What Is The Iraq Answer

Winger -- This was a war of choice, unnecessary, with the US military used as lab rats for fantastical geopolitical theories.
They sold the war on half-truths. The aluminum tubes. The smoking gun is a mushroom cloud. The fantastical meeting between Iraq operatives and al Qaeda in Prague. The lagoons of poisons. The vast storehouses of germs. The nuclear bomb in the rosebushes. (And we know, now, that a lot of that came from a drunk who was disbelieved by everyone in the administration except the people who wanted to believe him and who were, alas, the idiots running things.) They didn't just fail to attempt to sell a sophisticated case for war, which was fundamentally wishful thinking anyway. They sold a deliberately false and misleading and simplistic one. (Is there something sophisticated in what Cakewalk Ken Adelman was arguing? Or Cheney with his "greet us as liberators" business? Or the candy-and-flowers trope? That isn't the thinking of sophisticated people. That's childish fantasy, is all it is.)
I also dispute the fact that my opposition to this president is "incoherent." He has acted, at virtually every important moment, including the day of the 9/11 attacks, as a dim, entitled, spoiled incompetent. He has resolutely refused to listen to opinions with which he disagrees; the list of dispatched truth-tellers that started with O'Neill and DiIulio is now well into triple-digits, I believe. His concept of the Executive has been from the start contrary to the principles of self-government. (Remember, he was locking up the government before 9/11.) Even today, he is showing every indication that his policy is to stay in Iraq until it's no longer his problem. He's not going to listen to Baker. He's not going to listen to anyone who tells him what he doesn't want to hear. He has repeatedly broken the law and bragged about it. On his watch, the most serious attack on the country in 40 years happened and the most devastating single natural disaster happened and in both cases, his response was to first bungle, and then prevaricate.
You may consider al Sadr a sociopath. He may well be one. But right now, he's running the show in Iraq and, unless you're willing to blow in there with 200,000 troops that we don't have, that's the way it's going to stay.
And that was predictable, too.

 

Rather than write another 1,000 words when I really should be working, I'll leave it at this: Let's agree to disagree.

 

M_W --

We agree more than we disagree, but here is where I get caught up most in your lengthy explanation:

Even if I stipulated that the neocon ideal of advancing more pro-western democracies in the Middle East was possible through warfare, it's impossible to do the way we've gone about it.

That's because we're trying to build a democracy on top of what's there now, but what's there now will never be able to sustain a democracy.

These nations were drawn willy-nilly on a map back in 1919 -- without regard to tribal realities, or with the benefit of demographic data. That's why terrorist groups can take over an entire nation in Syria -- because the British skipped town and left a mandated Christian government of an overwhelmingly Muslim population. That's why Saddam Hussein came be in power for so long -- because the people were more afraid of him than they hated their religious enemies.

If you want actual progress in the Middle East, you have to go back to the beginning, and deal with the tribal conflicts, and all that mess. Which means that you have to at least consider the idea that Iraq should be divided, that the Kurds should have their own state -- in fact, that southern Turkey is probably actually northern Kurdistan. Maybe the Shia should be part of Iran. I don't know. And I know our leaders don't know, either. The only people who can decide are the people in that part of the world.

Of course, you're right, pragmatic foreign policy interests say we'll never do any of that. Which is why we should have left the damn thing alone. Hell, Iran might very well have moved further in our direction and helped Iraq come along later. We'll never know now. But we certainly have fucked things up beyond all recognition.

Now, you might chalk all or most of that up to flawed implementation, but I would argue that it goes to the heart of the idea from the beginning. The Middle East is, in its very nature, a complicated place, and much as I live to mock Balfour's maps, I don't know that we could do any better, here 90 years later. You need to reflect the demographics on the ground while protecting Israel's sovreignty and trying to allocate the precious resources of oil and water. It's a tricky job. One we should have tried to do over a 200-300 year plan, as opposed to in a week. And if you can't pay the piper -- or draw the map -- then you best not call the tune.

There's an interesting theory to be advanced, I think, that this war is really a continuation of WWI, but I won't make it here. I'll just say that it's nice to have a political discussion with a thinking, breathing person with different opinions. A real changeup around here...

 

You're absolutely right, obviously, that this goes back to 1918. Have you read A Peace to End All Peace? It's a look at the Treaty of Sevres and the mandate system and the birth of modern Arab nationalism. Great stuff. Makes Balfour and Lloyd George and Sykes and Picot look like the asses they were. Way too kind to Ataturk, but that's life.

I agree with you that the best thing to do would be to travel back in time to 1918 and try to get the Allies to handle Turkey's dismemberment a little more intelligently. But that's not an option, and there's no realistic way to tear up the map now.

