The neocons. They can’t have their "coaling station’, jumpoff point for further invasions, or their neoconized Iraq without troops there.
What is done is done; you are right. Now the US has to clean up the Iraq debacle. Surely, most Americans want to see Iraq establish a democracy and the Iraqi people regain some level of normalcy. The United States has a moral obligation to the Iraqi people. How this country should fulfill its obligation is debatable.
Nonetheless, the idea that the US can only move forward should never prevent people from looking back. This was a needless war with enormous cost to both Americans and Iraqis.
The largest banking institution in the United States just got bailed out by a foreign investor. The catastrophic foreclosures are adding to the ranks and files of the homeless. The economy is teetering on disaster while our standard of living is steadily decreasing. I doubt any turn of events in Iraq will influence voters or hurt the democrats. The United States cannot afford this war. The cost is too high.
These are scary times.
Since that would make Iraq an enemy state, and one much more fervent about it than Iran, I doubt that. Or, at least, if they do want it, they don’t realize what the result of their desires will be.
Which is well presented/illustrated here.
It probably won’t hurt them as much as it should.
That asshole Clinton (no, her husband) is lying thru his teeth about the war.
Big surprise there. Wonder how long before his sock puppet tries the same?
Regards,
Shodan
How do you get that from the linked article?
Both are excellent points. If the Iraqi people need to decide if they are Iraqis first or whether they are going to allow religious differences to reign supreme. If they can’t rise above the Sunni-Shia divide, then it’s not going to work no matter how much blood and treasure we spend there.
It may not have been realistic for me to try to discuss sort-term domestic political implications of the apparent success of the surge. The situation is more complicated than that…and too many people have already made their minds up about how any information about Iraq is going to be viewed.
Iraq is an artificial country. And presently with a powerless faux “government” of collaborators. Why should they feel any particular loyalty to it ?
First, you have to convince people that it’s successful.
Actually, some left-wingers consider the former a realistic possibility. From “Saving Iraq,” by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation:
But, that article is from June – the moment may have passed.
It may not have been realistic for you to attribute success to the surge.
The conditions that would permit them to do so would be the President ordering them home, either on his own, or in response to Congressional legislation.
I’d be surprised if we disagreed on that. So I guess we agree on everything here.
Anyway, I’m sure you knew what I meant, despite your pretense to the contrary. But just to remove that pretense, here’s the poll question:
As Pew described the responses:
What are you saying? That most “Iraqis” actually feel like they’re really still subjects of the Ottoman Empire? Because I have to feel that’s unlikely.
I’m saying that Iraq is a country that was artificially created by outsiders, and such countries tend to be unstable and have trouble creating loyalty among their citizens. I rather doubt that they think of themselves as “still subjects of the Ottoman Empire”, or they’d be more unified. My point is that Iraq as an entity doesn’t appear to have taken hold as a source of loyalty stronger that “Shiite” or “Sunni” or Kurd" or “follower of the tall guy over there”. And my point is also that there is no reason for that to change, when the official “government” is both powerless and composed of collaborators.
Here you go, Evil, I’m happy to provide the answer to all your queries – in the OP and beyond. Of course, would that I had both the talent and the contacts to write definitive answers as these two guys did. Then again, I make my living in other ways…and likely just as well or better than the aforementioned gentlemen.
Just for you – and anyone else that might happen to care:
Catch 22 in Iraq: Why American Troops Can’t Go Home
Can’t think of much else to add ATM. Though I trust your level of knowledge on the current “success” of the Iraq surge situation has been lowered to one more according with reality.
See, we can all throw our toys out of the pram, and call “black,” “white.” Won’t make a bit of difference to REALITY.
Cheers. Maybe.
I checked out the excerpts from Palast you showed. For reasons I can go into if you wish, I don’t consider Palast a trustworthy source. However, even assuming he is completely truthful, his facts demonstrate simply that Gen. Garner hoped Iraq would serve as a coaling station. That does not demonstrate that it was Bush and Cheney’s objective, and certainly not that it was their necessary or sufficient reason for invading Iraq.
The administration was unprepared for almost everything that happened when it invaded Iraq, but the one thing it was most spectacularly unprepared for was the failure to find a significant Iraqi chemical weapons arsenal. Even the infamous Downing Street Memo showed the Americans and British seriously concerned by the possibility that Iraq would use WMDs on day 1 of the war. Through wishful/fearful thinking, willful misreading of intelligence, misplaced confidence in Iraqi sources, or whatever, the Guys In Charge really thought they were going to find those chemical weapons.
Thank you for that information, RTFirefly. I blush to admit that I didn’t know that.
