I’ve been pondering this for a number of days.
Let me step back a moment. One of the biggest problems in the debate over Iraq, and what the US should do next, is partisanship, intentional and unintentional.
On the intentional side, there are too many people in the political leadership of this country whose positions are shaped on the issue because of what it means to them and their party and their political future specifically. The Bush White House is far more interested, at this point, in its future place in history, I believe, than in coming up with the best course for the US or Iraq, and so is unwilling to do anything that will look like a loss, instead leaving hard decisions up to the next hapless inhabitant of the White House. Too many Republicans see their party’s fortunes rising or falling (mostly falling, of late) with the White House, and so have toed the line with the President, even while muttering about him in public.
Conversely, too many Democrats are taking positions based on what will benefit their party, their run for the White House or other office. If Bush or his cronies somehow magically came up with the best !plan! evah! for resolving the Iraq issue, they would perforce oppose it because of what it would mean in November 2008.
Listening to both side’s Presidential candidates debate on the topic, as well as listening to the more partisan shills in Congress pontificate about it, demonstrates my point.
But beyond intentional partisanship, there is unintentional partisanship, something that goes beyond counting coup in political debates. That is this: George W. Bush has squandered, if not poisoned, the trust, good will, and prestige of his office for too many people, and they are reacting to the situation in Iraq based on that. In the case of too many of the dwindling Bush supporters, the reaction is fear. Oh my God, we’ve been supporting this lunatic and his coterie! To admit that, though, is to admit my complicity in what’s happened, to take responsibility for the blood and pain and death. And to admit we’re being run by an Administration that is, at best, insane, at worst, the darkest enemy the Republic has ever known But that’s way too scary and daunting and shameful — so I’ll simply stuff it back into the mental closet and wave the flag some more. If Bush suggested that Osama Bin Laden was, in fact, an alien out to eat our children and use their organs for building an army of cyborg robots, they would nod nervously and wave their flags and send in their checks and hope the clock runs out before Bush does something even more stupid.
Conversely, on the open opposition, the reaction is anger and hatred. George W. Bush is a lying bastard, and anything he does, says, or proposes is dead wrong, and I will oppose it on that basis with my dying breath. As a result, if Bush suggested that crossing a busy boulevard on red was dangerous and just what the terrorists wanted folks to do, too many people’s knee-jerk reaction would be to do so just to spite him, to demonstrate their contempt and disbelief, to not give him the satisfaction of following a suggestion of his. The hatred of the messenger has rendered the message not only suspect, but prima facie wrong.
Which brings us to Iraq. Too many Bush supporters are behind the President’s Iraq policy (to the extent they can be), not because it is the right thing to do in their opinion, but (in the case of too many GOP Pols) because of the harm to the party and its November 2008 chances (as they see it) if they break ranks and oppose it on its merits.
Similarly, too many Bush opponents are against the President’s Iraq policy, not because it is the wrong thing to do, but because Bush is the one touting it — which, to be sure, makes it automatically suspect to some degree, but even if there are doubts, one gets the sense that even if it’s precisely the right thing to be doing, the pols sense blood in the water and oppose it for political gain, and the populate so mistrust and are angry with and even hate Bush that they won’t support him on it.
Both of which are exactly the wrong courses to be taking in evaluating what the US should next be doing in Iraq. Supporting the President because he’s the President, or because it’s the Republican Thing to Do, is just plain crazy. Knee-jerk dismissal of anything that comes out of his mouth, while emotionally satisfying, is also crazy (after all, even a broken clock is right twice a day).
In other words, I think too much (not all, but too much) of the opposition to the war in Iraq is based on political opportunism by the Dems in power and blood-weary hatred by the population that the Bush Administration has manipulated, lied to, and screwed over too many times.
This is not to say that the war has not been mismanaged from the get-go (regardless of what you believe about the run-up to it, its motivation, etc.). This is not to say that the cost in lives — American and Iraqi — has been trivial (though compared to other armed conflicts that the US has engaged in, or even in terms of common causes of death in our own nation, the numbers are passingly small for all the passion they engender). But the reaction is an emotional one, not a rational one — and the results of that will continue to affect this nation for decades to come.
Proposals for what to do in Iraq seem to fall into three groups:
- Stay the course, do what the military (tacitly understood to be marching to the orders of the White House) is suggesting, etc. Call this the Petraeus Plan.
- Begin drawing down troops, shift the mission to support and logistics and limited counter-insurgency, and see how that works.
- Get the hell out of Dodge, regardless.
