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What Is The Iraq Answer

Discussion in 'Anything goes' started by HeinekenMan, Nov 30, 2006.

  1. Ace

    Ace Well-Known Member

    The problem, Mighty, is that there are so many factions and groups running around, you don't have any leaders you can go to to sit down and threaten, bribe, negotiate with, whatever.

    It's like trying to grab a handful of water.

    It's chaos.
     
  2. bigpern23

    bigpern23 Well-Known Member

    Send Isaiah in to infiltrate the militias. He'll wreck them in no time and they'll be $50 million over the cap and paying us luxury tax money.
     
  3. Mighty_Wingman

    Mighty_Wingman Active Member

    Ace,

    Exactly. You couldn't just sit down to a table with four chairs: Shiite, Sunni, Kurd, USA. You'd probably need more like a dozen. And how would you find a way to get a Sunni representative to sit down with somebody like Moqtada al Sadr, who's kidnapping Sunnis and murdering them with power tools? I have no idea.

    But like any big multilateral negotiation, the real dealing would be done with a smaller group...a "Big Four" or "Big Six."

    If the U.S. can somehow find a way Sistani, Talabani and Sadr to sit down with representatives of some of the bigger insurgent groups, with a big-time American player (Holbrooke, Albright, Baker, Rice, Tony Lake, someone like that) observing, some kind of deal could be done. That was the model for the Madrid negotiations between Israel and the Arab states, which eventually culminated in a half-dozen peace agreements.

    (And pern, The Isaiah thing made me laugh out loud, for the record.)
     
  4. Flying Headbutt

    Flying Headbutt Moderator Staff Member

    They should have killed al Sadr two years ago when they had a chance.

    Now they need to divide the country up. Turkey is starting to embrace Kurdistan now incidentally, and Iran is always going to influence the shia dominated south. Divide the country, come up with an oil revenue sharing plan, and get outta there so the civil war can be all their's.
     
  5. zeke12

    zeke12 Guest

    M_W --

    I was referring to the fact that we sold out the Kurds -- as a condition of invasion -- by promising the Turks they'd never get their own state.

    If you're truly trying to give democracy a go, you can't eliminate the prospect of an independent Kurdistan just because you want to send troops to Turkey and the Kurds don't have anything we want.
     
  6. Mighty_Wingman

    Mighty_Wingman Active Member

    I don't think there's anything irresponsible about denying the Kurds complete independence. That's been American policy for decades...since 1918, in fact.

    "Democracy" doesn't mean willy-nilly redrawing of international boundaries. That's why the U.S. is still trying to figure out a third way in Kosovo. And why our government has never really concerned itself with Tibet. And why we're supporting Georgia against Abkhazia and the other enclaves.

    Promising Turkey -- a loyal American ally for decades -- that we wouldn't support Kurdish independence isn't the same thing as "forgetting" the Kurds. Since the primary "realist" critique of the invasion was that it's "destabilizing" the Middle East, how can anyone justify Kurdish independence?

    I can't think of anything more destabilizing to Turkey, Iran and Syria than an independent Iraqi Kurdistan.
     
  7. zeke12

    zeke12 Guest

    But here's where the rubber meets the road:

    This invasion wasn't made based on a pragmatic model of American foreign policy interests in the region.

    It was made for any number of other reasons. but not that.

    And we showed the world our ignorance when we cut that deal.

    Iraq has never been a nation, at least not one in our sense of the concept. It's a place drawn on a map by an Englishman who wanted to get the hell out of there. It took a tyrant to hold it together, whether we like it or not. A tyrant we propped up, whether it's convienent to reference now or not.

    You can't say it's OK to cut that deal with Turkey in the interest of stabilizing the region when you know damn well our invasion will destabilize the region more than anything else.

    Hell, if you subscribe to the Bush doctrine, as publicly given -- and I'm not saying you do -- then a free and independent Kurdistan, with access to both water and oil, is just what is needed as a pro-Western bulwark in the area.
     
