Any hope for Iraq?

I find that I am growing increasingly discouraged about the US’s ability to make significant progress in putting Iraq back together. Many of us thought that the invasion and the initial assault on Iraq (as ill advised as some of us thought that was) would go pretty well and that the heavy lifting would come with the military occupation and the transformation from military government to civil control to a real Iraq run by Iraqis. I had no idea that is would be this bad.

Consider that we seem to have all sorts of interests that have a stake in turning the effort to restore order and commerce and life in Iraq into a dog’s breakfast. In addition to the people who are in bed with Sadam’s regime, we have the Islamic fundamentalists who want to turn the place into a theocracy, the people who benefit from banditry and disorder and the people who’s nationalistic and patriotic sentiments lead them to just want the Americans out. Not only do we have a trickle of American soldiers and Marines killed in random shootings and shellings, we have water mains blown up, we have oil pipelines blown up, we have a water and electrical distribution system that barely worked before the war and is pretty much not functioning now. We do not have adoring crowds throwing flowers at liberating GIs. Instead we have a sullen populace that seems to be growing more restive and resentful with every day. We top the whole thing off with the truck bombing at the UN compound.

It is starting to look to me as if the only way this thing is going to be brought under control is to come down on the urban population pretty heavily—a squad of infantry on every street corner and machine gun bunkers at every intersection. I’m not sure we have the will to do that or that we should give up all our pretence of being liberators bringing democracy and justice to the good people of Iraq.

What does anybody else think? Do we have no more chance than of a tinker’s bitch? At what point do we see enough improvement that we declare Iraq to be rebuilt and get out? What was our objective in going in to Iraq in the first place? Have we accomplished those objectives? Can we accomplish those objectives? At what cost in blood and treasure and self respect?

That would be playing into the hands of the Saddam loyalists. What better way to convince the Iraqi people that they are being occupied than to have the US forces there act like occupiers.

Our mission there is to create an environment in Iraq for the Iraqi people to take charge of their own destiny and be responsible for the actions of their own citizens. We will protect their resources and for the interim use it for their advantage.

Its been only 4 months. The US is still working on getting all the amenities back to the Iraqi people so that they can go on with their normal lives. Once they can see that being free of saddam is positively better than being under saddam, they will begin to object to the idea of going back to saddam. That is a long process and a lot must be done and lives will be lost. But it is a price that has to be paid for any of the rewards to be cherished. That reward is peace.

I was just about to start this thread.

May I request Spavined Gelding that you ask the moderators to rename the thread to “Iraq UN Bombing? Who did it?” so that your thread kinda stands out from all the other Iraq threads at the moment? I’m not wanting to hijack your thread in any way, it’s just that the thread title is a bit anonymous if you know what I mean.

Anyways… much conjecture… much conjecture.

Collounsbury’s observation is that both the Jordanian and the UN bombings are just a little bit too Al-Quaida ish in terms of modus operandi. I don’t wish to paraphrase Coll incorrectly so I’ll cease at this point.

Certainly, my own gut feeling is this - the distinct “manpower shortage” of Western troops on the ground within Iraq has opened the country to an immensely fertile soil for endless cycles of sabotage - and in particular, has opened the borders to all sorts of porous insertion points for bad fuckers from outside Iraq to enter into the country.

Consider for example how just 30 hours of blackout in New York broke so many hearts. Now ponder on the rolling blackouts which have been hitting Baghdad and various other Iraqi regions since April. It’s a country filled with conflicting resentments at the moment.

I think its fiddler’s bitch. Do you mean a tinker’s dam?

GeeDubya has to go to the UN and kiss whatever is necessary. The Iraqi people must be convinced that they are moving swiftly to thier political independence and sovereignty, and to that end it must cease to be a US operation and become an international one. We should seek the assistance of such groups as the Arab League, etc and if that doesn’t work, go into beseech and implore mode.

The text of his speech could easily be reduced to “Boy, we really screwed the pooch this time! Help! Comearunnin’! Send lawyers guns and money! We take it all back. You want Colin Powell, we’ll extradite him! We need troops yesterday, and money now, and twice as much tomorrow!”

This could lead to a major withdrawal of US forces and alleviate a major source of friction. We’re still going to end up pouring a gazillion bucks into the Godforsaken Desert without leaving so much as a damp spot, but we bought into that when we invaded. However much I disagreed with that, its done and we have the bulk of the burden of responsibility. But at least we could get our people out, and that’s priority one.

