I didn’t see the documentary but here’s an article accompanying it. It’s well worth reading in full.
From the early days of the US occupation of Iraq, the warning signs were there. One of the most senior British police officers sent to Baghdad was the former Deputy Chief Constable of South Yorkshire, <snip>
Douglas Brand says he voiced his concerns, ‘Probably ten times a day to whoever would listen, usually two star Generals and above.’ He even spoke directly to the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, ‘But I sensed the subtleties were not understood and if there were consequences down the road, that’s something the Iraqis were going to have to handle themselves’.
Those consequences became clear very quickly. In June 2004 an American soldier, Kevin Maries, was looking through his sights of his sniper rifle from his usual position on the top floor of the Ministry of the Interior building when he saw Iraqi police commandos bring hundreds of prisoners into a Ministry compound directly below him.
He took a series of astonishing photographs through his rifle sight showing what happened. ‘They were forced onto their knees, beaten with rubber hoses,’ he remembers, ‘The beatings got more severe, a metal bar was used and they were beating the soles of their feet’. When he thought some of the prisoners might die, Kevin alerted his unit and American troops turned up to stop the torture. But an hour later US Headquarters ordered them to withdraw and leave the prisoners to the mercy of their captors.
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Remind me again? At least things are not as bad as under who?
Remember Sarajevo? Anyhow, I was referring more to the ethnic cleansing and genocide than the geography.
The current bloodbath in Baghdad seems to be more about militias trying to drive out everyone from other ethnic groups than about territorial control, even though there seem to be tribal and political feuds on top of that. Deliberate massacres of civilians were the exception rather than the rule in Beirut, as far as I know.
If the US pulls out soon, it wouldn’t surprise me if we see things that make Srebrenica seem like a tea party. Although since 8,000 men and boys were massacred there, Iraq is probably running at one Srebrenica every three months or so already. How’s that for a cheerful thought to take into the weekend?
As for “worse,” how can you possibly know that for a fact? Related to Karnac perhaps? Point being that as long as Iraq is occupied, my own prediction greatly from yours. IOW, beyond the sectarian violence there’s an innate hatred of the American occupation, your being there only makes things worse.
If there is one lesson that appears to escape Americans such as yourself, it’s the fact that any sort of “success” in 'nam, began precisely at the time your troops boarded the last chopper. Only then did the healing begin.
It’s NOT your country, you are CERTAINLY not wanted there, so what’s the point of staying other than delaying the inevitable both for you and the Iraqis. Again, what they do with their country has nothing to do with your wishes and the neocon’s geopolital dream is nothing but what it was from the start…a dream. And a very bloody one at that.
The fact that it’s now an ongoing nightmare still appears to escape the grasp of some of the “Stay The Coursers.”
God yes, I remember that whole deeply shameful period. The rage, the impotent demonstrations, the perverse ‘even handedness’ of European govts and the blind eyes turned to atrocities. I still have trouble viewing Serbs as anything but collective war criminals.
As a poster whose opinions I value greatly, thanks. Devil or Deep Blue Sea?
Or ‘here comes the new torturer, same as the old torturer.’
And you knwo what really depresses me further. I saw a report on the draft CIA report circulating saying that they have no proof Iran is developing a nuclear program.
Beginning to sound familiar?
The BBC Washington (or Channel 4) reporter said that according to his contacts Bush’s response was:
“We do not accept that analysis.” Deja Vu beginning to strike?
They have other information sources that tell them otherwise. (Stop me if you’ve heard this before!)
And this CIA beating font of knowledge? An Israeli ‘secret source inside the Iranian Govt’. :dubious:
Paging Mr Chalabi, paging Mr Chalabi. :mad:
President Gump seems incapable, or more likely, unwilling to learn from history or even his own ongoing experience.
Sure, I guess that’s true if you count the American occupation of Iraq but disregard the American occupation of Japan and Germany. I fail to see what significance that fact has, though.