  8. Mighty_Wingman

    Mighty_Wingman Active Member

    Zeke,

    I'm sure I can't convince you on this point. (I do want to say how nice it is to have a conversation like this on SJ without it degenerating into namecalling and insults. Maybe the place changed while I was gone, though probably not.)

    But I will say that there was and is a "realist" case for invading Iraq, and it was made at great length by plenty of people, including the so-called "neocons." I know this because I'm a neocon myself, and I certainly don't buy the simple version of "We had to invade because we have to spread freedom to every corner of the globe."

    (This is going to be long. I apologize. I'm always wordy.)

    In the May/June 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs, Aideed and Karen Dawisha wrote a fairly perceptive story on the problems of occupation. They wrote the story shortly after the invasion, long before the insurgency really got rolling, much less the quasi-civil war we're in now. And they made a very clear realist case for spreading democracy. It's been made elsewhere...several times in The National Interest, for example.

    The short version (and I'm sure you've heard all or most of this before) is this: The United States won't be safe from Islamic terror for as long as despotic Middle Eastern regimes sponsor anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorism as a means of distracting their people from problems closer to home. For decades, American policy focused on Mideast "stability," but it was a negative, preserving rotten dictatorships like Saddam's and Mubarak's and the Assads', and rotten monarchies like the al-Sauds'. And as these regimes became more and more corrupt, they depended more and more on repression to defend themselves against their citizens.

    Being smart operators, though, the Arab dictators didn't just run police states. They justified their police states because their countries were at war with the "near enemy" (Israel) and the "far enemy" (the U.S.). They discreetly made it clear to the religious establishment and to other influential imams that preaching against the government, with its Western-style luxuries and semi-fascist governance, would make them targets of the police. But preaching against the near and far enemies? That was just fine.

    Thus encouraged, religious leaders stepped up their preaching of hate for the West and for the Jews. A region of proud, historic cultures needed an explanation for why it was struggling to catch up to the rest of the world. Blaming the governments was off limits. So ordinary Arabs became indoctrinated with the idea that it was the Western infidels and Crusaders, in service to Zionist world power, were to blame for the Middle East's everyday misery.

    In this kind of environment, it becomes relatively easy to recruit young men -- even educated, wealthy young men -- to blow up buses in Israel and office buildings in New York City.

    The "neocon" theory says that if you replace the dictatorships with freer governments, the pressure eases. When you can blame the government for the filthy streets and the shitty schools and the hollow economy, societal rage isn't building up and creating a potential for terrorist violence. Now, we can influence some Arab governments, like the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians and so on. And in the last five years, every one of those states has implemented domestic reforms to give people more voice in their lives.

    Some states, though, we couldn't influence: Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya especially. Something else was needed. Add in the persistent intelligence reports of WMD in Iraq (and can we please agree not to re-fight the "Bush Lied" absurdity here?), and it became clear: The U.S. could eliminate the potential military threat posed by Saddam and simultaneously send a message to the other recalcitrant regimes. Pour encourager les autres, in other words.

    So we invaded Iraq, hoping 1) To topple Saddam and 2) To instill a free democracy in the heart of the Middle East, putting more pressure on the moderate and radical Mideastern governments to stop sponsoring terror and stop educating their people to blame America.

    We accomplished No. 1. No. 2 worked in places -- Libya, Lebanon, to some extent in Egypt. Unfortunately, the democracy project hasn't worked YET in Iraq, and the unbelievable mishandling of the insurgency has raised the stakes.


    Whew. I'm guessing no one will ever make it through this thing. But I felt like it needed to be said.
     