The galling drawback will be watching President Rove make mucho political capital in self-congratulatory photo ops with our Returning Heroes, pouring praise on our brave troops and standing just close enough so some of it splashes onto themselves as well. Get the flight suit out of the dry cleaners.

Will we fall for it? We always have so far.

The USA doe not want to go to the UN hat in hand because the USA wants to control the place. The purpose of the invasion was to control Iraq. Control the oil, install military bases and control the government. The US is not going to hand control to the UN now. Things would have to get a lot worse before that happened. What the US is trying to do is get foreign help in exchange for nothing. Send help but forget about having any voice or control. Not surprisingly, few are biting. I believe this will drag on like this for quite a while to come.

Aren’t we largely doing that already? We occupy their streets, we inspect their citizens, we raid their homes, we play propaganda over the airwaves… How do you convince Joe Iraqi that the Americans aren’t an occupying force when he looks out the window and sees American soldiers on the corners, looking for trouble?

True enough, Sailor, no disagreement is implied or warranted. The man asked for “hope”, and that’s all I have at hand.

“Should GeeDubya smooch Kofi Annan’s butt? Well, Heavens, yes! Is it likely? Why, goodness gracious, no!”

First of all, we can stop refering to them as “Joe Iraqi”. I have not seen one Iraqi with even a close sounding name as “Joe” Calling them that is damn close to “americanizing” their names.

We should have the soldiers not cause trouble, and give the impression that they are not looking for trouble but are looking out for trouble. They should start saving more lives not taking them.

inspecations, propaganda and raids are necesary as long as there are insurgents. We should encourage the normal everyday Iraqi to take part in that. More and more people are turning in wanted people. They should be encouraged to stop the looting and destruction of public property. They more the Iraqi people participate, the more they can be made to feel that they are not being occupied.

We should get the Iraqi nation back on its feet. We should protect their livelihood and ask for their help to do so. The more people back happy with their jobs and safe with their families, the less there are to plan sabotage.

Knowing how to survive decades of brutal oppression cannot be un-learned in months.

Why do you guys think the U.N. is the answer to everything? It seems to me that the U.N. A) can’t provide significantly more manpower than the U.S. has, and B) will be just as much a target, as evidenced by today’s bombing.

It seems to me that involving the U.N. will just turn this whole thing into a rule-by-committee exercise, complete with international infighting and the use of Iraq as a political football.

Plus, the U.N. has one too many questionable actors in it for my liking. I do not trust Russia, France, or a number of Arab countries in the U.N. to have Iraq’s best interests at heart.

I remember a while ago someone posted a ‘flypaper’ theory on the board here, suggesting that part of the Iraq strategy might be to draw militants and terrorists to Iraq where they can be engaged by the military, rather than having them attack civilian targets elsewhere with impugnity. I wonder if we aren’t seeing some of that now. Saudi Arabia says that as many as 3,000 militants may have moved into Iraq. That’s a bad thing, and it’s going to make it tough there. But on the other hand - that’s 3,000 people that won’t be available to attack civilians elsewhere.

I agree that the U.S. cannot be too heavyhanded in its response here. In fact, that’s about the worst thing to do. Terrorist attacks cannot be thwarted with sheer manpower. There aren’t enough soldiers in the U.S. military or the militaries available from the U.N. to guard every bridge, every quarter mile of pipeline, every waterline, every power transformer, etc. So you can’t just turn the country into an armed camp.

What you can do is cut off the enemy’s head. They need to keep capturing leaders (Vice President of Saddam’s regime captured today), and they need to capture or kill Saddam. That might break the back of the Baathist resistance, which will still leave al-Qaida and associated terrorist nutbars. But as long as the U.S. keeps killing them, eventually they’ll run out. The big IF is that the population at large has to stay out of the battle. As long as it’s ‘foreign fighters’ and ex-regime members, the U.S. can win a war of attrition. But it becomes a popular uprising, it’s going to be tough sledding.

That’s why the U.S. has to avoid a heavy handed approach to this. If anything, it needs to back off more. Paying blood money is a start, as is allowing Iraqi courts to try the people the U.S. has captured (they’ve been doing that, and even releasing many of the captured when there isn’t enough evidence). Win the hearts and minds.

We can talk all we want about rebuilding Iraq. But talk is cheap, and rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure, both physical and political, is going to be extremely expensive.

I don’t think Bush has any intention of being honest with the US Congress, and the American people about the cost of rebuilding Iraq until January 2005. It is going to take $billions and $billions to repair was it broken now, and are going to continue to break in Iraq.

