I’m a junkie
Thursday, November 16th, 2006I can’t pretend anymore that I’m not. But although I’ll have 10 years sober in about 4 days, I’m totally addicted to politics. It impacts all other aspects of my life, especially updating this blog with details of my life, and from keeping in contact with the people I care about. I’ve lamented this fact for a while now, but I’ve decided to at least get out of denial. (Which is almost as important as getting out of the Nile, which is disgusting!)
So I’ll start with a confession: instead of keeping my friends and family abreast of my experiences in the Middle East, what I’ve spent the time (the time I would have otherwise spent writing dispatches on) doing is arguing politics - mostly Iraq - on an internet messageboard. It’s not because I don’t care about my friends and family, it’s because I’m a giant tool.
So there it is.
The upside, (ha!), to this is that I think I’ve gotten kind of good at writing these enormous rants. Some of them might even be bearable to read. Maybe, anyway. But what I’ve decided to do is just put some of this bullshit on the blog here so it looks like I’m at least typing something to someone. Call it sharing. Call it crap. Whatever. At least, maybe, it will let people know I’m alive. Whatever.
So today will be my first installment of my two-bit opinions on Crap! I Have a Blog! Please sit back, close your eyes, and imagine that I wrote this especially for you and not for a group of anonymous strangers on the internet who really just want to make fart jokes and try to sleep with each other despite being hundreds or thousands of miles away from one another.
[It starts out as a response to a specific question which I started to answer before I went batshit insane.]
BYOBKenobi wrote:
yerdaddy, do you
think there is a solution where Iraq ends up as 3 separate countries or
are they too blended together to draw lines? I know the Kurds are
pretty much on their own up north, but what about the other two?
It’s
been proposed by some really smart people. Senator Joe Biden is
probably more knowledgible about Iraq than anyone else in Congress and,
along with the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, (a
well-respected think thank), he proposed this a few months back.
See the article for the rationale. Basically, what’s happening is that
so much has gone wrong in Iraq that ideas about what to do become more
and more diverse, but with less and less chance of success. This is
what happened in Vietnam. People still argue about what we should have
done to "win", but the truth is at some point the problems have gotten
too many and too severe to solve. It’s what happens when wars are being
lost.
Immediately after Biden proposed the "partitioning" of
Iraq, Anthony Cordesman, probably the civilian most knowledgible about
the situation in Iraq, responded with why this is a bad idea.
Read both of these pieces and they both make sense. That’s because there are no easy answers anymore.
Personally I think it’s a bad idea for us to try to work
towards. Just because we draw up boundaries doesn’t mean they’ll be
respected by the people who live there, (see: the entire history of
colonialism, especially almost every conflict in the developing world
in the last hundred years). Even if we draw borders around the warring
ethnic groups instead of through them, like was usually done in the
past - including Iraq - the parties will still be fighting over what
they want - power and money. (We don’t have enough military in Iraq -
US and Iraqi - to secure the borders now. This would be removing US
forces but doubling or tripling the borders that need securing.) In
Iraq the oil is mainly located in Shiia and Kurdish areas. So the
Sunnis - those who have been attempting violent solutions the longest -
will be cut out and will still see a violent chaos as their best chance
for an outcome that is most favorable to them. The Shiia will fight
back, just as they are now.
Possibly the worst outcome will be
that Turkey will invade the Kurdish area and Iran and all the other
Sunni neighbors - Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, ect. - will intervene on
the side of the Sunnis. The risk is complete regional conflict that we
cannot afford to abandon, and thus it will be simply Iraq X 10 for us. [I just noticed the Washington Post has a piece on this aspect in today's paper.]
Which
is still a risk for us anyway. Honestly, the public debate is refusing
to even look past tomorrow in discussing the stakes in Iraq. It’s
extremely childish and unbecomming the most powerful nation in the
world. The reality is that losing in Iraq, which is what we are doing,
could lead to a World War III type war. But we’re too busy pointing
fingers at each other to even notice this. But that’s a whole other
rant.
The articles I linked to earlier mark a new shift in the
public debate about what to do. Republicans don’t have a plan, but, for
the sake of electoral politics, they’ve been screaming that the
democrats don’t have a plan. So, in the tradition of muddled stupidity
that is the democratic party, they came up with a plan. That plan is
partially a reflection of the situation in Iraq and partially a
political strategy for the 2008 presidential election. It takes into
consideration some of the most basic facts in Iraq - we have become
increasingly unpopular occupiers; the war is increasingly costly to us
in terms of blood and treasure; there is now a government in Iraq that
must make hard decisions about how to help itself, but is dependent on
US troops for its survival. Then it takes into consideration the
domestic political realities at home: the war is really unpopular among
the American people; the American people really don’t understand the
war in any sort of complex way - the public will, as translated into
"the will of the people", more or less comes down to fight/quit. So,
the unpopularity of the war translates one thing to BOTH parties: less
American troops in Iraq = more gooder. That’s the bottom line of what
we can be described as wanting.[If you really hate personal human interaction as much as I do you can read these additional arguments for and against troop reductions.]