The Petraeus plan faces huge obstacles. First off, it plays directly into the hands of (if not being dictated by) Bush, by vindicating his actions (the Surge, the ongoing presence) and his rhetoric. That does not mean it is the wrong thing to do, however. Yes, I’d hate to see that smug little smile on Bush’s lips even one more time by “going along with him.” But that’s not the basis for foreign or military policy. It can’t be, otherwise we’re as shallow as folks who claim we went to war because Dubya wanted to show up Dad (or, conversely, punish Saddam for trying to bump Dad off) say Bush is. Hardly a stirring example to follow.
Reports of how successful the Surge has been are mixed. I honestly don’t know. I would feel better if they weren’t being seized upon (by both sides) for whatever political and emotional advantage they accrue. And, of course, such things don’t function with a smooth curve, especially over a matter of a few months. It’s quite reasonable, in a situation like Iraq, to say that it will take several months to a year to really make a perceptible, sustained difference. And the big problem is that — for partisan and emotional reasons — nobody wants to wait that long, especially since it was sold as a — well, short-term surge of troops that we’ll know whether it’s working in just a few short months. Chalk up another bait-and-switch lie to the Bush column, which makes it all the harder to do anything that seems to follow their cue.
The draw-down/mission-shift plan sounds good, and supposedly it’s modeled more after how the Brits have managed their part of the country (without necessarily going into whether the situations are analogous). The problems here are multifold, though. First off, as incompetent as the White House has been in its management of this conflict, I have zero faith in letting Congress micro-manage military and foreign policy strategy. Ze-ro. There’s a reason we have an executive Decider (as awful as he may be), and while I have no problem with trying to work around him in various ways, substituting a political committee of 500 seems pretty hopeless.
Secondly, I have a sense that this is more a matter of “Let’s do something different in the hope of a quick fix” than an actually well-thought-out plan — again, doing anything that looks like “staying the course” is a political and emotional non-starter, so let’s think of something different, especially something that pulls out troops (not necessarily any faster than the Surge draw-down).
Third, such a strategy has no more “guarantee” of success (what Petraeus and Crocker have been asked for multiple times this week) than the President’s plan.
The last option — bring ’em all home now — is emotionally (and politically) very pleasing. It was a bad war, a badly run war, our kids are dying, let’s pull the plug and bring them home safely. The only problem is that it ignores two things.
First, we can’t just beam everyone up to the mothership. The logistics of pulling out over 100K US troops, plus their materiel, in an organized fashion, and safely, are tremendous — bigger, in some ways, than it was to insert them in the first place. It would almost certainly take over a year, more like two, to do so, and that assumes that conditions don’t immediately or progressively go to hell in Iraq while we’re doing so (an assumption that flies in the face of the counter-assumption in the reasoning behind leaving, i.e., the Iraq situation is falling apart, out of control, and increasingly dangerous).
Second — and this is the money question, the one element I’ve not heard anyone raise in the grilling of Petraeus and Crocker, nor anyone from the “bring ’em home” crowd address: What happens in Iraq next?
The answer is obvious, as we see a combination of post-Saigon Viet Nam and genocide Rwanda and any number of other geopolitical bloodbaths over the last fifty years. If, as is posited, the Iraqi government cannot step up to the plate yet, if the security forces are inadequate, then removing US troops will mean a massive resurgence in sectarian violence, in Iranian-sponsored violence, in terrorist attacks, and we’ll see what a real Iraqi civil war looks like. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions will die, millions more will be displaced, and — well, hell, it’s exactly the sort of situation that everyone will want the UN to step in to stop, but it probably won’t (both because the US will be out of the picture and nobody will want to bring them back in and nobody’s going to go in there without the UN).
Millions dead. Millions displaced. That’s the cost. And that ignores the impact on surrounding states, on petroleum supplies, etc. I don’t see any other outcome possible. That’s the cost of bringing our troops home. And it will be doubly our fault — both for starting and mismanaging the war in the first place, and then for leaving when we couldn’t figure out how to “win” it and it became politically expedient to do so.
I keep seeing Saigon. And damn Bush for finally raising a few weeks ago the Viet Nam analogy after years of denying it, because now that, too, becomes politically deadly to agree with.
I do not know the right answer. I do not know how to get the Iraqi politicians to play nice, or their security forces to stand up or their police to not be riddled with corruption and death squads. I don’t want any more US troops to die. (I don’t want to give Bush any satisfaction, or chance to blame the failure in Iraq on anyone else, but that must be a secondary issue.) But I also don’t want to see millions more dead and Iraq in turmoil, especially since it’s our fault. Or, hell, it’s Bush’s fault, but he did it as the leader of our country, which means we all have a moral responsibility to try and do something about it other than call him an incompetent idiot. And, yes, the Bushies have used the “you break it, you buy it” metaphor, too, which may make it poison but doesn’t make it any less real.
