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I truly don't know what is the best strategy for Iraq. Obviously, that makes me very much like a Democrat.
We shouldn't have gone in there in the first place. In retrospect, George Senior is looking like a friggin' genius in the first Gulf War for chasing Saddam's troops out of Kuwait and halfway to Baghdad, then pulling back without taking Saddam down and thus keeping Iraq stable.
None of the options are good, for one side or the other or both. Pulling out entirely is good for us in the short run, but what happens when Iraq falls apart? -- because it would. What goes into the vacuum we've created? I suspect we'd end up with a violent partitioning of the country, with the Kurds forming their own enclave in the north near Turkey (which will piss off Turkey mightily), the Shia forming their own country below Iran with Iran's help, and Saudi Arabia allying with the Sunni minority to hold some of the south. It would be a terrific, bloody mess, but hey, it wouldn't be American soldiers dying in the morass...
King George believes that after all the failed strategies he's employed before, this one will somehow magically work. I don't believe that either. I was curious and looked up a few figures. In the wake of WWII, we occupied Japan. In that occupation, in 1946 we had in excess of 400,000 troops there. According to GlobalSecurity.org, as of Mid-November, 2006, 152,000 US troops were in Iraq. Japan covers 145,883 square miles; Iraq covers 169,243 square miles -- so, in a militarily-defeated country that is (roughly) 16% larger than Japan, we have only 26% of the troops that we used for the occupation of Japan.
Yes, I know Japan is not Iraq (especially culturally) and this was a different war and a different time. The analogy is imperfect and maybe even wrong. But... we put close to half a million troops into Japan to make certain it was stable and safe -- in a culture, I would argue, where shame and honor are strong emotions, and where as a result there was far less danger of an 'insurgency.' I suspect that anyone who knew the Middle East at all expected that once Saddam was gone that a civil war would erupt -- and that if we were to control it, then we needed one hell of a lot more boots on the ground.
Another 20,000 troops won't do it. It's throwing a bucket of water on a raging house fire. Here's what I suspect will happen if we follow through on this: 1) we will be saying to those factions who already hate us that yes, we really are an Occupation Force; 2) the violence will escalate; 3) we still won't have enough troops on the ground to control the escalation, and the Iraqi forces will be next to useless; 4) we'll end up losing more of our soldiers; 5) we'll be hearing a speech in a year or so saying "Well, that didn't work either, but now I have a better plan..."
And we're leaving aside the issue of Afghanistan, which is increasingly looking as if it needs some propping up as well.
Doubling the forces in Iraq might do something about stopping the violence, but then there's still the whole panoply of Sunni/Shia/Kurd problems, and those will need to be addressed before Iraq can ever be stable again. But we don't have another 150,000 troops to throw at Iraq -- not without a draft... and I, for one, certainly don't want that again.
We broke Iraq. It's really, really broken. And looking at the pieces, I'm not convinced it's fixable. And if that's really, truly the case, then I would make the reluctant decision to say let's get our people out of there while we can...
Anybody got a better idea?
We shouldn't have gone in there in the first place. In retrospect, George Senior is looking like a friggin' genius in the first Gulf War for chasing Saddam's troops out of Kuwait and halfway to Baghdad, then pulling back without taking Saddam down and thus keeping Iraq stable.
None of the options are good, for one side or the other or both. Pulling out entirely is good for us in the short run, but what happens when Iraq falls apart? -- because it would. What goes into the vacuum we've created? I suspect we'd end up with a violent partitioning of the country, with the Kurds forming their own enclave in the north near Turkey (which will piss off Turkey mightily), the Shia forming their own country below Iran with Iran's help, and Saudi Arabia allying with the Sunni minority to hold some of the south. It would be a terrific, bloody mess, but hey, it wouldn't be American soldiers dying in the morass...
King George believes that after all the failed strategies he's employed before, this one will somehow magically work. I don't believe that either. I was curious and looked up a few figures. In the wake of WWII, we occupied Japan. In that occupation, in 1946 we had in excess of 400,000 troops there. According to GlobalSecurity.org, as of Mid-November, 2006, 152,000 US troops were in Iraq. Japan covers 145,883 square miles; Iraq covers 169,243 square miles -- so, in a militarily-defeated country that is (roughly) 16% larger than Japan, we have only 26% of the troops that we used for the occupation of Japan.
Yes, I know Japan is not Iraq (especially culturally) and this was a different war and a different time. The analogy is imperfect and maybe even wrong. But... we put close to half a million troops into Japan to make certain it was stable and safe -- in a culture, I would argue, where shame and honor are strong emotions, and where as a result there was far less danger of an 'insurgency.' I suspect that anyone who knew the Middle East at all expected that once Saddam was gone that a civil war would erupt -- and that if we were to control it, then we needed one hell of a lot more boots on the ground.
Another 20,000 troops won't do it. It's throwing a bucket of water on a raging house fire. Here's what I suspect will happen if we follow through on this: 1) we will be saying to those factions who already hate us that yes, we really are an Occupation Force; 2) the violence will escalate; 3) we still won't have enough troops on the ground to control the escalation, and the Iraqi forces will be next to useless; 4) we'll end up losing more of our soldiers; 5) we'll be hearing a speech in a year or so saying "Well, that didn't work either, but now I have a better plan..."
