Many, even in the supposedly enlightened newly elected Democratic Congress still don't get it. They think that by leaving Iraq, we are cutting and running. This is why they can barely muster themselves to pass a bill compelling a withdrawl in fall of 2008. With the usual Bush stalling tactics, this effectively means he will get his wish to pass this war onto the next administration. Here is why we should leave immediately - within three months (We do need a little time to make an orderly withdrawl and protect our forces along the way).
First, the premise that by leaving we are "losing" is wrong. As a recent intra-government agency report pointed out, among others, Al-Queda and its like are a relatively small part of the factional violence in Iraq. The rest are 1400 year old religious factions (Sunnis, Shiites), criminal gangs, and foreign interlopers. Therefore we cannot *lose* to the home-grown terrorists anymore than we can lose to any other particular faction by leaving - since none of them are in a position to win Iraq in the first place. Al-Queda, by the very nature of their anarchistic, nihilistic philosophy, can never govern anything more than a training camp.
Second, this is not the war we were promissed. We were told we would be fighting to rid that section of the world of WMD, but none were found. Then we were told we were fighting to get rid of Saddam, but he is long deposed and now dead. The American people, and even Congress, has never agreed to fight to bring Democracy to Iraq, and never would have if we had been told the truth.
Third, we owe the Iraqis nothing at this point. This is harsh, but the reality is, getting rid of Saddam is more than any country should expect of another. If they can't govern themselves, it is not our role to do so. Our own General Patreaus, among others, admit no solution is possible without political settlements. So if we are not going to use our dwindling leverage in the political sphere, then why bother? And as one Iraqi minister put it, "if (we) are not willing to let one side lose (presumably the Sunnis), this thing will just go on forever." Tough love perhaps, but consider this too: there are really very few innocent Iraqis left who haven't been either killed or forced to flee in the general Middle Class exodus to neighboring countries. After all, are you really innocent if you rasie your children to blindly follow the will of the Iman, or - if you have a daughter - to instill in her that she must follow her man, no matter how violent and destructive he is. If the women in Iraq refused to go along, to support their men and rasie their sons to be violent martyrs, I wonder how nihilistic the next generation would be. As for the fathers, just because they have become too old to pick up a gun doesn't mean they are innocent. It is to the elders that we look for the values of wisdom, restraint and compromise. The average age of greater Arabia is 15 - is it any wonder the vast army of disaffected, unemployed youth and angry and violent?
Fourth, every Sunnis jihadist who kills a Shiite or vice versa is making a gift to us. If the civil war does widen, that would be a *good* thing, not a bad thing, in that more angry muderous young men would purge themselves. There is no place in the modern world for backward, nihilistic, ignorent thugs like these. If they would rather die than live with anyone who disagrees with them, I say bring it on. It's also time the Saudis, Syrians etc. started to reap what they've sown. Why should we spill American blood and dollars to protect their elitist lifestyles? In many Arab countries, foreigners do all the work, for relative pennies a day, while their elitist masters pray five times a day and do other useless activities that do nothing to advance their cultures.
Fifth, if oil supplies are disrupted this would be a good thing for America in the long run because it would finally force us to invest in alternative technologies, which is a triple win - good for the world because:
A. it deprives the starry-eyed Middle East potentates of our petrodollars, which it then dispenses into useless Madrasses instead of creating jobs and a thriving economy (we must stop funding both sides of the war), and
B. It begins to reverse the potentially devestating rise of greenhouse gases by redirecting our energy sources to sustainable non-polluting sources, and
C. It stimulates the rise of green industries here in the U.S. Anyone who thinks we can all just become an investor class, spreading our wealth all over the globe while every other country does all the hard work, should take a look at the post-Columbus downfall of Spain, among other cultures. As Bill Gates recently pointed out to Congress, we are neither producing enough educated engineers and science majors, nor are we importing them from other countries. Meanwhile, we are squandering our precious wealth in "foreign entanglements" rather than investing in a greater return-on-brainpower (ROB) here at home. America is not the world leader it thinks it is and we need to return our resources to where they can do the most good.