Joe Sixpack supported the war, but wait until he gets the bill for it.

elucidator, fiddler’s bitch it is, as in “Grandfather, who usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us, had disappeared some days before. (On these occasions he was usually gone six or eight days and returned growling and out of temper, with the news that the federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn’t have any more chance than a fiddler’s bitch.)” James Thurber, The Night the Bed Fell on Father.

**Sam S.[/}, I do not see persistent efforts to decapitate the Iraqi resistance as doing much good. We may well be able to knock off the high level leadership of Sadam’s regime but I see no way to suppress low level Sadam loyalists, let alone the religious zealots and the nationalists and the gangsters. To do so it is starting to look like it will be necessary to line up all the adult and adolescent males in the country and machine gun them. That is hardly and acceptable solution and all it does is delay trouble until the next generation of zealots, gangsters and nationalists grows up and starts blowing up pipe lines again. After all, it is not the deputy minister without portfolio who is sniping sentries and firing RPGs at convoys and blowing up pipelines. It is the discharged junior officers and sergeants who are doing that. Shooting or jailing the deputy minister without portfolio is not going to stop the sniping and firing and blowing up.

We can’t even start to think restoring electricity and water until we can stop people from stealing the transmission lines. We can’t stop people from stealing the transmission lines until we can end the sniping and firing and blowing up. I see no answer short of the simple application of brute force. Just as soon as that happens the US will be revealed as conquers, not liberators.

If our objective was indeed to stop or prevent Iraq from being a threat to the stability of the region we have done that. If our objective was to get Sadam out of power we have done that. If our objective was to make Iraq a bastion of economic and political stability in the region we have a long way to go.

Well do you really think the US still has a moral position in Iraq ? The people hate 'em. If the UN cant try it… then no one else can manage it. The attack is a form of saying that Saddam still wants to come back…

Israel has been cutting off heads for a long time and to no avail… every subsequent leader is just as determined. So dont delude yourself that 500 prisoners later Iraq will suddenly slouch leaderless and ready to be plundered.

Win Hearts and Minds ? I think you already lost both in and outside Iraq. ZERO Legitimacy and a Trigger Happy occupation killed any real chance at Hearts and Minds. They have been told for some decades about the Great Satan… no amount of goodwill takes that away overnight.

Why the doom and gloom ? If Bush manages to come up with some convincing WMD’s, and get the AC back on before Iraq cools down in October, he might still be able to pull a rabbit out of his hat. Public opinion is fickle, and Bush just needs a couple of lucky breaks.

Yeah, but I’m not well-versed on Arabic names, and am worried that a line like “Achmed Iraqi” would end up as a negative stereotype or somesuch. Nobody is going to get offended at “Joe.”

As for the rest of your message, you better be careful, or you’ll be veering over to the “bleeding-heart liberal” side of the aisle. :wink: While I can’t find fault with your ideas, the cynic in me asks how many of those are we actually doing.

Because unlike the United States, the UN has no motivation to exploit Iraq for the further entrenchment of American power and/or the financial windfall of Haliburton et al. At a minimum, I’d venture that most folks in Iraq would find the UN more credible than the US, if only because the UN actually has genuine Muslem/Middle Eastern members among its ranks.

At this point, I think it’s going to take a fish-and-loaves-style miracle before George W. Bush finds any sort of WMDs in Iraq.

You don’t see this much, but the fact is that all the attacks have come from what is informally known as the Baathist Triangle, and the people we’ve captured tend to be closely related or identified with the regime. That area includes parts of bagdad, and extends up to Tikrit.

These are not the ordinary Iraqis - these are people who have an awful lot to lose from the US being there, and immediately so. The US is being targeted for an assassination campaign because they want to rape the country again. The fact is that this is not going to happen again, since the other factions won’t let them.

In any event, the UN would simply become the target instead. They have no more moral authority - not with the people who count, the Americans and the Iraqis and the Kurds. This isn’t a popular uprising, its an assassination campaignh designed (poorly) to reinstall Saddam, or another Baathist in power. Moreove,r handing it over to the UN, which does not exactly have a good record of peacekeeping against these sorts of attacks, would be a sign of weakness, which absolutely must not be shown. Methinks the real agenda here is dislike of the US.

Regardless, the UN would completely and royally screw up the real long-term goal, which is building a free Iraq. There is no way any of the faction leaders would work with them.