Will keeping troops in forestall an eventual collapse and chaos and civil war / genocide in Iraq? I don’t know. But pulling them out almost certainly will, and until we can figure out what to do about it, pulling out now is as irresponsible as the way the rest of the war has been managed. These things don’t have quick answers. In fact, thinking they do (or pretending they do) is how Bush got us into this mess in the first place.
Yeah, I know you have been waiting for this Dave…. ;P
Very Brave of you to take this on, and it would have been a perfect conversation for you to have with me and Randy over Wine and some maybe some Vanilla Coke Zero for Randy.
One of the problems with the beginning of your statement was that folks like me at the beginning of this stupidity could see where it was going and what was going to happen and now that we are there we really do not care what happens as long as it ends. We already knew the price and that we would end up like fleeing from the roof top like in Saigon…though the Idiot Bush did completely lie and misrepresent what happened in SE Asia, but that is just par for the course for him. You also assume that what is currently going on was not what the goal was all along. Fear sells, and for the GOP to rule, the need fear, they need an enemy, they need an Emmanuel Goldstein otherwise they have nothing.
Between the Sanction time period and the War there are already at least one to two million dead Iraqi’s and four million displaced Iraqi refugees. The civil was has been going on already for the past three years and the end game will be a lot like Yugoslavia or the India/Pakistan partition with Turkey invading the Northern Iraq for good measure. Baghdad has gone from a 70-30% Sunni/Shia to 80-20% Shia/Sunni mix, with most the Sunni fleeing toward the south and west or to Jordan or Syria.
As to the plans….well, it all depends on what your goals are.
Your one and two are really all the same thing. Only one is SURGE on and the other is SURGE off. Two is what we had prior to the surge and what we will return to after all of the extended deployments end (thank you, you lying bastard political hack Westmoreland Pertraeus for not saying the that the draw downs are because those troops had reached the end of their extended 15 month deployments), that is why we have 14 permanent bases (like the one George II was at for his photo op last week) in place for “Begin drawing down troops, shift the mission to support and logistics and limited counter-insurgency, and see how that works.”
Yes, #3 is going to take a year to do, everyone knows this and the GOP folks that claim that folks are saying otherwise are again lying.
But…if you want to “win” (since we have never been given anything more than pie in the sky dreams and ponies for everyone scenarios for the description of winning) here is what you will need to do:
Institute the draft so that you can have at least one million troops in Iraq for the next 10 to 50 years….and then at the end of that the same things will happen as if we leave by 2009.
We are already a trillion in debt to the Chinese for the seven years that we have been there, is it worth countless trillions more and the destruction of this country to be there for the next 50? For the same outcome? And we are not even counting the Thousands of dead Iraqi’s and Americans over that time period.
I had hoped that American Hubris had been slain in Vietnam, I am hoping to finally bury it in Iraq. Republic or Empire, we cannot do both.
The other end scenario is that we do as we have always done and put in a bribable Dictator to do our (and U.S. Business interests) bidding:
Sani Abacha
Idi Amin
Hugo Banzer
Fulgencio Batista
P.W. Botha
Chaing Kai-shek
Vinicio Cerezo
Alfredo Christani
Roberto Cordova
Ngo Dihn Diem
Sam Doe
Francios and Jean Claude Duvalier
Fransico Franco
Suddam Hussein
Ferdinand Marcos
Mobutu Sese Seko
Efrain Rios Montt
Mohammed Pahlevi
George Papadopoulos
Augusto Pinochet
Both Lon Nol and Pol Pot
Antonio Salazar
Anastasio Somoza
Alfredo Strossner
Suharto
This will of course still require us to be there to make sure that the transition to Dictatorship is smooth and to rearm the new strong man up to Suddam Hussein levels…and maybe a base or 10.
BD, not a question I prefer to debate in person, if only because it’s heated (and causes my guts to clench up, regardless). A painful subject …
I think the question of how the war got started, who benefited, what the motivations were, etc., are beside the point. They are all valuable points to debate for other reasons, to be sure, but they don’t inform the ultimate questions: Is there any chance of averting Iraq’s disintegration into blood, with the cost in human lives and repercussions from that? If so, do we have a moral responsibility to pursue that chance, and, if so, to what extent in American lives and money do we fulfill that moral responsibility?
That’s not what’s legitimately on the table from any side. The White House talks around that, but their motivations are corrupt and self-serving (regardless of whether they are right or wrong). The Dems aren’t willing to face those questions; they assume for public consumption “no” and are simply hoping that the resulting blood will spatter the GOP more than them.