It's too bad George Bush and his administration has so little faith in the American people and their ability to innovate and change course. He is *not* pro-growth, he is pro-big business (oil) and big money. Fortunately, I believe the American people will solve our energy dependence despite government interference and ineptness, and a moderately disfunctional education system, but unfortunately, many more prime American men and women will have to die in the useless war before that happens.
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Comments: 48
Also, let's remember that in every poll, the Iraqis, and the government they've elected, have said they want us out, now, by a four to one ratio. Just who are we fighting for in that case?
Yes, Donna, the damage will haunt us for years to come - we have not even begun to tally up the financial and physical toll of 23,000-205,000 wounded (the latter figure is from the VA system itself, not the Pentagon, and reflects the number of service personnel who have gone into the system for help from something related to their service in Iraq/Afghanistan - this number can only get larger as the war continues). Shamefully, the very administration who likes to speak in front of veteran's groups and wave the flag, has been cutting back on VA benefits for years, and Walter Reade's barricks are the result. Perhaps this is not surprising since both the President and his VP didn't serve in war when they could have.
You really can't compare the political ideologies of Vietnam and Iraq. Vietnam was one country that was artificially separated, and they wanted to unify the country. Iraq is an artificially made country and is now full of terrorists and genocidal maniacs. At least the genocidal maniacs stay in their own country. Among the problems with fundementalist terrorists is that they don't exactly pack up their bags and go home after the war is over.
1. There ARE alternative sustainable energy sources that are viable today. Ethenol isn't one of them except for a small part of the pie - already the soaring cost of corn is causing food prices to go up, so corn based ethenol is not a good solution as both people and pigs need it too. Plus it takes about 80% of the energy to make a gallon of ethenol as you get back. Sugar based ethenol is about 6X more efficient, and switchgrass is even better in America because it grows everywhere and doesn't need expensive, polluting, petroleum based fertilizer to do it. Wind power increased from 1290MW in 1995 to 11,770MW in 2005. Much of Europe gets double digit percentages of their electricity from Wind. Nuclear power supplies 80% of France's electric power and solar is the fastest growing source of power and very nearly at par with the cost of producing electricity from conventional oil and coal now (the technology is changing very rapidly). For reference, I suggest you check out Worldwatch Institute's American Energy report from www.worldwatch.org. This oily administration is selling us a bill of petroleum goods - nothing they say can be believed and their pockets are lined with oil industry cash, where both Pres and Veep come from, after all.
As for Bhumika's point that I am expressing western thinking that we are superior, it is actually just the opposite. It is the interventionist neo-cons who think they can bring democracy to the world at the point of a gun who are trying to force our cultural values down the throats of those who neither want it nor can understand it. I am saying that we cannot change the attitudes of a culture that has fought a 1400 year old religious war. *We* may think the sunni/shiite conflict is absurd, even silly, but they are willing, even eager, to die for it. If we try to hold apart both sides with our arms outstretchced, they will just cut off our arms (or our heads). The middle east world has to grow up on its own, or die trying. We cannot do it for them, much as we might want to. Only when total exhaustion form killing one another has set in, will they find another path - a path, incidentally, that won't be one we fully understand either, but which, just maybe, will involve less bloodshed.
As for the rest of the article, it's well written and well reasoned. It's interesting. As for the "vote" and your rating, I suggest you ignore it. Just write what interests you, and don't pay attention to what anyone rates it. I couldn't tell you a single rating of anything I posted. I never look and don't care.
What horrifies me about this is that the majority of people in that part of the world don't see through this tactic.
Yeah Anne Coulter is like a white Condi Rice for sure..and she's no Henry Kissinger for that matter.
With ann , sean ,bill , and the rest that have nothing to lose by running their mouths.
