At a certain point you have to go… stop!
Today marks another Memorial Day, this time with the American death toll in Iraq well past 2400 lives, with over 18,000 injured. Just over six months have passed since hawkish Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) called for the beginning of a U.S. pullout in Iraq but just days ago, President Bush outlined his latest plan, amid rumors of a withdrawal, to “stay the course, amid graphic reports of a new My Lai.
All of this would seem to call out for a re-thinking of positions or assumptions on newspaper editorial pages. Indeed, three of the most influential did weigh in Sunday with Iraq editorials. All of them, despite voicing strong crtiicism in the same editorials, came out against starting to bring the boys home.
This continues the depressing tradition of newspaper editorials saying most of the right things, and pressing charges against the administration s handling of the war while arguing for more time or a few more months for the latest turning point in Iraq to produce a positive outcome. This pattern could and possibly will go on nearly forever.
A long time ago I believed that while it was wrong to go to war in Iraq, we had to “fix” what we had broken, lest Iraq descend into chaos. Yet, 3 years after the fact - in almost the same time we had smashed the Axis and sent Europe onto the path of rebuilding itself, Iraq is still a major war zone and has really not shown significant progress. Afghanistan was supposed to be the model for this sort of nation-building on the cheap, but their government has no real control and anti-American sentiment there is clearly significant. I personally think the best model going forward is not the misguided strategy of imposing democracy on nations (the last refuge after the WMD hunt petered out and we allowed Bin Laden to escape at Torah Bora), but rather back to our previous path of eliminating threats. Job #1 should be eliminating and containing the Bin Laden/Al Qaeda threat, rather than being sitting ducks in Iraq training an Iraqi army that - quite frankly - could turn on us in a minute and regularly betrays our troops in the field. It’s time to get realistic about all of this and leave the mythical democracy up to the fiction writers.
Oliver please read some history….
Your leftwingnuttery has gone around the bend.
Read about WWII, Korea, even vietnam. Iraq a “major war zone”? What are you some kind of nut. We lost over 300,000 people in WWII (compared to the russians at something like 9 million!). On D-Day alone the US lost 2500 men…in ONE DAY.
Europe and japan tooks decades to rebuild, and for those of you keeping track, we STILL garrison troops there.
Stop with the constant cowardly mewling would you? It is tiresome, and on a day like today (remember, Memorial Day?) it is particularly vile to have to attempt to denigrate what our fighting men and women have worked so hard to achieve.
an Iraqi army that … could turn on us in a minute and could turn on us in a minute and regularly betrays our troops in the field.
Evidence, please?
From the Convenient History of Oliver Willis:
You mean December 1944?
While I agree with you in general, I’m not sure what the least bad realistic exit strategy is. Iraq is facing a five-part civil war right now.
1) Sunnis fighting the US and the Iraqi government
2) Sunnis and Shi’ites killing each other (the corpse war)
3) Religious extremists (both Shi’ite and Sunni) murdering the “un-Islamic”
4) Intra-Shi’ite war in Basra, that has now turned agains the British
5) The North - Kurds, Turkmen and Arabs fighting over Kirkuk. (this is the lowest grade part of the war, but has the potential to be genocidal)
What exactly are US troops doing right now? Conducting periodic high-profile raids against Sunni insurgent strongholds. And standing guard lest the Sunni insurgents start driving around in tanks. For all the talk of “clear-hold-build”, we aren’t doing much of it. BTW, this is a paraphrase of Frederick Kagan’s recent piece in the Weekly Standard. NOBODY thinks clear-hold-build is working right now.
So does it make sense for US troops to continue what they’re doing? Hawks like Kagan think we should conduct a massive roll-em-up campaign against the entire Sunni triangle. But he openly discounts the other 4 parts of the Iraqi civil war, meaning that the situation will hardly improve if we replicate Fallujah throughout central Iraq. Can we really pacify Baghdad that way?
If we keep on the status quo, the five elements of the Iraq war will continue to escalate according to their own logic. We may prevent the appearance of insurgent tanks on the streets of Baghdad, but we can’t prevent wanton summary executions of government workers.
But what happens if we pull out, say, in a one-year phased withdrawal? Is anybody ready to keep order? The insurgency against the US will end, but the insurgency against the Shi’ite dominated government won’t. Nor will the other 4 parts of the war. Will the five-part war just escalate that much faster, now that the US lid has been removed from the pot? Redeploying to Kuwait a la the Murtha plan might actually give us the worst of both worlds. The war immediately escalates out of control, and we find ourselves constantly drawn back in to stop a genocide. So do we just pull out permanently and let the forces fight it out to whatever logical and bloody conclusion awaits? I have no idea. But if we are going to talk seriously about pulling out - and we should have that conversation because the current plan is such a disaster, and the more hawkish plans like Kagan’s are based on unrealistic assumptions, then we need to think seriously about what will happen within Iraq.
Good post. Anybody with an easy answer is a fool or doesn’t understand the dynamic.
Dugger