In the early days following the invasion, the US might have had a better chance to stabilize the country, but we made a whole lot of mistakes (like firing everyone who was in the Baath party, opposing local elections when we didn’t like the candidates, off-ramping divisions after major combat operations were over, not fielding enough translators or Arabists, establishing reforms designed to encourage a free market which instead allowed foreign companies to liquidate Iraqi assets, etc.) and while I hear that we are learning from our mistakes, I fear that our present efforts may be too little, too late. However, I fear that leaving Iraq will lead to some combination of the following scenarios: 1) anarchy and/or civil war leading to a state like Afghanistan in the nineties which will be a fertile breeding ground for al Qaeda, 2) an Iranian puppet state, 3) Kurdish secession with a possible Turkish invasion, 4) stuff I never even thought of.
This puts us between a bit of a rock and a hard place. Is there anything we can do now to turn the situation around? Please give your reasoned answers, or I’ll compare you to Rumsfield.
My only thoughts would be to draw our forces back to Mesopotamia, stabilize that region, begin a massive public works campaign employing many Iraqis to restore basic services, train Iraqi troops and post them to guard the secured areas, spread out and repeat, while pointing out to the Sunnis that American pullout will make things a hell of a lot worse, especially for them.
I don’t have specific sites, but the following have informed my thinking:
Blind into Baghdad
Cobra II
Babylon by Bus
Licensed to Kill (I am only halfway through)
any articles about Iraq that appeared in the Atlantic in the past two years
Two possible solutions are:
(1) Divide Iraq into 3 parts, possibly as independent contries, or as a loose federation, with internal autonomy. There may be bloodshed as peopel move to the right part of the country (as with India when it was divided), but in the long term it should be more stable. However, that opens up the problem of the Kurds in Turkey …
(2) Bring in a strong man, preferably a secular person like Saddam Hussein, rather than a fanatical Islamist, who can knock heads together, and put together a coalition of forces to keep the peace like Saddam did.
As someone in Iraq, who has been here since the summer of 2003, I don’t think there is much hope for Iraq. I believe that the United States has created a failed state.
Partition of Iraq into three nations carries with it a host of problems, most significantly, there will be intervention on the part of Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia to prevent an independent Kurdish state. For the Kurds to establish such a state, they will need to capture and hold oil-rich Kirkuk, which will likely cause the above mentioned states to do their best to prevent the capture of Kirkuk. There will likely be very nasty fighting for the city.
I don’t see any good options for Iraq and I haven’t heard any of the supporters of this war explain what exactly the US is trying to accomplish, let alone how we are going to do so.
I have no idea where folks get the idea that this is a workable idea. I won’t say where folks think its a GOOD idea, because I don’t think they feel that way…but it seems to me at there are a lot of people who think this could actually work. Let me ask you something…WHY do you think that Saddam could be ‘turned loose’ and be able to pull things back together? HOW could he manage it? What do you suppose the (no armed and heavily pissed off) Shi’ite MAJORITY would do in that circumstance??
If it wasn’t a joke, it should have been…
Can Iraq be fixed at this point? Depends on what you mean by ‘fixed’ I suppose. If you mean a stable, democratic nation, the light and hope of the middle east, full of happy citizens basking in the glow of democracy, a beacon of hope for millions of opressed muslims in the ME, blah blah blah…well, no. Probably not.
If you mean a stable country not continually wracked by civil strife and sectarian violence…I think it COULD be fixed to that extent. How? Damned if I know. My thoughts are that if we REALLY want to fix what we fucked up, then Rummy being gone might be a good first step. I’ve seen it kicked around that increasing our troop strength massively (doubling or even trippling our commitment) in the short term might be the key…coupled with some serious negotiations with the various insurgent groups who might be willing to negotiate.
Its either that or get out of dodge and accept that the whole thing is going tits up. While this seems an attractive ‘plan’, I wonder if people who are attracted by it really understand what it would mean, not just to the Iraqi people but to the region. I was reading the other day that something like 100 people a day are being killed in Baghdad and the surrounding area (IIRC). If there were pitched battles going on throughout Iraq, it could be 100+ people a day in every major and minor city in Iraq…or thousands killed or maimed a day. And this is just the human cost…in Iraq. It doesn’t count the financial costs of having Iraq in flames. Nor does it take into account that this could very easily spread into other countries in the region as nations take sectarian sides in what would be an all out Iraqi civil war.
Can it be fixed? Maybe. Should it be fixed? We should give it our best shot IMHO. And maybe…just maybe…with a Democratic controlled congress we CAN give it a better shot than what we’ve been doing up until this point.
We could pardon Saddam tomorrow and re-install him as ruler of Iraq the day after, and all it would do would be to inflame the civil war already in progress. At this point you’d need a Shi’ite strongman with actual military talent sufficient to train a Shi’ite militia to conquer the Sunni provinces of Iraq.