You have to hate those "American Values" that we are bringing at the point of a gun. Women able to walk out of the house without the fear of being raped or murdered must be a very horrible concept. Who needs a thinking woman anyway, right? Condemning wanton murder is another of those terrible values. Killing as many people as possible is a god given right is it not?
Al Qaeda is just a small part of the insurgency? So what does that say if we cannot outlast them? If we run from them in Iraq, where should we go? How long before Al Qaeda is all over the world calling us cowards? Bin Laden said that he could defeat the United States if they were patient enough. Is it really a good strategy to give him the victory he needs to be elevated to the level of a prophet?
The US had to deal with a 10 year insurgency after The War Between the States. The insurgency lasted many years in Germany. The reality of the situation is any exit plan should be thought of as decades and not months. No nation has ever maintain their own sovereignty by showing cowardice.
First, of course we had to undergo Reconstruction after our OWN civil war - where else would we go? BTW, I believe people would be willing to sacrifice another 500,000 Americans if it meant preserving the union again, if all else failed of course. But the parallel here would be if France, for example, came in on the side of the north or south. Thanks, but we managed to solve our own Civil War, and eventually so will the region now known as Iraq. If I had to bet though, I'd bet the borders look nothing like those imposed on that territory by the British in 1919 over the former Ottoman empire. Frankly, the western world has already interfered in that region of the world too much, because of our selfish need for oil, mostly. Iraq was held together only by Saddam's iron hand. Either a new similar dictator will emerge, or Iraq will splinter into 3 parts, or there'll be some sort of anarchy like in Afghanistan. In the last case, I have no conpunction against eliminating whatever terrorist camps arise then. If the Iraqis can't keep our enemies from setting up bases there, then we'll do it for them - I just don't think we owe it to them, or ought to, rebuild their country for them.
Second, as I said in my article, Al Queda can't govern more than a training camp. They haven't got the support they would have us believe. It is only because they and the shiites have a common enemy - us - that they are not even more at each others throats. Remember, Al Queda is sunni and they're the ones who bred the 9/11 crew, and similar ilk. Shiite Iran never attacked us, though if we keep stirring things up, that may not be true forever. I'd like to see IRan have to deal with the insurgency they created. The Iraqi shiites are no fans of Iran either, but are working with them for now against us. Historically though, Iraq has been the enemy of Iran, and not just the sunni and kurdish parts either.
Third, our democratic values of fairness, justice, and democracy grew out of Parlimentary England in the 13th century. The English King was surprisingly similar to our PResident, and if not for the luck of having George Washington when we did, we'd be addressing our President as Your Excellency today (well, maybe George would like that, but I digress). We're not going to be able to instill those values from the top down, from outside, and from a foreign position where we're perceived as the enemy by the majority of Iraqis. I have much more hope of self-reformation, like Vietnam, where 35 years later we are trading with them almost as if nothing happened. Change for nations, as for people, has to come from within. The best thing that could happen to them is for them to base their economy on something other than oil. It's no accident that the most despotic, corrupt, tyranical regimes in the world are those based on scarce resources. Much better to be a Singapore or Japan, where brains are valued more than what comes out of the ground. Actually, the neighborhood militias we're so busy fighting - without any clear idea of what side they, or we, are on, just that we should shoot back at anyone who's shooting at us, may be the best that land can do in a semi-anarchy. Why is it our job to build a country for them on top of that? We can't do it, and morally ought not to try.
P.S. as for Anne Coulter, she's a cruel joke. I heard her compare the 1400 year old sunni/shiite war to the feud between the gangs the bloods and the crips on Larry Kudlow's show Kudlow and Company (see, I get my information from lots of sources). I think she is seriously deranged and more of a reactionary than a conservative. I respect any opinion i fit's well thought out - conservative or liberal or whatever, but she's just off the wall.
How can invading a sovereign nation be a Civil War? Did that also make 1812 a Civil War?
An insurgency does not have to have a large number to have great impact. If you prove bin Laden right how much will it fuel the civil war in Iraq? Any place else in the world for that matter?