A year at least.
Except, say, Bill Richardson, who says he’ll bring ’em all home “in six to eight months,” or Dennis Kucinich who keeps bandying around the word “immediately” (with the assumption that (a) making the announcement will magically quell the violence, and (b) the UN will step in and all will be well).
I’d settle for a government no more disfunctional and a populace no more likely to kill each other than the rest of the ones in the region.
Which will never happen, not least of which because there’s no political advantage to it for either side.
See, the wine would help! 🙂
That debate has not and will not happen since the GOP claims that what they are doing will achieve that goal, so no debate on the subject is necessary. The press will not bring it up since they are cowed into not doing anything that does not “Support the Troops” and this leave the Democratic Party with only one real position to take. Which the GOP will then use it to pound the Democrats the next election cycle. The Iraqi’s have never been nor will they be anything but a part of a political Kabuki show and a photo op in a Potemkin Market (Purple Fingers! Safe as an Indiana Summer Market!).
In the run up to the war anyone that made the above statement was called a traitor and accused of helping Saddam fly planes in the WTC. The only person who did bring this up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric Shinseki retired just as the war started.
Dave, guilt and shame are no longer part of the U.S. Lexicon, especially if you are one of the few in power.
First off Dave I would like to point out that I appreciate you posting on this. And that I am probably as equally pissed about the whole thing as you. So please do not take offense to anything I write, because I would rather debate this issue. I have a lot of respect for you so I mean no harm.
Leading up to the war I had to debate with my repub friends about how the whole thing was BS and there is no WMDs. They didn’t listen and called me and the UN (whom was right from the beginning) a bunch of morons. Now I am in a similar spot as you are. If we leave there will be chaos, if we stay there will be chaos. Damn!!! So needless to say I feel betrayed and pissed off by this whole war.
A few things I wanted to discuss…
Whether the troops are there or not the civil war will continue. There is nothing we can do to stop it. Al Qaeda groups have already stated they are in Iraq because we are too and they will leave when we will. I am not suggesting we trust them, but with the US military pulled out, will there be an incentive for AQ to stay around? I think they could care less about getting involved in the civil war.
An arguable point, not a fact. But I don’t care to get into this.
Again, I don’t see how US staying or leaving will change the outcome of the civil war. If two social factions are pissed at each other and killing each other there is little a third party military can do to stop that. Terrorism can’t be stopped by a bomb, it is an idea.
If we want to make the world safer we need to start improving the economy and education of those in third world countries. When people have an alternative to joining a terrorism group, especially if they have other interests to attend to, family, etc, then I think we would make some progress. Will it completely solve the problems or completely kill off terrorism? Not likely, but at least we could get a lot of the younger ones and say, “Hey! You know there is another path right?”
Thanks. It was not an easy post to write (in general, the harder the post, the longer), both because I am confrontation-averse and because it’s a topic I feel both conflicted about and have no real answers to.
I submit we have seen nothing like the civil war that could/would occur if US troops pulled out. Which is not to say that things are skittles and beer with them there, but the consensus is that matters have *somewhat* improved, militarily, over the past few months (even if, politically, they’ve gone squat-nowhere).
That’s probably not a wise thing to say. I have little doubt they’ve gone in there largely because we’re there, but …
No, but they might care about influencing its outcome or being power brokers or just taking down anyone they think might be pro-West.
I wholeheartedly agree that taking solely a military tack — at least of the degree of ruthlessness that we’re willing to stomach — will never succeed on its own. On the other hand, “start improving the economy and education” is a lot easier when various factions aren’t slitting each others throats or bombing each other or destroying vital infrastructure that could “start improving the economy and education.”
That’s an excellent long-term goal. But it doesn’t really address what to do in Iraq, or in Baghdad, *this month.*
A Margie Gras’ worth of Martinis wouldn’t help. 😛
The above solution was more for before going in.
The only solution I have for right now is a complete withdrawal. What purpose do we have for letting our military members die for no reason? If Iraqis want to stop their civil war then we say, okay, we are ready to help you. I don’t think there is a good solution to this problem, so we need to take the one that minimizes our losses. It may hurt the Iraqis, but unfortunately we here in America could use some of the money being spent in Iraq.
I’m not convinced we cannot minimize the harm (or avoid far greater harm) to the Iraqis if we stay longer. If so, I feel we have a moral obligation to do so, based on the action of our elected leadership (and supported by polls and the 2004 elections).