"But
what if that’s not the best strategy for winning in Iraq" you say?
Doesn’t matter. The American public simply are not taking the time to
follow the complex reality that is Iraq and so we are incapable of
rewarding or punishing complex solutions to this complex problem. We do
care about our soldiers, so when things go bad, we want them out of
harm’s way. We don’t think about the possibility of their withdrawall
meaning that even more of them will have to go back in to a worse
situation in the future.
Thus, the democratic plan is to
withdraw SOME forces, "redeploy" the rest to bases in key areas and
give them more military duties like force protection and going after
insurgent groups. This, the theory goes, will give the Iraqi government
no choice but to solve the more complex problems of providing security
for the people, (all the people, and not just their own sect),
providing security for reconstruction, cleaning out the Iraqi forces of
"death squads" and sectarian militias, and all the other
responsibilities of a functioning government. The theory is that this
step is necessary as leveraging the government to act. It’s a valid
theory. But I doubt it will work. It’s just that it’s the most
realistic option from within the framework of satisfying the public’s
desire of less troops.
Bear in mind, the public desire for
less troops in harm’s way is also the reason the Bush administration
has NEVER had enough troops in Iraq to fulfill the military goals of
why we’re there. They’re just as guilty - if not moreso - of pandering
to political expediency as the democrats. Their irresponsibility, it
should be remembered, is what got us this situation on the ground in
the first place.
So, in the articles linked above, you’ve got the
ex-generals who were critical of Bush now being critical of the
democratic "solution". (First of all, this should absolve them from the
partisanship accusations the right made against them when they were
criticizing the administration, and it should make us more willing to
trust them as honest as well as expert authorities on the subject.)
They say the Iraqi government is still too weak to take on its
responsibilities if we do "leverage" them. The two that were quoted,
(as well as the conservative analyst from the Heritage Foundation, who
was quoted), say we need MORE troops. Which is what McCain is saying
again - to great political risk, as his article rightly points out.
They basically are saying that the necessary steps in Iraq are
fulfilling the complex tasks that the public is not paying attention
to: reconstruction and job-creation in order to lure the public away
from supporting violent conflict, and supporting the government while
still providing them the US military to conduct basic government
responsibilities. They’re saying we need to buck the political will of
the American people.
Now before anyone defines this as "staying
the course", this is not the course to this point. The course, as
implimented by the Bush administration so far, has been largely to
neglect these basic functions of military support for "nation-building"
in Iraq. About two years ago, David Kay resigned early as chief US
weapons inspector, specifically because the administration had been
withdrawing military and financial assets from the tasks of completing
the inspections process as well as from supporting the reconstruction
goals. Virtually all of the former CPA officials who have spoken
publicly about the reconstruction effort there said it was full of
political loyalists with no experience and, thus, was never a serious
effort on the mission of nation-building. In a very fundamental way,
the generals and McCain are not saying that this has to continue, but
that this has to finally be taken seriously. It’s alot to ask - for
politicians to buck politics. It’s also alot to expect - that the
people who haven’t taken this advice to this point will suddenly start
taking this advice. I doubt it will happen either.
The hope is this: that the Iraq Study Group
will come up with a strong, rational, non-partisan report on what the
situation is and what to do about it, and that it will gain enough
support from key public figures to keep it in the center of public
debate long enough to give the public and the politicians the public a
chance to broaden their views of the situation and what to do about it.
This is what happened with the 9-11 Commission Report. Such
government-appointed independent commissions almost never make the kind
of impact on the public and political world-views that that commission
did. It didn’t transform policy, but it had a major impact, and that’s
alot to ask. That’s what I’m hoping from this group’s report: that it
will force/enable the media to bring the complex issues at play in Iraq
and Washington into the public eye, and detract some attention away
from some of the crazy partisan bickering that has dominated public
discussion about the war from the beginning. In effect, I hope it
served to educate the public and political leaders about what is
important to discuss and what is not. That may serve to bring about
some change in the political will of Americans and give key leaders,
like McCain, the political cover they need to push the administration
into doing what needs to be done in Iraq to "win" regardless of what
domestic political strategists say to do.
Outside ideas are
absolutely critical to a better situation in Iraq because the reality
is that, Rumsfeld aside, the people who are going to be conducting
policy in Iraq for the next two years are the same people who have
fucked it up. They have shunned all outside opinions, even from their
own party. They have remained idealists in the face of reality all
along, and the only chance for anything positive is that they finally
start listening to some realists. I finally see some hope that this can
happen now that Bush is a "lame duck". In a way, it’s the opposite.
Right now I finally have some hope that he is capable of making
realistic decisions, and that what is left of the "foreign policy
community" still functions enough to give him good advice. It’s still a
long-shot, and it may be too late, but it’s the first time I’ve had any
hope at all about the war in a long time.