Absolute nonsense. There was absolutely NO legal justification for us to attack Iraq. In fact, the UN forbids attacking ANY soverign nation unilaterally. We had the moral authority when the inspectors were inspecting. The moment Bush chose to go to war, he trashed that moral authority. He is a war criminal, no different than Hitler was when he invaded Poland.
"They were in violation of the treaty after the first desert storm. "
Somebody needs to read up on the UN resolutions. WE were the first to violate the UN resolutions on Iraq. There was NO provision for us to even threaten military action at any time, let alone create "no fly zones" and indiscriminately bomb at will.
"which btw we could have taken Iraq then, but didn't, because we didn't have the right."
So, how did we have the right when Boy George did it? You're talking sideways out of your ass now.
"Furthermore, they had hidden long range capabilities. yes that means they could have struck at us and also a major violation of the treaty. "
Where the hell do you get shit like this? Fox? You're clueless. Iraq not only had no long range capability, they had very little military capability at all after 1991. You've been listening to that dumbass Cheney too much.
"They show expansionists tendencies. "
By trying to re-annex Kuwait as part of Iraq again, after receiving the blessing of the Poppy Bush administration?
You might want to pay heed to what both Powell and Rice said in 2001. Iraq was absolutely NO THREAT to ANYONE, and had NOT rebuilt its WMD programs. I guess you missed that one.
"It was a valid concern and a legal battle."
Bullshit. There was NOTHING legal or valid about Bush's illegal war.
"Probably executed poorly and a pain in the ass for all of us,"
Ya think? Probably executed poorly? Gee, I don't know...it seems to be going so well and all...
"but with an economy built off of war since the depression and a general uneasiness with the world, it is inevitable that we will be at war at sometime."
So, it might as well be a nation that's basically defenseless and has done nothing whatsoever to provoke us, and oh, by the way, they just HAPPEN to have a whole bunch of oil underneath all of those dead Iraqi civilians.
Barney, yank your head out of your ass. You're cluelessness is choking us all.
Clark Kent, Since you are wrong more times than right, is it intentional?
Iraq did have more than 100 long range missiles capable of hitting Israel. However, in the build-up and the 'peace process' that Bush enacted, Saddam destroyed all of them publicly.
"If we run from them in Iraq, where should we go?"
This is about the easiest question to answer in a long time. How about we go back to that nation that we invaded in the first place, the one where the leadership of Al-Qa'ida is, the one we deserted to invade and create the mess known as Iraq? Afghanistan!
Everybody on the right says we shouldn't cut and run from Iraq. It will make us look like cowards. Yet they fail to realize we already look like cowards after we cut and ran from Afghanistan, letting the nation slowly fall back into the hands of the Taliban and letting Al-Qa'ida and bin Laden live longer and have the chance of re-establishing a base of operations in Afghanistan.
Completely wrong. It would be right if we were to lose the majority or a high amount of our supplies, but that is practically impossible, short of a nuclear war. The US receives it's oil from a variety of places. If we were to lose all of our supplies from the Middle East and couldn't replace it from other sources, then we'd be down about 10%.
For a comparison, that'd be a bit worse than '73 or '79. It wouldn't be a great economy, but it wouldn't exactly be the next Great Depression. A deep recession that the US would pull out of with some minor adjustments.
Wow, I didn't realize that we no longer had troops in Afghanistan. I guess all those reports are just made up. Enduring Freedom was a NATO operation with the US as the lead. It is still under the command of NATO. Most, if not all, intel reports indicate that bin Laden and al Zawahiri are in Pakistan, a country that we cannot run overt operations in.
to fail (someone) at a time of need
By going into Iraq, devoting at least 100,000 troops to that nation at any given time (although usually much much more), we put a strain upon our armed forced that doesn't just affect troops in Iraq but those in Afghanistan who have to pull multiple tours of duty. Iraq also diverts needed funding and resources away from Afghanistan. We failed at a time of need in Afghanistan by diverting our men, resources, funding and attention away from it.