If I were in charge (and thank Heavens I’m not), I would go to NATO, the EU and the UN and say, “Look. I know we screwed this all to hell, but now we need to clean it up. Laugh and point at us all you want. Tell us you told us so. But at this point it’s about saving lives. Let’s pull together and put things into some kind of order. We might as well deal with the fact that there are three Iraqs–Shia, Sunni and Kurd–and split them up. If you guys can help us with that like we did in the Balkans, I’d really appreciate it. We have troops there now, but we could use some more. Then, after things cool down, we can help the Iraqis decide if they want to come back together or stay as three separate countries. OK?”
One problem with Kurdistan…
We create it, Turkey will invade it, which almost happened last month and we promised them that would bring the PKK under control…..which we have yet to do. So, look for this to come to a head again some time after Ramadan.
Also, what would anyone be willing to help us out of an illegal war? If I was NATO, the EU, and UN I would say, sure we can do that but you turn over every one that greenlighted this war (Politicians, Pundits, talking heads, and newspaper editors) and all Officers above the rank of Major to The Hague for war crimes and we’ll talk.
Dave, I mostly agree with you, and I thank you for opening this up for comment.
We can’t change the past. How long is “I told you so” going to hold water? Okay. Time to let it go.
Everyone’s looking for an answer to the situation in Iraq. I don’t think there is a complete solution, and I don’t think the U.S. goal should be to come up with one. We are not Iraq. We’ve sent billions of dollars to Iraq to build infrastructure, or so I hear, and the money and infrustructure have pretty much magically disappeared. We can’t force people to act against what they perceive to be their best interest, you know? And schools are much less of a priority than guns at this point.
Did the U.S. policy of nation-building work? I don’t know. It seems like our previous policies of fighting the cold war worked in the short term: hey, we lived through it as a species, as a planet. (Not that something might not happen anyway.) But as a long-term strategy? Not so much. Why would we build up Iraq as a nation, anyway, other than to ensure our oil supply is stable? Where’s the profit, either politically or financially, on a national level? Fear that Arab nations will become another USSR? Or hope that they will?
I think one of Bush’s policies has been to increase power. Two fronts: as a president and as a nation. But is an increase in power the best thing for the U.S. as a whole? Or the planet?
I’m going to say no. If the U.S. is the single most powerful entity on the planet, our competition is everyone else. “Either join the U.S.* or be consumed/susumed.” And then what? We’ll find a way to compete with ourselves. If the president is the single most powerful entity in the U.S., then it’s the president against everyone else. “You’re with me or you’re against me.” Sound familiar?
If the U.S. is a powerful nation among powerful nations, we can still compete with them, build alliances with them, jostle for position, etc. Does a better economy come out of trading with Japan or Senegal? Does the public benefit more from a monopoly or a free(ish) market?
So if the U.S. controls the situation in the Middle East, in the long run, we may be undercutting ourselves: other nations will be asking who’s next to be taken over? Will you ally yourself with the U.S. or against?
Okay…let’s pretend you agree with me up to this point. If not control over Iraq as a strategy, what then? People are dying. Women are being killed by their families because they were abducted and raped. Little kids are getting their faces burnt off. If we give up control we have, and if the UN is useless (not sure on this), then it will only get worse.
So here’s my plan:
1) Wait until Bush is out of office. I maintain we should impeach him. “Stay the course” until then as necessary — like we have much of a choice.
2) Eat crow. This should be politically feasible, because we can approach this from the direction of “It was all Bush’s idea.” Which is not the same thing as saying “It was all Bush’s fault.”
3) Rebalance the role of the President. Take away the crap that Bush pushed in there: it’s not legal. Open things back up again: Yes, the President needs broad powers in times of war or emergency. Avoiding oversight is not the point of having a President — making decisions quickly is. The President should still have to take the consequences of his or her actions; it just may happen at a later point in the game. No torture. No holding prisoners incommunicado. No skewing test results because it’s politically undesireable to have the truth come out.
4) Work on rebuilding international relationships. But enough of this “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” business. Keep channels open.
5) Work on a cohesive solution to improve U.S. competitiveness in international markets. Not only do the products need to be better, the services more efficient, but the benefits need to be overhauled. Benefits? Would you rather work at a company with good health insurance, tuition assistance, a good cafeteria…how about a country? Where do the best brains go when they leave home? Why?
6) Make the purpose of the soldiers still in Iraq (and I believe they should be there) to be defending relief workers. Take whatever help we can get, UN or otherwise. Pull out for-profit companies and contractors. Export refugees, if necessary. Stand up for basic human rights…pull support that may end up with militias and route it elsewhere. Stop throwing money and send in the equivalent of the Red Cross. Stop building schools and whatnot until you know the places won’t be used as militia barracks.