Besides, the idea that artificially constructed states don't work isn't really fair: The Allies did more or less the same thing to Austria-Hungary as they did to Turkey, and that region's not as bad off as it once was. Ethnic minority rights are a problem all across the world; it's not a difficulty unique to the Middle East.

Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia may have broken up and a few borders have changed in Poland and Romania, but the bulk of the 1918 settlement in Central and Eastern is still intact, even after WWII and the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It hasn't worked that way in the Middle East, but that doesn't mean that settlement was totally flawed. With a few breaks -- like Nasser and Khomenei being strangled at birth or the Soviets not encouraging Baathism in the 60's and 70's-- the Middle East could be a totally different place today.

 

You'd give them two years? I'd say a year to 18 months at the most. For me, two years seems like a lot and I'd expect the Iraqi leadership to drag its feet until the 11th hour. Then, in typical American fashion, we'd extend our deadline until they "get up to speed." Two years after that, we're still in there.

PS - Hey scientist-dudes, how 'bout picking up the pace a little on finding an efficient alternate fuel, then get Detroit in gear (pun intended) and have them pump out the appropriate cars. Then we can let the entire Middle East go fuck themselves to hell without taking any more American lives and dollars.

 

Hessians?

 

I read the whole thing, M_W, and that was the most reasoned and informative post I've ever seen on a SportsJournalists.com political thread.

 

M_W,

Just read you're post. Very reasoned. But -- and this is a BIG but -- it seems as though you've gone to great lengths in an effort to convince yourself that this war has a shred of right to it, and that's simply not the case.

You've made one huge leap in logic -- that our presence in Iraq played a role in the changes in Libya and Lebanon -- and omitted one huge point -- that we already had taken control of a terrorist stronghold and had made significant progress in destroying the biggest terrorist threat to this country.

You can't make a claim that this war prompted any significant change in other middle eastern countries because failures, especially those of this magnitude, rarely inspire others to follow your lead. The people in the Middle East who don't utterly despise this country, for the most part, see our invasion of Iraq for exactly what it is -- us trying to impose our way of life on a country that neither wants it nor needs it. The US invasion of Iraq had no more impact on the changes in Libya and Lebanon than the outcome of tonight's Ravens-Bengals game did. The people of those countries wanted change. They got it. And the change they got certainly didn't benefit us any. If you're talking about the changes in those countries concerning their nuclear weapons programs, the war had zero effect. Those changes were in the works well before the war started and were a product of diplomacy, not war.

Most importantly, though, the idea that this was somehow the opening salvo in the march to create a friendlier, more stable Middle East is shot to hell when you consider how much progress we tossed aside when we left Afghanistan for Iraq. The progress we had made in Afghanistan was staggering. Only a handful of the top commanders in al Qaeda remained, those who remained were splintered and spread all over the place and we had all but eliminated any possibility of the group even planning another attack. We had tossed out the Taliban and the people of that country were actually treating us as liberators. On top of all that, we had the support of the entire world, including some very terrorist-friendly Middle Eastern countries. Basically, we had exactly what you're claiming we invaded Iraq for.

So, if your theories are to hold water, explain to me why we gave that up. Why was Iraq a better target than Afghanistan, considering there was far more terrorist activity and a far more dangerous, anti-US government in place? How did the changes in Iraq prompt change in other countries when the changes in Iraq had led to complete and utter chaos, steadily declining living conditions and an environment so dangerous that the government leaders have to duck under every window?

Please stop trying to convince us that there's some grand goal at the bottom of all this. There's not. Shrubby's not some great mastermind. Six years of his bullshit has more than proven that. In fact, if we've learned anything from his tenure, it should be this: The guy does nothing that doesn't benefit himself. You start looking in that direction and I'm sure you'll find all the answers to explain this invasion. If anything, this war has made us more vulnerable. The anti-US, terrorist-friendly countries in the Middle East see what's happening in Iraq, see our military bogged down by a rag-tag group of insurgents, and we've suddenly become not quite so feared. In addition, all the WMDs claims has wiped away what little credibility our government had with these countries.

And we certainly can't re-fight the "Bush lied" statements. There's no fight left, because to fight, you need two sides. And there is no other side in this. He lied. That's a fact. Straight out, right to our faces, over and over and over again, he lied. Maybe you missed the statements about WMDs, yellow cake, mushroom clouds, the al Qaeda-Saddam link, the mobile labs, the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. He presented every one of these things as stone-cold facts, when we all now know that not only were they not facts, there were numerous intelligence reports telling him these things weren't true.