"Most, if not all, intel reports indicate that bin Laden and al Zawahiri are in Pakistan, a country that we cannot run overt operations in."
Gee, Bush and you had no problem invading two sovereign nations. One of those was not even over bin Laden. What's another? Not to mention you'd only be dealing with the border region which is only technically Pakistan, although it's truly a nation of its own.
person, place, etc.) without intending to return, esp. in violation of
a duty, promise, or the like:
Our actions in Afghanistan does not fit any definition of the word. Are you engaging in hyperbole?
Since the US did not "fail (Afghanistan) in time of need" I don't think your use of the definition is applicable.
So you are saying that we should have invaded Pakistan because they failed to capture the al Qaeda leadership? How many additional troops would have been needed for that? How would it have affected the India/Pakistan turmoil? Would an overt operation be more effective than the covert operations currently being used?
There are many variables that need to be considered in any military action. As with all operations there is the strategy drafted and the battle engaged. The two are rarely the same. All of the indicators I have seen, from multiple sources, show that an invasion of Pakistan would have been worse than the current situation in Iraq. The collapse of the Pakistani government would not have advanced the effort to capture/kill the al Qaeda leadership.
There were some positive and negative effects from Iraqi Freedom, a plan first endorsed by Bill Clinton. Many of the regional governments took notice of the US/English coalition's willingness to use military force. Iraq was the most logical place in the Middle East to set up a strong US presence and it was the softest target. The presence of al Qaeda in Iraq prior to the invasion has been supported with plenty of evidence. Whether or not Hussein was complicit in this, for me is still debatable. Hussein's comments about sponsoring attacks on the US might have been braggadocio but still needed to be addressed.
The continuation of the '91 Gulf War by a multinational force with the reluctant support from the UN (Every nation knew what the grave consequences were) was a necessary operation. Improper military planning and poor decisions by the civilian leadership caused many problems. These problems are not insurmountable, only difficult.
No war, be it a cold war or hot war, can be won from a position of weakness. The fruits of any war are reaped by the generation after the conflict.
1. The oil crisis in the 70s turned out to be good for America. Think of the efficiencies we gained, some of which put us in a stronger position and helped spur the 20 year bull market, with energy costs a fraction of what they were before, and energy costs as a smaller piece of our costs overall as we transitioned into a service economy. The notion of sacrifice seems to have disappeared from the American vocabulary. When we invaded Iraq, Bush told us to respond by going shopping. We have never had to sacrifice even an iota of the amount our service men and women have, and their families. It's almost hard to believe America is at war economically.
2. Yes, related to the first point, we are a war economy. That is both sad and infuriating, because there is so much more that needs to be done here at home with the money we squander abroad (see the excellent documentary - "Why we fight" for more about the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned us about in the late 50s). Someone, I forgot who, estaminated we could house the homeless from what we spend on Iraq in a year - forever. We could certainly build up our green industires, or at least provide incentives for privite industry to do so (In general, I am against government picking winners, though we didn't do so badly building the Grand Coolee and Hoover mega-dams during the depression. It is a different world now, though). We are twenty something in infant mortality, somewhere around Costa Rica, 19th in geographic literacy, according to National Geogrphic etc. etc. Really, we have much better uses for this money at home.
3. OK, you're worried about terrorists. First, we have to stop funding both sides of the war with our petrodollars. Second, we have to strengthen our borders with scanners, port checks and better patrols. However, it's interesting that in spite of our 1900 mile border with Mexico, no terrorist has yet sneaked across to hurt us. Perhaps the world doesn't mean us harm to the extent the Bush-Chenny crowd would have us believe? Perhaps we are scaring ourselves to death? Perhaps people mostly just want a better life for themselves and their children? Just a thought.