  9. I could pull a Boom here and start listing the quotes from people involved in actually running this government and planning the invasion who didn't argue anything like what Winger argued here -- or who said quite plainly that they making a case that could sell itself, and not one based on the actual reality. But I won't do that. You take this country to war based on lies and fantasy and it ends badly. People do not like being lied to. When they discover they have been lied to, there no longer is a middle ground of political support. It's over-the-cliff or get-out-now. There is no longer any reason for any American to believe anything this administration says about Iraq. None. They lied about why we were going in. (And Winger, you know full well that there were respected voices prior to the war who said the WMD argument was hooey. And you know full well what the neocon fantasts did to them, from Scott Ritter to Hans Blix to el-Baradei.) They lied about what would happen when we did. They tried their damndest to lie about what was actually going on. And they're pathetically lying now about the nature of the bloody fucking quagmire they caused.
    I have no doubt that the Winger is sincere -- although The National Interest has been a fount of bad advice for a couple of decades now -- but this is the Search For The Pony -- also known as, That Bastard Didn't Give Us The War We Wanted. A project to spread "democracy" -- as we define it, and never in any way that would damage what we perceive to be our national interests. Sure, here's your democracy. What? You keep the oil? Eh? -- is something dreamed up by people who never fought anywhere but a boardroom, and whose experience with the real political world is limited to a bunch of greedy exiles and the 25 people with whom they drink cocktails. Libya has democratized? It has? Lebanon's democracy is in tatters because our staunchest ally blew the hell out of the country. Egypt? These are the successes? Bad plan.
    There is no credible American solution that will be accepted by enough different factions in Iraq to make a difference. We get out now or we get out in six months what will be left is an independent Kurdish state and a Shiite regime allied with Iran. Bush isn't calling the shots over there. al Sadr is. And there were people who predicted that before the war, too. They were ridiculed, marginalized and worse by the neocon bunglers who ought to be driven from government forever with a horsewhip.
    Whew.
     
  10. Mighty_Wingman

    Mighty_Wingman Active Member

    I think we agree on the big picture here, F_B.

    We're just separated by the details. And our relative level of incoherent fury at Bush.

    Again, though, just because politicians didn't make a concerted effort to sell this sophisticated case for war to the public doesn't mean it wasn't one of the cases for war. There were about a dozen...Time or Newsweek or someone did a breakdown in late 2003, inexplicably trying to spin it as proof of the administration's "incoherence" over the case for war.

    The basic point where I differ with you -- and I'm guessing with all the Dems on this board -- is that I don't believe the war was a mistake from the beginning. It was badly handled more or less from the beginning and it was poorly sold at home and abroad. But I think -- even if you don't -- that the reasons I advanced for invading Iraq are still sound. You're right that there's no AMERICAN solution that enough Iraqis will accept. But there is an Iraqi solution, which statrat and I appear to agree on at least.

    And the Iraqis need American help to get to that solution. Almost all of them -- except the real sociopaths like al-Sadr and the al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia types -- admit they want American troops protecting them from each other. That's increasingly true among the Sunnis. Without American soldiers there making a better effort to keep the peace, the sides will never come to the table to negotiate.

    As for Libya being a success, I'd say it is. I never said it was a democracy. But it's folded its nuclear program, opened up its military to international observers and publicly (at least) renounced terrorism. Egypt's in a similar situation. As I've been saying to you since mid-March of 2003, the goal isn't to turn the Middle East into Belgium by 2008, which is the standard you're demanding. It's to make it a better place. We haven't yet, but we still have a chance.
     
  11. statrat

    statrat Member

    Al-Maliki was quoted today as saying Iraqi forces would be ready by June 2007. I say we hold him to that. We beef up our troop strength with whatever we can in the time being, secure the borders, oilfields and major cities, and give them six months after June 2007 to have their forces in place, with or without a plan for a functioning government, whether that is to divide the country or some other solution, and then start pulling out. That would mean troops home by Christmas 07. I hardly doubt that will happen, being that Bush will leave the troops over their until after the '08 election so that the withdrawl does not become part of his "legacy."
     
  12. statrat

    statrat Member

    I would agree with M_W about the war not being a mistake in the beginning. The war came at the wrong time and in the wrong way, but it was a war that we would have had to fight. If our government had not had an attention span of 10 seconds and had told the world "Listen guys, (this means you France, Germany and Russia) we created this mess by giving this guy the weapons he has. We have created a monster who is a threat to the rest of the world. We need your help to take him down" And then outlined the weapons that we have given him and what they have been used for, it would have been them looking like asses to the rest of the world and not us. Hussein needed to be removed, but we went about it in the worst, most screwed up way possible.
     
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