No doubt! Its a simple matter of seizing the bull by the tail and facing the situation!
So - we mobilize every military, semi-military and psycho-military force in America, down to and including the Camp Fire Girls, and swamp Iraq with such overwhelming force of arms that everybody surrenders…
Or we send in Chuck Norris…
Or, what, exactly?
Because our current efforts there are accomplishing what, exactly?
Hey! No guts, no gory!
OK, I misunderstood you to say he wanted out of Iraq, not that he wanted us out. (The latter is also true; just no need to discuss it. He’s wanted us out pretty much since we got there, regardless of his and our relative situations.)
That’s a reasonable stance to take. I would still contend that the Iraqis in the government, having more to gain from our presence than the Iraqi population as a whole, is for that reason less representative of the wishes of the people than they ought to be on this question. And it’s the opposition of a large portion of the Iraqi people to our presence, not the attitude of the government, that dooms our mission there.
Hesitant as I am to pit the cursory insight Chatham House have into the situation against the awesome expertise of some in this thread but I’m going to give it a go anyway.
So no. Things are not getting better and the lying liars are still lying to us. And people who should by this time know better, are still believing them.
But doesn’t that put the lie to the whole “we must fight them there or they will follow us here” meme? Does Iraqi sovereignty trump our own security? Or was that just more alarmist nonsense ginned up by the White House to scare the sheeple?
Aw, c’mon, it’ll be a cakewalk! The insurgency is in its last throes!
IMO, this isn’t about believing or disbelieving. There are some people think that being on the “winning” side of a debate somehow makes them a winner by association. The longer they stay on one side of a debate, the more they have emotionally invested in the outcome. Eventually, they don’t care if their side is right, as long as their side is winning. To them, the ends justify the means, because the ends just don’t matter any more.
They are practically surrendering.
As Juan Cole says informedly:
Point taken. But how on earth, given the overwhelming evidence, can these people think they are on the ‘winning’ side?
The only information sources that support that view is the completely discredited US Govt with its Fantasy Iraq metrics.
I wish they were right and I was wrong but it just ain’t so.
One of the ironies about Iraq at the moment is that success and failure of the surge are supposed to have the same outcome – a drawdown of the troops. From that perspective, the Iraqi insurgents, of whatever stripe, know that all they have to do is wait a couple of months, then they’ll have a much freer hand to insurge. Good time to take a little holiday, if you’re an insurgent. Recharge the batteries, and come back strong in September!
Because their asses aren’t the ones being shot at.
-Joe
Quite a CV for a “coked up schizophrenic ranting about the CIA on the street corner.”
Than again, maybe you don’t like him because he speaks the truth – street corner or not.
:::shrug:::
Bet you don’t like Scott Horton either: 19,000 Iraqis Disappear Into U.S.-Run Prisons
American Democracy at its best!
Anything that would have any chance of stopping it would have to be quite different than what has been done so far. The, “add some more troops” method seems to do squat, and after an initial benefit that may have been due to how they reported the numbers, things continue to worsen. There is no reason to believe that anything the kid with the matches is capable of doing is going to fix things. I honestly cannot think of anything that would be able to turn this around short of a draft and multiplying the number of forces we have there by two or more. Even that seems unlikely to fix things at this point.
The worst part is that even if we get out now, we will likely have to go back in. Iraq is on its way towards “failed state”, and with the attention that terrorist groups are now giving it, it will likely become a hotbed for them. Then it is only a matter of time before we NEED to go in, like we did in Afghanistan, to take out a real threat unlike the imagined one that put is there in the first place.
Perhaps I am wrong though. Perhaps the child in your analogy has Superman’s freeze breath. Just let me know what that equates to in the real world so we can fix this mess.
I’m not talking about winning in Iraq, I’m talking about winning right here in the U.S.A… They hooked up with Georgie and his pseudo-conservatives, and now that Mr. Bush has shown that the only way he can increase his political power(and by extension, the political power of his supporters) is by being a “war” president, then by ghod we’re gonna be at war for as long as possible. They are not trying to end this war-where’s the financial or political power in that? Every time a political crisis pops up, another wartime tragedy occurs. Every time it looks as if this war is winding down, another wartime tragedy occurs. How many times does this have to happen before someone says,“The last time I saw this many timely coincidences was on a soap opera.”?