4. Finally, put me in the cynical-realism school of political thought. I don't believe under the current political climate, America will be motivated to get off the oil tit unless forced to by high prices and difficulty securing oil supplies (a la Venuzuela). Again, the oil shock in the 70s hurt, but it was very helpful in the long run. It's time to toughen up a little, folks, in the name of the greater good for our generation and the next.
P.S. read my article on "Buy the Crop" for my different ideas on how to deal with the Afghanistan problem. Also, read my article on Enforced Humanitarianism for my ideas on Darfur.
I will type very slowly. Perhaps that was the problem originally. I type fast so you missed the point.
1. We invaded Iraq. This was a regular aggressive power grab.
2. When we began our occupation an insurgency developed which we pretended wasn't there. This consisted of disgruntled internal Iraqi forces and imported terrorists.
3. The insurgency stated publicly that they were going to stir up sectarian violence in addition to the insurgency, which they did.
4. The sectarian violence was also ignored by the administration and grew into a civil war.
5. The civil war in Iraq continues to grow. The majority of the violence there is now sectarian factions against one another and the outright murder of civilians.
6. The insurgency is still there.
7. The administration is still using a plate glass belly button through which to view the situation and refuses to admit that either is actually happening. I guess they think those people are blowing themselves up daily as some sort of religious exercise.
Is that clear enough? The original war in Iraq was not a Civil war. We let one develop through inaction and stupidity. It is a civil war now.
"Your statement infers that the current state of civil war existed when we invaded Iraq rather "
That is a very asinine statement. Your idiotic comments are laughable as it is clear to me that you lack the knowledge and understanding to hold an intelligent conversation. Every time I have read your posts I have been able to counter them with truth and facts. Sometimes it is fun, today it is just boring.
"At a somewhat deeper level, the United States had a burst of inflation in the 1970s because economic policy makers during the 1960s dealt their successors a very bad hand. Lyndon Johnson, Arthur Okun, and William McChesney Martin left Richard Nixon, Paul McCracken, and Arthur Burns nothing but painful dilemmas with no attractive choices. And bad luck coupled with bad cards made the lack of success at inflation control in the 1970s worse than anyone had imagined ex ante.
At a still deeper level, the United States had a burst of inflation in the 1970s that was not ended until the early 1980s because no one had a mandate to do what was necessary in the 1970s to push inflation below four percent and keep it there. It took the entire decade for the Federal Reserve as an institution to gain the power and freedom of action necessary to control inflation."
Carter might have taken other steps, but the blame and solution lies as much or more with the federal reserve and the oil shocks brought by the Middle East. This shoudl have been a wake-up call, and was for a while, but then we got complacent and now we are beholden to that region even more than we were in the post-Vietnam era. My point about that era, inflation-wise, was that there was also a significant overhang of expenses from the Vietnam war to pay for over the next decade or so after we pulled out, and a returning generation of veterens who would not be so easilly reincorporated into the economy, and that one of the ways to bury those costs was to inflate the economy - i.e. print more money - in a effort to pay for the war with (devalued) dollars. This is often overlooked now, when we look back and just see the graph of inflation/unemployment from those moribund years, but it took until 1982-1983 until inflation was finally broken and the great bull market began and we finally began to put the Vietnam war costs behind us - though not entirely. Also, let us remember that the economy performed better under Clinton than under Reagan, and that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the world wide opening of capital markets, combined with a technological revolution in the manufacturing and new service economy deserves much of the credit for that too. But I really do digress...
Getting back to Iraq, we are going to be paying for this in dollars and ruined lives for years, decades perhaps, and if we can't find another way to deal with the Middle East - such as my suggestion to let them work it out themselves (including allowing jihadist to kill jihadist) while we accelerate our path toward an alternate energy future, we are in danger of bankrupting ourselves, or at the very least, losing our place in the world order to the less entangled Far East (China, India etc.) This is already happening. We don't have the wealth we project with our military might, and even there we are depleting our resources in both human and hardware terms rapidly, and this too, will have to be rebuilt at enormous cost just to preserve our basic defensive capabilities (just one reason I am not selling my Defense stocks).