Yes, that means people will die, quite probably more civilians than are dying now. Yes, that means oil prices may skyrocket. Yes, that means terrorists might be able to gain a stronger foothold than they have now. But a *lot* of people are dying with our “stay the course” strategy. And we *should* be moving away from oil. Oil’s a good jump-start energy source, but it’s terrible as a long-term fuel. And terrorists will hate humanitarians less than an evil empire.
We pulled down Saddam. Honestly, we *could* pull down the leader of any country, whenever we want, whether it’s politically expedient or not, and we could probably get away with it without the repercussion of war on home soil. We can probably depose the leaders of as many Iraqi factions as we feel like. How is this not enough power?
I don’t think the situation in Iraq is just about Iraq. I think it’s also about us, and whether we’ll continue to pursue some semblance of Cold War strategy or plan for a future in which other countries are permitted to have some kind of influence on the way the world works — and how to profit from that kind of situation.
*Or Microsoft. Or Wal-Mart. I think Bush just picks up on evil corporate policy sometimes.
Solonor/BD: The whole Turkey/Kurdistan thing is a huge diplomatic mess just waiting to be handed over to the next President (who will have, I hope, at least some credibility or honeymoon with the international leaders who will be quite glad to see the end of the Bush regime).
Dust:
It’s time to make it separate from the issue of “Okay, what do we do now?” I don’t want to forget the past — but we need to deal with the present, too.
Efforts of the current Administration aside, the US doesn’t have the attitude to be a real empire in the Soviet, or even British, style. We want to be loved and admired too much.
The Congress can’t even pass a “we don’t think Gonzelez is a very good AG” non-binding resolution. The chances of an impeachment seem passingly slim.
I’m sure that will be the private message. The public one needs a bit more public crow-eating — the collective responsibility of the US for screwing the pooch on this one (if only in taking three more elections to start turning on the GOP about all this).
I expect there will be some of this, even if a Republican gets elected. But it’s hard getting the genie back into the bottle — unless Congress drives this, as per post-Watergate, the person sitting in the Oval Office will, with the best of intentions, be unwilling to roll it all back.
I do like “Avoiding oversight is not the point of having a President — making decisions quickly is.”
I expect to see a lot more international rapprochement — but TEOMEIMF is Foreign Policy 101 around the world, rightly or wrongly.
So far, brain drains still tend to head our direction, 19th Century social policies notwithstanding. And low prices, rather than “better product,” still drives a lot of international trade (I mean, nobody actually thinks the Chinese build better toys than the US — they’re just lead-filled-dirt cheap.)
I think all of the above will be more difficult than it sounds. I think there is a place for for-profit contractors — but with much tighter controls. Relief worker protection sounds good — but does that mean shadowing every Red Cross worker with a soldier? And will that actually (a) allow them to do their work and (b) really provide them with the protection they need and (c) not get the folks who want to raise trouble doing something else (like killing and/or blowing up the folks who receive relief aid).
I dunno. There’s something to be said for trying to establish security first. The how it’s to be done is the big question.
I don’t know if that’s the best way to wean ourselves from oil.
Because terrorists have avoided hurting humanitarians to date.
Well, yeah, we could do the “Okay, everyone start cooperating, or your successors will be persuaded to build statues to your memory … next week” bit. I’m not sure that’s either the sort of thing we would do (for humanitarian purposes at least), nor that we necessarily want to encourage.
I agree that Iraq is more than about Iraq. And thanks for your very thoughtful post.
I expect there will be some of this, even if a Republican gets elected. But it’s hard getting the genie back into the bottle — unless Congress drives this, as per post-Watergate, the person sitting in the Oval Office will, with the best of intentions, be unwilling to roll it all back.
I do like “Avoiding oversight is not the point of having a President — making decisions quickly is.”
I am sure that once a (hopefully) Democratic President is back in office the Mighty Rightwing Werlitzer of Rush and Drudge will dutifully remind the press that the new President has too much power and all the yappy type dogs will yip and yap until by some Miracle Congress will take back its power.
No I am not a cynic.
Hi Dave,
Ah Bushie, you’re doing a heckuva job.
So, what are your/our/the USAs goals? You want to avoid “Millions dead. Millions displaced. That’s the cost. And that ignores the impact on surrounding states, on petroleum supplies, etc.” So far there are somewhere between 130,000 (Iraqi health minister’s estimate) killed and The Lancet’s estimate of 650,000 ‘excess deaths’. Over 3.9 million Iraqis have been uprooted (almost 16% of the total population) and over 2 million have fled Iraq. To stop this sort of thing and to secure the Iraqi oil supplies would require more soldiers. LOTS more. More than we have, let alone what than we can sustain currently. So this alone would require either a new Draft (which you say is impossible) or massive military commitments from other countries — Russia, India or China really, the only ones with the manpower. Unlikely.