Things get real fun when the jihadists start trolling the 2+ million refugees for recruits. Sure, a lot of the expats are living decently but then there are the big tent cities in no man’s land. I wonder how long it’ll be until we start bombing them a la Clinton.
Also, as a callous aside, does anyone else ever feel a little…well, haughty isn’t the right word, but just sorta amused at the idea of all the hundreds of suicide bombs that have taken place? Yeah, yeah, I know IEDs are the main threat and suicide bombs can be a poor man’s guided missile but it just seems so…ineffecient. It seems better to bomb and run away to fight another day. You know, analyzing the tactic from an objective viewpoint and all…
Martyrs begat martyrs and more recruits. A suicide bomb has a sophisticated targeting brain. The bottom line is - suicide bombing is easier than bombing and escaping.
‘Haughty’ is not the emotion you should be feeling. Do you remember the bit is Apocalypse Now when Kurtz recounts the story of the severed arms? His awe at the Will it demonstrated the enemy has?
We face an enemy so determined on nothing less than total victory they will kill themselves, blow up fellow citizens etc et bloody savage cetera. While we are quite happy to take a cavalier approach to innocent deaths we cannot be that deliberatley ruthless and even if we were it would just strengthen the enemy.
That is what should have kept us out of Vietnam, where we were intervening in a war for liberation the vietnamese had been fighting for centuries. And it damn well should of at the very least caused us to go into Iraq with our eyes open, not filled with Chalabi tales of flower storms.
If anything the insurgents, driven by religious fervour on top of sectarian nationalism, are even more determined than the vietnamese.
Like in Vietnam we could kill millions, we could do a Fallujah on every city in Iraq, and still they would fight us.
The implicit racism involved in these sorts of discussions never cease to amaze me. The British or the Americans would not be cowed by displays of force by an occupier. We would never give up, particularly if it was a Muslim occupation army. And I’d lay any odds we’d have ranks of suicide bombers. So why do we think the various Iraq insurgencies are ever going to cry pax?
And even if we did somehow come up with the pretty ruthless approach taken in Vietnam - all the Agent Orange, free-fire zones, Operation Phoenix extra-judicial assassination and torture programmes, even if we had a regime as strong and united as the various Saigon regimes (an abysmally low standard the Iraqi regime is nowhere near meeting) - we would still not win. We could kill, crush, maim, burn and destroy all we liked and still not win. Bearing in mind the insurgents only have not to lose.
We’d be setting the rest of the Muslim world alight. We would drive them into the open arms of China and a resurgent Russia.
As i’ve said repeatedly over the years in various threads - Since the early 80’s I’ve been marching and protesting western support for and collusion with Saddam. I beleived the international community had a right and a duty to intervene.
But that had to be the real international community not 2 anglo-saxon, christian countries and a handful of browbeaten allies. And it had to be done with the right motives (eg not as a geo-strategic move by a superpower bent on imposing its own unfettered free market, secular western template) and most of all - done competently.
We had one chance to demonstrate that liberal interventionalism had a place at the world table and we could not have blown it more than if we’d actually sat down with a piece of paper with Intervene at the top and Ignominious Defeat and Total Chaos at the bottom and planned the intervening stages.
Everyone involved should be impeached for the grotesque level of incompetence displayed.
Well. First, suicide bombers have that whole martyr thing going for them. Second, no doubt quite a few really believe that they’ll go to paradise. And finally, I expect for many they really don’t care if they die simply because we’ve destroyed all hope for them. What do the Iraqis have to live for, thanks to us ? If you are Iraqi, why not die trying to kill the monsters who have ruined your country, ruined your life, and killed so many of your friends and family ? Death is the rational choice in a hellhole like Iraq; the suicide bombers are going to suffer a lot less than the Iraqis who live.
While you may be right about the motivations given to the bombers themselves, those motivations were put in their head by people with no intention of dying any time soon. For them, guided missiles taken from the near infinite supply of hopeless masses make a wonderful weapon for their cause. They also have the benefit of not being able to be caught afterwards and give up their superiors.
Sure, but how many generals are out there charging machinegun nests and kicking in doors in Baghdad?
The people with the ‘Grand Design’ are never the ones flying the bombers or strapping on the suicide vest.
-Joe