Smiling Bandit, it is reasonable to think that a fair number of the people involved in the snipper and RPG attacks on American troops are demobilized members of Sadam’s regime, that doesn’t explain things like the bombing at the UN facility and the Jordanian Embassy. My concern is that we are confronted with something much wider than the efforts of what the Administration calls “Sadam Loyalists.” It seems to me that we are starting to deal with some sort of Pan-Arab resistance to US and Western presence and control of Iraq.

As far as the majority of the action being confined to Baghdad and the surrounding area, that’s where the population is. That is where the greater number of targets are. You can’t think it significant that there have be few incidents in the western desert simply because there is precious little out there to shoot at or blow up. Of course the trouble is in the densely populated part of Iraq. While contradictory, it is worth noting that the oil pipeline that was blown up is out in the boondocks and (I think) in the Kurdish district.

There may well be a change in what is going on in Iraq. A change from disorganized and sporadic small scale attacks by indigenous remnants of the Sadam regime to larger scale and better planned attacks by ‘international jahidists" (if that is a word and spelled right). The discovery of nuclear, chemical, biological weapons or the coveting of them will not help much if Iraq goes up in flames under our noses. We might be caught in the same predicament as Napoleon I sitting in the ruins of Moscow.

Joint Chiefs chairman Air Force Gen. Richard Myers disagrees with you on that:

It should also be noted that this pesky Baathist triangle encompases most of the population of Iraq.

I, for one, do not think that the U.N. is the answer to Iraq. The U.N. appears to be very unpopular in Iraq, thanks to the economic sanctions it imposed at the behest of the U.S. for so many years.

But while the U.N. is not the answer to Iraq, internationalism is. The U.S. cannot impose its will on an Iraqi people who do not want them there and have no intention of acceding to U.S. wishes other than at gunpoint. Right now, every single thing that goes wrong in Iraq is attributed to the U.S. occupiers. (And of course, it’s certainly not helpful that the guys in charge of this operation make the Three Stooges look like thoughtful, competent problem-solvers.)

Right now, we’re stuck doing the whole damn thing ourselves, and we’re taking all the blame for everything that goes wrong. Nobody can focus on getting anything more than bare necessities taken care of because they’re too busy being pissed off at the shitty situation we’ve put them in. So spread the blame. Shove Dubya’s damn fool pride right down his throat and bring in the rest of the world to get this motherfucker fixed

That is not, I’m afraid, the freakin’ point. To hell with the U.S.'s best interests, to hell with Haliburton’s stock price, to hell with miltary bases, lapdog governments, MCI, baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie.

The point, Sam, is that Iraq must be fixed. Not for the U.S., but for Iraq. If Russia, France, and the Arab nations can help make that happen, then we ought to do whatever we can to get them in there. Anything less would be utterly reprehensible.

I do believe, ladies and gentlemen, that the word that best describes this philosophy is “quagmire.” God help us.

I disagree with most of your post, minty. In some cases you have assumed that the Iraqi share your views.

This appears to be speculation. Maybe the UN appears to be very popular in Iraq, because they were attempting to do something about the Ba’ath regime. Without actual polling data we don’t what the Iraqi people think of the UN.

I’ve seen sources showing that the US is wildly popular in Iraq, except for the Ba’ath Party remnents. E.g., It was our Kurdish allies who captured Iraq’s former vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, and turned him over to us yesterday.

E.g., according to this Marine serving in Iraq, The “Arab Street” I’ve meet in Iraq loves–that’s not too strong of a word–America and is deeply grateful for our presence. Read the whole article for more details of how popular we are in Iraq.

The problems are attributed to the U.S. occupiers by leftist critics of the U.S., not by the Iraqi people.

Iraq reconstruction appears to be going badly because many reports focus on the negative. There were headlines when saboteurs destroyed water pipes, but you didn’t see headlines when these pipes were immediately repaired. There were headlines when the oil pipe was bombed, but Iraq will resume pumping of oil this weekend. Electric power is continually increasing, and has exceeded what was available under Saddam in many areas.

That’s the difference between liberals and conservatives. You want to spread the blame for doing it wrong. I want to see it done right. I think the best chance for doing post-war Iraq right is if American is firmly in charge.

There is no reason to believe that the forces operating to thwart the US’s effort in Iraq would be any less inclined to thwart the efforts of an international presence. Are you just saying that more manpower is needed and the US is tapped out?

Hope for Iraq has to come from the Iraqi people themselves. I’d like to see us get addtional manpower needed from wtihin Iraq. Our soldiers are performing a lot of tasks (eg, civil defense) that Iraqis can be trained to do.