I think it’s important to figure out what that figure means. Is the majority of the American public really prepared to accept Moqtada or another current/former U.S. opponent toppling Maliki and his crew, if it means getting the troops home? Or are they just hoping against hope that the Baghdad government would survive without us, and would flip-flop if it saw the parliament building on fire and Maliki’s head being paraded through the streets, pro-Maliki voters being publicly executed, etc.?
I got an object lesson on the fickleness of public opinion back during the Clinton impeachment. Two weeks before the House voted to impeach, I read a poll showing a firm majority of Americans in favor of Cinton resigning if he was impeached; the day after the impeachment, I saw another poll showing an even larger majority saying Clinton shouldn’t resign.
And if the majority of Americans really have a firm commitment to ending American involvement in the Iraq war that would survive the death of the Maliki government, well, would somebody please tell Reid and Pelosi about this before the next “emergency” appropriation bill for the war comes up?
Finally, I think the thesis put forward by elucidator and tomndebb - that the reduction in violence is due to the successful ethnic cleansing of Sunni and Shi’a minorities from their neighborhoods - is certainly part of the truth, and maybe most of the truth, but not all of the truth. As the New York Times reports, violence has decreased even in mixed-denomination areas:
I’m not sure whether the surge caused this improvement or not; in a way I hope the surge isn’t responsible, because the surge is going to end soon and any benefits it brought will presumably end with it. The clear-and-hold strategy depended on the Iraqi security forces doing the holding to have some loyalty to the elected government, rather than to Sunni and Shi’a militias, and I’ve seen no improvement on that score at all. Once the surge troops go home and turn these areas over to the Iraqi army, or worse yet, the police, then . . . more tragedy, I’m afraid.
Please do.
But, you must admit, establishing Iraq as a “coaling station” is perfectly in keeping with PNAC-neocon thinking, and this war was primarily a neocon project. Since political pressure forced us to move our bases out of Saudi Arabia, the only other candidate for the role in the region is Kuwait, which is arguably too small.
I hope so, because that is probably the only way to save Iraq. See post #69.
OK, though if we’re going to discuss Palast at length we should probably open a thread for him.
First, I went and read that portion of Armed Madhouse that’s available on Amazon. It includes the following statement on page 11: “Mr. Bush gave bin Laden exactly what he wanted: U.S. troops sent packing from the Land of the Holy Places [i.e. Saudi Arabia]. That’s astonishing. Until George W. Bush, the United States of America has never, ever removed all our military bases from a foreign land no matter how much locals bitched or moaned.” This tendentious statement is completely false on two counts. First, Bush didn’t remove all American military bases from Saudi Arabia; we retained Eskan Village. Second, we had in fact removed all military bases from a foreign land before, and did so specifically in response to the locals’ objections: when the Philippines refused to allow the U.S. any further basing rights in Subic Bay , the U.S. simply withdrew, willingly and ahead of schedule, leaving no bases in the Philippines.
Second, Palast stated with absolute confidence before the 2006 election that the Republicans had already stolen the election. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out that way at all. Palast thought he had left himself an out by saying, “It’s true you can’t win with 51% of the vote anymore. So just get over it. The regime’s sneak attack via vote suppression will only net them 4.5 million votes, about 5% of the total. You should be able to beat that blindfolded.” I.e., if the Democrats won, they still had had 5% of the votes stolen from them. The trouble with that is, Palast has consistently maintained that exit polls are accurate descriptions of the way voters voted, and are unaffected Republican vote-stealing schemes. And the CNN 2006 nationwide exit polls showed only a 52.55% majority vote for the Democrats, well below the 55% threshold that Palast claimed the Democrats needed to overcome the alleged massive vote fraud.
Third, Palast is well known for claiming that the 2004 election was stolen from Kerry. I admit I have not chased down the evidence he claims to have in support of this contention. I will take it seriously as soon as John Kerry takes it seriously. I voted for Kerry, volunteered many hours of work for his campaign, and read the same e-mail everyone else got that, no matter what the outcome might be of the alleged voting irregularities in Ohio, it wasn’t enough to win the election. I see no reason to believe Palast over the actual guy who was running for President and who had a complete legal team and millions of dollars in campaign funds to make the case for a fraudulent election, if there was such a case to be made.
In sum, I view Palast as merely a left-wing version of Michelle Malkin: utterly partisan and lacking in journalistic objectivity.
Agreed that the concept of Iraq as a coaling station is the sort of thing that many of the PNAC folks liked, and that those with that turn of the mind leaped at the chance to establish such stations. I simply distinguish between the motives for invading and the opportunities that the administration wanted to exploit as a result of the invasion. I.e., once you decide to get divorced, you’ll probably want a new apartment, but that doesn’t mean that the reason you got divorced was to get a new apartment.
By the way, most of the American servicemembers evacuated from Prince Sultan Airbase were sent to Qatar.
:dubious: I saw no cartoon.