And we're leaving aside the issue of Afghanistan, which is increasingly looking as if it needs some propping up as well.
Doubling the forces in Iraq might do something about stopping the violence, but then there's still the whole panoply of Sunni/Shia/Kurd problems, and those will need to be addressed before Iraq can ever be stable again. But we don't have another 150,000 troops to throw at Iraq -- not without a draft... and I, for one, certainly don't want that again.
We broke Iraq. It's really, really broken. And looking at the pieces, I'm not convinced it's fixable. And if that's really, truly the case, then I would make the reluctant decision to say let's get our people out of there while we can...
Anybody got a better idea?
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/01/10/condi_rice/
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How do we fix something that was broken when we got there which we're making steadily worse? The idea that we should stick around and Fix the Problem bugs me not only because of the loss of U.S. soldiers (which in a draft situation could very well be our kids in a few years) but because it's paternalistic and robs the Iraqis of self-determinism.
And while we're doing shaky analogies, I see our current Bush as Marie Anoinette, blithely spending more and more on his favorite hobbies and living off his father's (or in M.A.'s case, her mother's) legacy while the country bankrupts outside the gates of the palace. No matter what we should or should not do in Iraq, how long can we keep this insane level of spending? Better start learning Chinese. I suspect they already own us.
Guess I'm not a fan of Manifest Destiny anymore.
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What would I do to fix it?
Put Colin Powell in charge, give him a blank check and get the hell out of his way. I think he could engineer a solution (one which would probably upset everyone for different reasons) and get the right people in the right places to accomplish the goal. I also think Colin Powell would decline the job, which is the main reason I nominated him. He doesn't WANT it and anyone who WANTS the job is unsuited to have the job.
It would also cost us more than all the oil in the Middle East and three generations (minimum).
So it's fixable. But too expensive for us to repair. OTOH, if we don't repair it, it's going to come back to haunt us.
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Our only possible solution is to admit complete and utter failure and plead to the international community for help.
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Overall, I'd agree with that statement. The consequences of the establishment of Israel continue to reverberate to this day. I'm not saying that creating a Jewish state was wrong, only that 'mistakes were made' during its creation that still echo.
As I suspect there will be echoes from this current mess for decades...
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I'm not certain of that, either. I think arguments could be made that a three-way partition of the land might be the most stable accommodation we could make. The problem would be that to do so means that we (along with other countries, perhaps) would be imposing that on the country without their consent.
That historically hasn't worked out so well (see "Israel" or "Lebanon" or "Palestine").
When thinking of this initially, I was probably more in favor of partitioning the country than of the "Send More Troops" option or the "Let's Get Out ASAP" option. But right at the moment, I'm more favoring the latter of those options... but I still remain open to other options.
But I'm dead certain that 21,500 troops aren't going to make enough of a difference. If we want the "Send More Troops" option, it needs to be in six figures... and I really don't want that -- notwithstanding that we don't have that many troops to send.
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I would be interested in hearing what he thinks would be a solution, though. I'd love to hear that.
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I agree completely.
"Our only possible solution is to admit complete and utter failure and plead to the international community for help."
I'm more in that camp than any other. I think we need to go to Iran, Syria, the Saudis, and Turkey (as humiliating as that might be -- though I don't personally find admitting "We screwed up" to be humiliating, but more 'honest') and say "Look, it's in everybody's interest to have a stable Iraq. How can we best accomplish that, and what would make you work toward that end? Because otherwise, we're pulling our troops out and we'll leave the mess on your doorstep."
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But we took him out, we broke the country, and I don't know if we have the ability to glue it back together again. I certainly don't think the current Iraqi government has that capability.
It's a worse morass than Vietnam, and potentially far more dangerous.
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But if we don't admit that we made a mistake, we'll never get anywhere.
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From everything I've read, he actually did make that effort. Even though both Saddam was Sunni and Al Qaeda is a Sunni organization, Saddam was fairly 'secular' and Al Qaeda's philosophy is more 'fundamentalist' that Saddam's. From everything I've read, Saddam considered Al Qaeda a threat and actively kept them out of Iraq.
I also don't believe that we were entirely missing the lack of WMDs. From appearances, the administration was only listening to those who would tell them what they wanted to hear. There were plenty of voices saying the opposite, but they were actively ignored.
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He probably has a better background and understanding that most in this area and I'd love to see what he would propose.
I liked the we broke it; we fix it line but we seem to be the equivalent of 6-year-olds who accidently blew up the neighbor's house. We haven't the means or the skills to fix it.
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That last is the sticking point, because it's something that few people are willing to face: that Saddam kept Iraq stable. We may have disliked the way he did it, but I for one find it difficult to believe that the average Iraqi is better off now.
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That may be true, but the problem is that no one can impose 'unity' on anyone else. We can't force the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shia to put down their arms and cooperate -- we can't do that no matter how many troops we put there. They gotta do that themselves.
And absent their will to do so (which seems to be entirely absent, in fact), partitioning might at least result in a temporary cessation of hostilities.