I couldn’t - I had to stop about a quarter of the way in. Reading it just plain hurt too much.
Every time I think I have a handle on just how bad it is over there, something crosses my path - like this - to remind me I have no idea.
Iran and Syria actually get along reasonably well. An Iranian-Syrian partition of Arab Iraq would at least put someone in charge. That would be a HUGE improvement over our management of the situation.
(Can’t see Saudi Arabia wanting to buy a piece of this trouble, at all, ever.)
XT, I’ve got a lot of respect for you as a poster, but this is pony time you’re talking about, here.
We can’t ‘radically’ ramp up our current troop strength. We’ve got 140K troops there, and we could very temporarily bump it up another 20K - less than 15%! - which would last a few months, and that would be it. Should I list all the tricks we’re resorting to already, just to sustain 140K troops in Iraq? We’re breaking our military as it is.
I’m all for that, but who exactly are we going to talk to?
The problem is, we’ve destroyed their pre-war institutions, and the new ones we’ve created for them aren’t worth a damn, except to the Sadr and Badr militias. And tagos’ link shows how well that’s working out.
The World is smart enough to recognize a lost cause when they see one. They don’t have half a million troops to sink into Iraq either, and anything less than that is likely viewed as insufficient.
Besides, this isn’t likely to spread further. Pro-democracy activists in Syria have shut up because Iraq’s giving democracy a bad name in the Arab world. Iran’s going to be stronger, not weaker, due to what’s happening in Iraq. Saudi Arabia’s going to just (literally) wall it off, and Iraqi Kurdistan can protect itself from the chaos in Arab Iraq.
The World isn’t gonna come to our rescue. We’ve got a bigger military budget than something like the next 10 countries combined…if we can’t do it, who can?
What happens when failure is both ‘not an option’ and the only option?
And they can and will get a lot worse if we stay, and we’re going to leave sometime, and whenever we do, things are likely to get even more worse than they were before we left.
There’s also Afghanistan, which appears to be about where Iraq was three years ago. Since Iraq’s pretty much a lost cause anyway, I’d kinda like to save one country, rather than see both our glorious victories get sucked down the toilet. And the only place we can get more troops to stabilize Afghanistan is from Iraq.
I got about ten seconds in. Long row of decaying corpses with their hands behind their backs and bullet holes. I screwed my eyes up and tried to pretend they were rose petal covered kittens but I couldn’t quite manage it.
I’m genuinely curious. Do these sorts of documentaries get shown on terrestrial free-to-air TV in the USA?
From what I hear, I strongly doubt it. But I watch almost no TV at all, so I’m relying on hearsay.
But you’ll be glad to know that, according to Atrios, CNN says:
I guess that CNN’s saying that working through the ‘political process’ means joining the cops, and being able to round up Sunnis and torture and kill them while wearing a government uniform.
Not sure what their definition of having ‘given up violence’ is, but I reckon it’s different from mine.
I just want to address this part of your post because you seem to be making a huge leap of faith.
Is there any evidence that Syria or Iran want a partioned Iraq?
Is there any evidence that the Iraqis want a partioned Iraq?
2a. Is there any evidence that the Iraqis would accept Iranian/Syrian overlords?
Assuming we partitioned Iraq as you say, why would that suddenly make anyone “in charge” an more than if we or the current Iraqi government declared martial law and put someone “in charge”?
You might want to read this analysis from the Washington Post.
I think we need to engage with Iran and Syria and that Bush is an idiot for trying to further isolate those two countries. But the idea that those countries want Iran carved up does not make sense in light of what we actually know.
No. I was simply responding to an alternative raised by xtisme.
Haven’t we been here before? There’s a hell of a lot of evidence that a lot of Iraqis with the guns to back it up, don’t want other kinds of Iraqis living in the parts they control.
That doesn’t say that anyone wants partition per se, but if the Sunnis are kicking Shi’ites out of the territory they control (or simply butchering them), the Shi’ites are kicking Sunnis out of the territory they control (or simply butchering them), and the Kurds are kicking Arabs out of the territory they control (or simply butchering them), then a lot of people are working towards the goal of partition already.