To go further, to “get the Iraqi politicians to play nice, or their security forces to stand up or their police to not be riddled with corruption and death squads” we would have to really occupy and pacify Iraq in the old British Imperial manner. (But we’d contract most of it out, so there goes rooting out corruption.) The best analogy might be the Boer War (because it was one of the few times they faced an well-armed, organized and committed enemy), which they won by shoving the Boer women, old people and children into concentration camps and letting them die in droves. The thing we can’t do (because the West has been doing it to them for over a century and they’ve caught on) is whack their leaders and install a puppet on our payroll. Pity.
To summarize: We’re screwed. We sowed the windbag and are reaping the whirlwind. On the bright side, we aren’t Iraq; they’re really screwed. And it’s not entirely our fault. We aren’t the ones blowing up soft targets with great abandon. Mostly. We aren’t forcing them to murder their neighbors for differing about religion. We can slow down but not stop ethnic cleansing, chaos and mass displacement — at a severe cost. Even to maintain current (surge or no surge) levels of military manpower will eventually require a Draft and may well bankrupt us. There would be more Hadithas, more Mahmudiyas. Many more, with a Draft.
Bring our people home. We have 3,700+ dead, 500+ major amputees, 9,000+ soldiers with brain injuries and 30,000+ soldiers with mental disorders. Enough is enough.
Dave:
“Efforts of the current Administration aside, the US doesn’t have the attitude to be a real empire in the Soviet, or even British, style. We want to be loved and admired too much.”
Okay, but we do want to be a financial empire, the strongest military power in the world, and basically hold veto power over everybody else’s nuclear, human-rights, and trade policies. Not the same thing 🙂
“I’m sure [claiming ‘it’s Bush’s fault’] will be the private message. The public one needs a bit more public crow-eating — the collective responsibility of the US for screwing the pooch on this one (if only in taking three more elections to start turning on the GOP about all this).”
It would great if we just took a deep breath and claimed responsibility, no strings attached. But I doubt it. Eh.
“So far, brain drains still tend to head our direction, 19th Century social policies notwithstanding. And low prices, rather than “better product,” still drives a lot of international trade (I mean, nobody actually thinks the Chinese build better toys than the US — they’re just lead-filled-dirt cheap.)”
They do, but not as much as they used to. When was the last time a world-famous scientist publicly ditched their homeland for the U.S.? Happened all the time in the Soviet era. On the other hand, we *are* getting a lot of people from India. Why are they coming here? How can we make it so other people feel the same way? (And how to we make it legal, eh?)
Chinese manufacturing, I hear, is about to improve very quickly, both in standards and techniques; it may not be long before they are both better and cheaper. See Meizu, the iPhone cloner. Japanese products are already better and cheaper. Detroit is going down the tubes.
“I think all of the above will be more difficult than it sounds. I think there is a place for for-profit contractors — but with much tighter controls. Relief worker protection sounds good — but does that mean shadowing every Red Cross worker with a soldier? And will that actually (a) allow them to do their work and (b) really provide them with the protection they need and (c) not get the folks who want to raise trouble doing something else (like killing and/or blowing up the folks who receive relief aid).
I dunno. There’s something to be said for trying to establish security first. The how it’s to be done is the big question.”
More difficult no doubt 🙂
What should the for-profit contractors be doing in Iraq? I agree that having them back in at some point, with tighter controls, could provide good results…but what is it that the U.S. should be sending contractors over there to do?
As to protecting relief workers, I think we did something similar in Bosnia. But I may be wrong. At any rate, relief workers are often sent into (or near) sectarian violence, civil war, revolution, etc. I apologize for having to gloss over this point, but there are probably known techniques for doing so.
Security before relief aid? We haven’t been able to achieve security after years of trying; we’ve only made things worse. In all honesty, the kind of results likely to come from people saying this won’t mean a drastic reduction in troops, only a change in justification. But how can you expect people to put their lives constantly on the line for Iraqis as Iraqis? It’s impossible. We want to give them democracy, but they don’t want it, not yet.
I doubt we’ll wean ourselves from oil any other way than to have our supply cut off…we’re not cutting ourselves off from the other countries there, unless there’s some kind of chain reaction.
“Because terrorists have avoided hurting humanitarians to date.”
Yes, but terrorists don’t whip up their troops with pictures of Mother Theresa, either.
