgitating optimistic and unrealistic boilerplate:
We are on the right track in our overall approach, but we lack adequate help and we are running out of time before the violence becomes uncontrollable. The outlines of a broad political compromise that can pull Iraq back toward stability are clear. Power must be broadly shared within a national unity government.
The Shiite religious parties and militias must agree to give up their control of the Ministry of the Interior and the internal security apparatus, so that more neutral and professional police forces can be established. The Ministry of Defense must also be headed by a figure not connected to any private armed force. ...
In the Constitutional Review Commission that will soon be established, the Shiites must give up their ability to form a single region across the entire southern half of the country, and the Shiites and the Kurds must accept that control over Iraq's oil and gas wealth - both existing and future fields - will rest exclusively with the national government.
Han Peleg of Lafayett College in Pennsylvania is not impressed with the results of the war:
If an escalation of the war in Iraq occurs -- and it is looking almost certain that it will - the American military involvement in Iraq, which began as an effort to remove Saddam Hussein, will emerge as possibly one of the worst decisions ever made in the history of U.S. foreign policy. ...
Iraqization and democratization at this juncture are a deadly combination, because they amount to the deliverance of the Sunni minority in Iraq into the hands of the Shiite majority and its Kurdish allies. And although we all know that many among the Sunnis were enthusiastic backers of Hussein's regime, we can expect this previously privileged minority to resist with all its might, including violent means, the deadly combination represented by Iraqization and democratization.
The obervations of Gordon Livingston, a Maryland psychiatrist, are also included. Maybe psychiatry is needed to understand the administration's thinking on Iraq:
It is a continuing irony that those who opposed this war from the beginning are challenged by its architects to come up with alternatives to its continuation. As Iraq descends into civil war, our troops become more and more spectators to the violence and religious divisions that are tearing it apart.
The combination of ignorance and arrogance that brought us into this pre-emptive war has proven lethal, for both us and the Iraqis about whom we knew so little. The hollow call for their security forces to fight for a central government that is largely our creation is yet another effort to bend the country to our fantasy of what it should be.
I've posted at The Blue Voice about the contributors to this article expressing what I found new and disturbing in this one is that there were several opinions from supporters of the war that, when you cut through the nice phrasing, come down to this: we should stop worrying about civil war and just back the Shi'a government as they kill, torture and displace as many Sunnis as they feel like. For instance, James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS):
The insurgency is a symptom - it could end tomorrow if we avert our eyes and let the Shiites massacre the Sunnis. But there is still a chance for something better.
Gregory Treverton of the Rand Corporation says something similar:
U.S. forces should be dramatically reduced in number and focused on the insurgents - primarily through training and occasional support to operations, a mission akin to the one they played in El Salvador's war of the 1980s.
The country's sectarian divides make "Iraqi security forces" an oxymoron. In many places, the militias, especially the Shiite ones, are the security forces, and U.S. policy will have to tolerate them.
Treverton at least realizes: "Bad choices leave bad choices". Which is pretty much what the Bush administration left us in Iraq when they invaded.
Abraham Sofaer of the Hoover Institution also has a similar analysis:
We must at the same time give up all control to the new Iraqi government. We will be no more effective in preventing a civil war than we were in remaking the energy system. ...
Insisting that there must not be a civil war is only the latest U.S. policy based on what we want from Iraq, instead of on what Iraq is dishing out. A civil war may be the only way in which the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis who support the form of majority rule adopted by the people of Iraq can successfully root out and destroy the forces against whom our policies have failed. We should be familiar with the concept of a bloody but necessary civil war.
My other posts from today on this topic at The Blue Voice include:
The Bush message on the Iraq War: Lower your expectations
How simple it looked to the faith-based visionaries three years ago
Maverick McCain's "straight-talk" on the third anniversary of the invasion
"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05
No comments:
Post a Comment