No, but my guess is they’d have better luck imposing order, out of a combination of greater understanding of the territory, and willingness to be more ruthless than we have been.
They could hardly do worse in terms of imposing authority than we have.
Wrong thread. I have made no suggestion here that we should try to impose Iraq. I have only suggested that IF we were to leave, and IF the result was for the Syrians and the Iranians to make an Iraqi land grab, that would likely work out much better for Iraqis than how things will go if we hang around.
Because the Iranians and Syrians have, like, actual armies and stuff; the current Iraqi government doesn’t. It’s got us, of course, but we don’t know WTF we’re doing.
I’ve said this to you in at least two threads before this one: it takes more than just being put in charge to create a strongman. You get to be a strongman by winning a rather Darwinian game of demonstrating your ability to win the support of some, and dominate the rest. So can we put the “let’s appoint a strongman” approach to rest? Because any ‘strongman’ who needs to be appointed is no strongman at all. Like Napoleon, a strongman grabs the crown and puts it on his own head.
I never said they did.
Since we have repeatedly discussed partition, is there something in it that responds to arguments I’ve made? Because the part you quote is precisely the sort of thing my arguments have already responded to.
As anyone can see, Iraq is already experiencing ethnic cleansing on an increasingly large scale. Any reason to expect the scale shouldn’t continue to increase? Didn’t think so. Seems the one thing we could do about it would be to move Sunni Arabs, Shi’ites, and Kurds who are in parts of Iraq where they are in the minority, to parts of Iraq where they are in the majority, ahead of the ethnic cleansing through violence and butchery that is already well underway. We could enable that movement of peoples to take place in relative safety, and when they got to where they were going, they’d be safer than they are now. Particularly, they’d be safe from being killed simply due to being of the wrong religion or ethnicity in the wrong place. That is what I’ve been arguing in the partition thread.
RTF: So, what point are you trying to make by bringing up a hypothetical and then saying you don’t support it and that it’s not likely to happen anyway? And what evidence do you have that things would be better other than your “guess”? The US is the richest, most powerful country in the world, and yet somehow Iran and Syria will be able to put a stronger force into Iraq? And if the only way they are going to achieve order is by using brutal tactics, why is that better than the brutal tactics being employed by the Iraqis themselves?
Maybe you didn’t read the part where I said several times that I didn’t bring it up; I was responding to another poster’s hypothetical.
You really want to follow xtisme’s hypothetical down to the bitter end, don’t you? Your choice of points that you want to pursue, come hell or high water, gives me pause these days. It so often seems to be the peripheral stuff that ultimately has nothing to do with the main issues of the thread that you want me to spell out my reasoning in great detail.
At least this is better than the Lieberman thread, where you repeatedly demanded that I defend a point I wasn’t even making. Here, at least, I did make the assertion you’re challenging, but really, what’s the likelihood that there’s going to be an attempt at an Iran-Syria partition of Iraq?
But my answer is: can they do worse than us?
Strength isn’t everything. We’ve got the strength to turn Iraq into a sheet of radioactive glass, but since we at least in theory are here for humanitarian reasons, that isn’t exactly helpful.
Syrians, surprise surprise, speak Arabic. They’re also mostly Sunni. Think there’s a chance they might be able to find at least some parts of the population in their side of Iraq that they can work with, and be able to distinguish friend from foe far better than we can?
Iranians speak Farsi, of course. But they have a whole bunch of Arab neighbors, and they seem to be able to communicate with their Shi’ite friends in Iraq. Think Arabic is at least somewhat present as a second language among Iranians? Just a WAG.
Because I see little evidence that any one Iraqi faction can win out, and the splintering of the larger Iraqi factions into smaller ones is already underway. A brief but brutal war that ends in order is less evil than a cycle of brutality and violence that simply continues to spiral down into chaos.