“I’m not sure that’s either the sort of thing we would do (for humanitarian purposes at least), nor that we necessarily want to encourage.”
It’s *exactly* the sort of thing we do — see BD’s list of puppet dictators. Not that I agree with it, it’s just that the option is there, and we don’t need to keep up this political OCD that needs to check it every six months.
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BD: I don’t want Democratic Presidents to have that much power, either. I mean, they *aren’t* the current set of frat-house Republicans, but we’re still talking politicians, here. I don’t want anybody to have that much power. So I *hope* the next President, whatever party, takes the initiative to limit power and increase accountability. Please oh please don’t let this get worse before it gets better 🙂
Oh, me either Dust. I want things to return to the way there were before Goerge II got slected for office. I am just saying that the current lack of any noise about Bush’s concentration of power and abuse of said power will drastically change once a Dem is elected President. At which point things will return to the way they were win Clinton was in office and the press will make up for being alseep for the past 8 years and sound like howls of the dammed as they claim the Dem Pres has mysterously somehow usrped the power of the other two branches of the goverment…and VP will no loger be able to claim to be part of which ever branch of government is most convienient at the moment.
Basically the press will be like it was in 2000 and Drudge and Rush will rule their world.
In other words, we’ll go back to the days when the Black Helicoptors were thought to be crypto-UN troops brought in by Clinton to declare martial law at Y2K, rather than Blackwater mercenaries brought in by Dubya to declare martial law in October 2008.
Yeah, most likely. The GOP has long played the “limited power / liberal fascist” card regarding government. It will be difficult to see how they do it with a straight face next Administration, but I’m sure they will give it a go.
On the other hand, while I expect that there will be some well-publicized roll-backs of executive power, some stuff will not roll back (for legitimate or more dubious reasons). And the power grabs and signing statements and “we can do whatever we want as long as we wave the ‘executive privilege’ and ‘national security’ flags” will remain as precedents that some future president will still be able to point to as justification.
Sadly, Dave, you’re probably right.
Personally, I would love to see whoever is the next President Sign an Executive Statement that rolled back the Torture, Illegal Wire Tapping, and all the rest of the evil that George II has done in his drive to create an Unitary Executive the First Day in office.
But, that may just be a Pipe Dream.
I strongly suspect there will be something of that sort that happens — especially if it’s a Dem that gets in. But, again, the precedent will remain, and what Executive Order created once can be created again (legislation notwithstanding).
And, of course, the devil will be in the details.
One thing to consider, to some degree, will be trust (which circles back to my original post above). I don’t *trust* Dubya. If he told me that a meteor was going to hit my house tonight, I *might* not stay there, but I would certainly wonder what his ulterior motive was. One reason the various “Unitary Executive” bits have so rankled is that I simply don’t trust that the secrecy and snooping and disregard for due process and civil rights are being used benignly, let alone competently.
I *might* trust Obama, or even Hillary, more with such powers (certainly more than Dubya et al.) — but that’s even more dangerous in some ways, both because power corrupts, and because it sets up the parameters for the next, less-trustworthy person to inhabit the office.
Loss aversion and Iraq…
I understand this doesn’t take into account what could happen to the Iraqis if we leave, but it seems even Bush is ready to stage a withdrawal without officially announcing it.
Yes, it was fun watching him Lie on TV again last night….good times good times.
It is not a withdrawal, it is the end of those battallons 15 month deployment, the only whay that they could be kept there is if their deployments were extended again another three months. Why the Press, for the most part, seems blind to this is amamzing to me (Though, I was shocked when the NPR guy tried to get Patraeus to admit that this was the case in an interview yesterday morning).
Over the next 13 months, all of the troops sent in for the surge will rotate back home, that is how it works.
That’s assuming they couldn’t “simply” extend their deployments further (which Petraeus rather petulently said was under his discretion to do). And, of course, they could change the terms (again) and redeploy them somewhere not in the US to free up other forces to fill in.
But, yes, all we’re talking about here with the current Bush plan-lette is dropping back down on the “short-term few months -> year and a half, if all goes well” surge level to what things were back in February or so. And that’s just counting brigades; the actual troop count might remain higher.
That’s assuming they couldn’t “simply” extend their deployments further (which Petraeus rather petulently said was under his discretion to do). And, of course, they could change the terms (again) and redeploy them somewhere not in the US to free up other forces to fill in.
But, yes, all we’re talking about here with the current Bush plan-lette is dropping back down on the “short-term few months -> year and a half, if all goes well” surge level to what things were back in February or so. And that’s just counting brigades; the actual troop count might remain higher.