I don’t see anyone like that on the horizon.
I don’t think this particular Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. (I keep thinking of the Far Side cartoon where the king’s horses say they’re ready to give it another try.) I think partition probably has the best chance of reducing Iraq’s descent into hell, but that’s JMHO, and there’s really only so much good it can do.
a) Iraq needs to be occupied for quite some time to come;
b) But not by us; we have no moral authority as nation builders in Iraq and should get our soldiers the fuck out of there
c) Ideally by soldiers from a coalition of Iran, Turkey, Muscat & Oman, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Indonesia, Serbia, Syria, and other Islamic countries. It’s in their interest to see a stable Iraq, and as a collectivity (at least) they’re likely to keep any territorial / hegemonic aspirations any given one of them might harbor in check. Or, failing that, to orchestrate that kind of outcome to the satisfaction of a sizeable part of the world.
d) We still have to pay for it. We broke it, we bought it. And we can provide military intelligence, advisory, material assistance, etc.
In fact, RTFirefly has created another thread to discuss the partition issue. As to the larger question of whether Iraq can be fixed, I think the obvious answer is “no.” If, after three and a half years of occupation, we can’t even keep the lights on in Baghdad, what does that say about our ability to affect wrenching society-wide changes for the better?
Pulling out may well lead to a bloodbath, but there’s a bloodbath happening now. What’s better, a civil war that leads to 500,000 deaths in a year, or a slow bleed of 50,000 deaths a year for ten years? I think the former. For an example of the latter, look at Afghanistan. We’ve been militarily involved there, in one way or another, since 1980. That’s 27 years, for those who are counting. Is Afghanistan better off for it? Of course not.
How do you figure that the two situations are comparable? IIRC, for a good chunk of that time the Soviets were occupying Afghanistan. After that, there was a bloody civil war going on there for much of the remainder. In fact…this is a good example of what could happen in Iraq if we pulled out…not an illustration of the point you were trying to make.
Instead of your 1 year of 500k deaths, how about 7 or so years of bloody civil war…but war that spreads to other countries in the region. You seem to have forgotten something important…no one gave two shits about Afghanistan. Not like they are swimming in oil or anything. However, there is a LOT of oil in Iraq…and its also right in the heart of the ME, not off in a corner somewhere with inhospitable mountains and terrain and nothing much worth bothering about.
Xtisme, my point about Afghanistan was just that keeping the violence partially under wraps doesn’t make the problem go away – it just prolongs the agony, which can last for a very long time. In other words, we could continue to occupy Iraq for the next 20 years, keep the violence on a low boil, and then have it explode when we leave. How is that a gain?
Your point about the danger of a prolonged and regional war is well taken, though I don’t think we have to worry much about Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, or even really Syria (they’re already a little stressed). The real source of worry is Iran, and to a lesser extent, Turkey.
But that’s a risk you have to run. I repeat that the Americans have shown themselves to be incapable of even maintaining basic services in Baghdad, which says to me that these grandiose ideas we have of keeping Iraq intact, or partitioning it in a cleanish way, are pipe dreams. What does that leave us offering? More of the status quo, with no real end date. The American voter is already fed up. And are the Iraqis themselves somehow becoming less fed up?
I would never dispute that an immediate pullout of the troops is unpalatable. But does anybody, from whatever end of the political spectrum, have any better ideas? All I see are a bunch of faddish and incompatible notions that are unlikely to work.
Since the beginning of this mess I’ve thought that Iraq will not be fixed until the people of that nation and perhaps their neighbors decide to make a concerted effort toward peace and an end to tribal war based on greed and control. Unfortunately I don’t see that happening. They are willing to kill their own best and most intelligent people to the point where many of those people flee the country.
There can be changes in the overall outlook of the population but that takes several generations and a concerted effort by other nations. The so called civilized nations are also far to greedy and self serving for that to happen. Now that many Arab nations have decided to develop nuclear capabilities we can only hope our great grandchildren aren’t in a mess ten times worse than this one.
We had our shot at stopping it and didn’t. Now future generations will face the consequences.
Actually I’m not so sure XTisme (your earlier post), the Ba’athist party was secular, also the Shi’ites were kept under a firm heel for rather a long time
remember their rebellion after Gulf War I in 1991 ?
lots of them - but they got belted - perhaps they were life’s underdogs.
I see four factions in Iraq: Sunnis, Kurds, Shi’ites
and a bunch of people who are pretty westernized and don’t give a toss about which religion or which tribe their grandfather came from.
The Ba’athists are the most westernized force amongst the Arabs, also probably the easiest to deal with on a ‘level playing field’.