Actually, **XT **brought it up as a possible consequence of someone’s hypothetical, but was himself saying it was something we should avoid.
You really seem to often want to makes these debates personal, which give me a lot of pause these days. Feel free to ignore my posts in the future if you like. And, as others have aleady pointed out, the “main issue” of this thread is empty. This is not The Tet Offensive.
Can they do worse than us? Yes, I think so, and so do many of the experts quoted in the WaPo story I linked to.
Syrians are mostly Sunni, but the ruling class is Shi’a. Why would they ally with Sunni Arabs in Iraq?
I have no doubt that the Shiites in Iraq want close and friendly relations with Iran, and that they would communicate together fairly easily. But it escapes me how it would be in the strategic interst of the US to surrender large parts of Iraq to Iranian control. If we were to redeploy the troops as someone like Murtha suggests, I’m sure even he would say that the introduction of Iranian forces into Iraq would be a reason to bring our troops back in so that we could repel them.
As others pointed out in your Partition thread, there is no reason to think that such a war would be brief and every reason to think it would long be and protracted.
Those reasons being what, exactly? You appear to be adopting a contrarian stance here: everybody is wrong but you, and you are only right because everybody else is wrong. For myself,I have no idea whether such a struggle would be protracted or no. I cannot pierce the fog and all information is tainted by agenda. How then, I wonder, can friend John be so positive in his assertions? What are the facts that lead him inexorably to his conclusions? So I’ll ask. What are these facts, or are they merely conjectures offered with a tone of authority?
[QUOTE=elucidator]
Those reasons being what, exactly? You appear to be adopting a contrarian stance here: everybody is wrong but you…
[quote]
Please show me where I’ve said everyone is wrong but me. I disagree with RTF’s analysis, and I’ve given reasons and cites, but **XT **seems to be agreeing with what I say. Further, the plan which I have consistently advocated wrt to our troops in Iraq is pretty much what the concensus opinion of the Democrats seems to be forming around-- a phases withdrawl starting sometime early next year.
Funny, that’s exactly what I thought you were doing in the Lieberman thread, by repeatedly demanding that I defend a particular stance, despite the fact that my assertion in that debate wasn’t the stance itself, but the claim that many others as well as myself took it. I felt that was a considerable overstepping of boundaries, and a personalization of the debate.
I’ve skimmed the article, but I don’t see where any experts opined on how Iraq would fare under some combination of Syrian and Iranian rule.
Try putting it the other way around, and see if it makes sense. If you’re a Sunni Arab in Iraq, which Shi’ites would you feel less threatened by - the Sadrists and the SCIRI/Badr gang, or Assad & Co.?
Because we would consider that, distasteful though it might be, to be preferable to the bloodshed of Sadrists and Badrists and who knows how many lesser players fighting it out for control of southeastern Iraq?
It would be nice if we were to prove, at least for a moment, that this war hadn’t really been all about oil.
Gotta keep your partitions straight. Tamerlane, who I think is the person you’re mainly referring to, said absolutely nothing about the prospects of an Iranian-Syrian partition of Arab Iraq in that thread. I doubt anyone else did; I don’t think the issue ever came up.
How’s that? XT hasn’t posted since his remark about Iran and Syria got us into this whole kerfluffle. In what sense can you say he agrees with you in the debate we’re having that stemmed from that remark??
That part, I have no problem with. Where I keep on tripping up with your proposals is your belief that we can install a strongman who will be able to bring some degree of order to Iraq.
Might want to read what madmonk28has to say about that, since he’s a poster with some firsthand experience over thataway:
madmonk also believes that this is likely to spread into a wider war, contra to the position I took a few posts up. He’s undoubtedly the better judge of that.
Tamerlane, who I think is the person you’re mainly referring to, said absolutely nothing about the prospects of an Iranian-Syrian partition of Arab Iraq in that thread. I doubt anyone else did; I don’t think the issue ever came up.