First of all, can you please quote conventionally? We shouldn’t be editing your entire post every time we want to reply.
Yea, but when the people “disagreeing” are the puppets that you installed - AKA, the people you trust most - AKA, the people you want running the country - then you have a rather serious problem on your hands.
Oh, it could easily be ressolved by killing everyone in the cities.
Unfortunately, that opens up a “few” new problems.
*Second, even this June 30 is a long way off, at the current pace. January 31 is an eternity away. I don’t believe we’ll be in a position to guarantee elections anytime in 2005, even if we’re still there. *
Because it is speculation does not mean it is false. The fact that we never had a good chance of establishing a stable democracy within a year, combined with the fact that even our puppets are opposing our actions, combined with the fact that entire new groups of Iraqis are rebelling each week… well, it doesn’t look good.
You talk about this war like it is a bloody football game. That is disturbing.
You are also looking at this from a very short-term point of view. “We can still win the battle.” You aren’t considering the international and long-term consequences and costs of winning that battle. It could end up being a Phyrric victory.
Ah, back to the black-and-white comic book world of the right.
“We stabbed him, we might as well finish killing him. If we don’t, it looks like we’re inept.”
BTW, does this mean that we surrendered in Afghanistan, or just called a time out?
Wow, you’d have thought by now that they aren’t puppets! Still, a disagreement isn’t a call for war.
If we’re killing everyone in the cities, we would have nuked them.
I never said that. I said it doesn’t mean it’s true, so we should not take it as truth.
That’s a stable democracy in two years and I would like a cite for “new groups”.
Hmph, never saw it that way.
No, I am not looking at it from a short-term perspective. I’m thinking we and the Iraqis have so much to gain from a developed Iraq years and years down the road. You, however, are looking at a week of violence and concluding that it means failure. In the long-term, I’m thinking that premature withdraw will cause what I listed above.
No, my feeling is that we did a little surgery to save him. If we don’t take care of him after, well, you know what follows.
I haven’t been keeping tabs on Afghanistan so I won’t comment on that.
Granted. None of them have come out and supported the rebels, as such, though several have resigned, left the country, and denounced the American actions. These actions arne’t exactly what we want to be seeing.
I don’t think so. It is much easier and less politically costly to carpetbomb a city out of existence than to use a nuke.
Fact is, we’ve entered a seige around some of the cities and have been shooting people on sight and engaging in continued bombardment from plane and helicopter.
Fair enough - though we are free to submit it as a likely possibility.
One year, two years, still as likely. Sunni and Shia groups are joining the rebellion constantly, either joining Sadr or starting their own movements. What isn’t talked about much is the rebellion in northern Iraq that has been damaging the oil pipelines.
I’m looking at a nation and region full of fanatics who resent our presence more every minute, and that has been growing a great deal since the Fallujah incidents started being broadcast.
I’m more concerned that he will pull through crippled, and his friends will be stalking us.
I don’t think any of us want to be seeing anything we’re seeing now. We can either leave and let a civil war happen, or fight for a peaceful Iraq. Either way, there will be bloodshed. One option, the latter, has less.
Cite for all of that, and methodology.
My speculations are as likely as yours then. That’s why I’m advocating wait-and-see.
You haven’t provided a cite.
Maybe you’re right. I tend to overestimate people.
Heheh. I guess this is where we disagree. I’m thinking, if we take care of him, he won’t pull through crippled, and we’ll get a big check and more customers. If you want, we can leave it at that.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak08.html
Novak comments on how relations between the Presidential administration and the generals are worse than they’ve been in a long while, and the military is quietly getting fed up with the arrogance and mismangement and outright contempt for their opinions they’ve had to deal with.
This has been proven to exacerbate the violence, actually. We were absent from Fallujah, and that’s what made it easy for the Baathists to retake the city.
Why should you have anything to “gain” from Iraq’s future? Who gains and who doesn’t, with regards to their own assets is their decision to make. Nota bene: they never asked for you to invade them and any subsequent gratefulness they may have felt is understandably being buried along with their own copious dead.
Besides, unless you have a justification for naked 21st colonialism I am not aware of, it’s rather frowned upon to invade sovereign nations on trumped-up charges for the ultimate purpose of gaining geopolitical and economic advantages.
Besides, as we keep hearing over and over as of late form many pro-war sources, this invasion can and should be simply ‘justified’ by the premise of “bringing freedom to the Iraqi people.” Surely, such an altruistic endeavor should become its own reward and not be stained by other er…less benign motives.
Right?
-Saddam is gone
-No WMDs to be found anywhere. Other than the ones used by your own forces of course.
-No ties to AQ and/or 9/11
-No flowery showers, but Iraqis are certainly “liberated.”
So then, what’s keeping you? Or more especifically, why not turn over control to the UN and have any number of Muslim neighbours involved in the reconstruction of Iraq under the guidance of gulp the Iraqis themselves? Think about it, not only do they understand each other better, but it would finally put to rest the rumours that the US is there for a bunch of other reasons…just a tad more self-serving and nefarious than the the previously impeccable at first glance menu of reasons given for public consumption.
I am extremely upset by the images of dead bodies caused by the American bombings, especially women and children, coming out of Iraq. Has America gone crazy?
This is morally repulsive and I don’t care for any attempts to justify it.
I didn’t say it was. But the group of Iraqis whose interests are most closely bound to our success, and by and large have no other source of legitimacy, are vehemently opposing our actions, and a number of them have left the country.
They’re not against us, perhaps, but they’ve backed way away from us. (Except Chalabi, of course.) If that doesn’t tell you something, what will?
There’s a Middle Eastern saying that runs something like, “Me and my brother against my cousin, but me and my brother and my cousin against the stranger.”