It is quite possible that the Iraqi Shi’ite Ba’athists would rather welcome the return of the old regime.
The comical thing is that the Regime Change has happened in the USA.
The farther away from Iraq you reside,the more likely you make sense of whats happening. The Iraqis I read have seen the deterioration into street violence with hastily cobbled together militia groups. They are unsafe and can not even define who the enemies are. They dont understand the funding of these organizations.
Ihttp://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com/ http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
These are people who are living it.
I don’t think fixing Iraq is the US govt’s main concern at the moment. They’ve managed to destroy the only credible opponent to Iran in the region, and have stuck Americans with manning the guns for god only knows how long. The American public is not going to put up with this state of affairs for long, so the US is desperate for something, anything, that will make Iraq able to once again counterbalance Tehran. At this point, the US would happily embrace a dictator who had the proper loathing for Iran, the problem being that said dictator could never come to power so long as we’re there.
Having fucked up Iraq so badly, I think we’re going to be forced to make nice, somehow, with Iran. Iran knows that, of course, and are not feeling any pressure to play with us.
Having Iraqis be able do live a decent life is pretty far down on the list of US priorities. It always has been.
I’ve said before that the best possible outcome will be if the US can establish some kind of “Saddam Lite,” a dictator who isn’t interested in threatening Kuwait or the Saudis, but is able to hold the nation together through torture and fear. That’s a long way from what this administration promised isn’t it?
In 2003, when the administration disbanded the Iraqi army, started de-Baathification and allowed the looting to go on without end, Iraqis would ask me why the US wanted Iraq to break apart. They couldn’t conceive that this was just incompetence, but that it must be part of some grand American plan. I had to break it to them that the Americans who defeated the Nazis and landed on the moon have all been retired for some time now. Iraq got the “B Team” to quote one often told story about the occupation.
I think Blind Into Baghdad, and Assasins’ Gate are the two best things I’ve read about the occupation.
This is an amazingly bad idea. Half of those nations have no real interest in seeing Iraq succeed, and the rest have active interests in seeing it be a craphole.
Iran’ has several reasons for championing the Shiite regions of Iraq even at the expense of the rest. They may well imagine that if they play their cards right they could foment enough internal unrest in Iraq to be able to annex the shiite south (and who would stop them?)
Syria also has internal reasons for making sure that Iraqis aren’t too free, happy, wealthy or safe: it makes them look bad by comparison.
Turkey has an active interest in making sure the Kurds are firmly under thumb, either Baghdad’s or their own.
The Indonesians and Saudis are probably in no rush to get Iraq’s oil fields up to full production; additionally, the Saudis are perpetually in need of a place to export their Angry Young Wahhabis to.
As far as the rest, how is it possibly in their interests to stick their hands into that nest? (Actually, to the extent that a failed Iraq lowers US prestige, pretty much every nation in the world has an interst in it’s failure, but we’ll leave that aside) Even if they wanted to, 1) they couldn’t come up with anything like the total number of troops needed for the job 2) the troops they would send would be nowhere near as well-trained or professional as US soldiers.
This is an even worse idea than sending, say, Dutch troops to Srebinica, Belgians to Rwanda, UN troops to the Congo …
I agree in principle. I felt from the beginning that the U.S. should have begun pushing to sideline Saddam and get Qusay into the role – in other words, follow the path Syria followed after Assad’s death. You get a guy who controls the apparatus, but has maybe a smidge more pliancy and a smidge more decency than his father.
But of course it’s too late for all that. At this stage, the trouble is finding the one guy – the one who can keep a lid on things without massacring hundreds of thousands. You don’t find resumes for people like that on Monster.com.
If Iraq breaks up, shift the bulk of American influence into Westernised Kurdistan, who’d be more than happy to allow US bases and money to pour into their neo state in the north. Grab Kirkuk, and hey presto, a small wealthy Kurdish state which is a democracy.
But personally I do still think Iraq can succeed and survive as a federalised state in the future, however it needs time to rebuild it’s shattered infrastructure, solidify it’s political process (in which a power sharing strategy has never been discussed between the three sectarian factions) and security services in order to solidify this ‘new Iraq’ so to speak. I think Iraq will rely on Western money being constantly pumped into the country in order to pull it from the brink, this will last a long long time.
So yeah, Iraq will sink as a nation in any form if people believe that either;
A) Iraq will plunge into civil war
B) Iraq will divide into 3 states
C) Iraq is never going to be capable to administer it’s own territory under a unified leadership in Baghdad.
How do you figure that the two situations are comparable? IIRC, for a good chunk of that time the Soviets were occupying Afghanistan. After that, there was a bloody civil war going on there for much of the remainder. In fact…this is a good example of what could happen in Iraq if we pulled out…not an illustration of the point you were trying to make.