This is not speculation: we will leave, sooner or later, and the Iraqis will stay. They have little to gain, and everything to lose, when it comes to siding with us against their countrymen, but until the past week or so, we weren’t pushing anyone to make choices like that.
And that’s the importance of this past week: now we’ve picked a fight (or two) and forced Iraqis to choose sides - are you with us or with the people of Fallujah in the north; are you with us or with al-Sadr’s militia in the south. For obvious reasons, hardly anybody chose to be on our side. The police, army, civil defense units we trained have switched sides, or melted into the woodwork. And I’ve already discussed the IGC.
And clearly millions of people across Iraq have chosen to be against us. The number of cities, or in the case of Baghdad itself, sectors of cities that we no longer control, or in many cases even have access to, is staggering.
‘Resolved’ how?? Exactly how do you undo the damage of this past week?? We were much better positioned to win Iraqi hearts and minds a year ago, and look where we are now.
I think others have pointed out the problem here. But if we’d been absent from Fallujah in the first place, those Blackwater guys, whose errand still has never been explained (there’s speculation that they were really CIA, but no evidence) wouldn’t have ended up as charred corpses hanging from a bridge.
To win what, how? And the governing council is no longer that stupid. Except maybe Chalabi.
OK.
Won or lost what?? We’ve lost what legitimacy and support we had. Essentially nobody stands with us, and millions stand against us. Exactly how do we propose to change that?
When the going gets tough, the Boy King takes a vacation. There still is a Governing Council, but even the exiles on it speak Arabic, and you can see how they’re reacting to events.
We’ve lost the only battle that counts this past week: the one for Iraqi hearts and minds. Up until a week or so ago, there was at least some reason for them to believe that we were trying to help them, even if we were doing it ineptly. Now they see an occupier that is willing to shoot thousands of Iraqi civilians to restore order. We may be able to ‘win’ a street war with al-Sadr and his militia, but how many more people on the sidelines will we turn into enemies by doing so? “What is ‘millions’, Alex?”
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We haven’t lost militarily yet, but we aren’t exactly doing well, either, if you haven’t noticed.
And the problem, I’ll remind you, is that simply by virtue of being in this sort of fight, we’ve lost. But if we continue the fight, we’ll be defeated and humiliated by the Iraqi people, and then we’ll still have to leave anyway. The question is, how dramatic do we want to make bin Laden’s recruiting posters? If we stay, there’s still plenty more opportunities for American corpses to be dragged through the streets. I’d prefer to bypass that phase.
We came to Iraq ostensibly to liberate the Iraqis from Saddam. We’ve done that. Now they’re liberating themselves from us. It’ll be easier for them to do so, and less trouble for us, if we just pack up and leave.
I think advocates of “staying in iraq” fail to appreciate the damage caused in Iraq by Americans’ arrogance and stupidity and even by their mere presence.
And that would be even without outrages like those cited by Sailor.
Americans can’t do any good in Iraq, whether or not that even is their intention. American’s presence in Iraq is profoundly counter-productive. This is something to consider if you think that we “have an obligation to stay the course” or “knew that it would be difficult”. The difficulty is precisely the American presence, actions and attitudes in the first place. So Americans are not achieving what they think they are by staying there.
Here is another nice illustration (obviously there have been any number of these analyses over the past couple of months).
Note especially the part about the Marines in Fallujah, about halfway the article.
Also consider the part about al-Sadr. Maybe the Americans don’t like him. (Many Iraqis don’t like him, or so I have read.) But I wish the Americans would realize that there is nothing whatsoever they have a right to do about it. It’s not their country!! “Bremer also chose…” “Bremer and his top aides hoped…” “By late March, Bremer decided…” (Insert some Pit expletives here)
Aside from this, I also happen to think that many people exaggerate the risk of “civil war” if Americans leave. Time and again, I am struck by the relatively moderate and conciliatory stance of Iraqi leaders and “factions”, even ones we consider “extremist”, and yes, even Moqtada al-Sadr. Moqtada held off on calling for violence against occupation troops until the very last days. He is much less belligerent and violent than the Americans!
Articles like this seem to be the main argument “for” the risk of civil war. I’m not saying there is no risk. I’m interpreting that there are still many tendencies working against escalation of such events.
Here (long PDF document) (HTML) is an article about Moqtada al-Sadr (and just a glimpse of the complex dynamics of the interaction of factions in Iraq).
The USA Has made this mistake before. Invading a country under pretext of liberating it and then wanting to keep it. It happened in Cuba and the Philippines where US forces came to “liberate” them from Spanish rule and then stayed on so that the locals just went from fighting the Spanish to fighting the Americans.
I’m as yet unconvinced that we have America’s “best and brightest” in all of the jobs over there, (or over here). I’m in favor of rapid radical change of the US’s team, strategy, and strategy team.
I’m still convinced that we have the capacity to pull this off. We do need a new team, ( at least replacements for some key players), working on it posthaste though.
Now that I’ve had time to search the Iraqi constitution, I see that the elections to take place by January 31 are to a transitional Assembly which AFAICT will not be able to act against the will of the executive authority, which will be persons from the present IGC. (Assuming any of this comes to pass, of course.) The timetable for real elections pursuant to a new Constitution is December 2005, it seems. That would be in Article 61(D), for those keeping score at home.
Unfortunately, the new team won’t be installed until January 20, and by then it’ll be far too late for Iraq.
Bush and Bremer are both saying we can just teach these guys a lesson militarily, and that will get us on the road back to normalcy. These guys seem to be completely entrenched in their POV. I don’t see that this Administration has the capacity for change, once they’ve set their course.
