Agreed. He has to be as accountable for his failures as he is for his successess, such as…wait, wait, don’t tell me…it’ll come…his successes such as…umm…no, no, I know this, don’t tell me…oh, wait, I know…no, that was a fuck up, too…damn…how about, no I don’t think that counts…wasn’t he President when…no, I think that was someone else…well, anyway. He has to be as accountable for his failures as he would be for his successes if he ever succeeded at anything.
I don’t mean the US doing it, I mean, don’t they want that themselves? If there are different sections of a country that are clearly different and don’t get along, why not separate?
Probably not.
First, your going to have to uproot folks to move them into the sector that they are most closely affiliated with. So, a shop keeper in Bagdhad is going to have to close up and move to Tikrit (or where ever). But these folks have made a home where they are, and have buried family where they are now. So, some have ties to where they are now. Some won’t want to go willingly.
Second, there is still a power vacuum in the (now three or more) provisional governments of the sectors. You’ll still have some infighting as folks grab for political control. The factions aren’t as monolithic as we’d like. (If they were, maybe a unified Iraq would have been possible… You would only have to get the top three or so leaders to come to an agreement. A Triumvirate.)
And who gets the oil ? IIRC, that sort of separation would leave the Sunni with little or none of it, and nothing else to base their economy on. After all, we blew everything else up that survived the sanctions.
The Sunnis certainly don’t; they would get stuck with the desert in the middle of the country, with no oil.
No, no! His failures are someone else’s fault. Everyone else’s successes are his doing. He is the Leader. Get it right!
True enough.
Regards,
Shodan
One thing is very likely: if we stay, hundreds more of our troops will killed with weapons that were intended for Iraqi defense forces:
200,000 weapons unaccounted for
Here is the relevant passage from the GAO report in its entirety (PDF):
I watched a special news report recently. The reporter had managed to arrange interviews with insurgency leaders. They said getting weapons was not a problem. They can buy them off the police and army.
And by ‘army’ they did not mean just the Iraq one.
Which is why the top, perhaps only, priority, not only for Bush but for all of the Republican pols and remaining supporters who’ve lockstepped behind him, is to stretch this thing out until the next administration. That way, the Dummycrat appeasement-monkey America-hating liberal traitors can be blamed for dolchstossing instead.
More to the point, the argument to the contrary is simply “You think this sucks? Look how much worse it would be if we left!” along with “We’d see a civil war and ethnic cleansing”, as if it were still hypothetical. Sadly, that’s based not on any measurable metrics, but only on pure faith derived from a few cherry-picked anecdotes (which, btw, is not the singular of “data”). We see it from the few remaining loyalists on this very board.
I hate to break the news to you but we’ve already got bloody and horrific slaughter and Bush has already got the blame. The only issue now is what do we do about it.
Bush has already made his choice. He’s decided he’d rather kill a thousand American soldiers rather than admit he made a mistake. But I suppose a thousand dead Americans is a small price to pay to him because there are still a few people like you who won’t believe your leader isn’t perfect until he gives you permission.
Right. Every time someone says “you just want the war to fail because it looks bad on Bush”, it needs to be pointed out that it’s already failed, and they just want to prolong the slaughter because eventually it might look good for Bush. How long are Shodan and his ilk willing to let the all-but-in-name civil war run for the faint hope that Bush might eventually be vindicated in the end? How many lives must be lost before you’ll admit he’s a screwup and everyone was better off with Iraq under Saddam? 100,000? 1,000,000? 10,000,000? I think the current estimates of total casualties are between 500,000-1,000,000, so it bears some thinking about.
Add in the 4 million refugees and 8 million in need of immediate emergency aid - from a population of 24 million. We’re part of the problem and so can be no part of the solution beyond removing ourselves from the equation through meaningful and unconditional talks with all interested parties including neighbouring states and an on the knees, unlimited blank cheque plea to the international community for help.
As I’ve said before and gotten weird looks, there are just some places in the world where you need a tyrant in charge to keep order, as odd as that comment may seem to most.
Possibly true but I still marvel at the sheer utter ineptitude of this venture. We didn’t even try to do it properly. It’s like a few people sat down and asked themselves:
‘How can we fuck this up in every conceivable way?’
Too few troops? Check.
Believe the word of hucksters and Iranian agents when planning the venture? Check.
Disband the administration and army? Check.
Try to impose extreme right-wing ideology on society and economy? Check.
Pay no heed to ethnic and religious differences? Check.
Allow ‘force protection’ to mean - shoot anyone and anything that might be a threat? Check.
Hire young, right-wing republicans to run Iraq? Check.
Deal with resistance with a city smashing level of violence guaranteed to act as recruiting officers for the opposition? Check.
Aid and abet Israel in denying any solution to the Palestinian question except on their own terms? Check.
Lie, lie and lie about anything that can be lied about? Check.
And so on.
This is what makes me so mad. I was marching and protesting about Saddam when the West were arming him and covering up his crimes and I’ve wanted the bastard overthrown for years. We had one chance to do it properly, one chance to put tyrants on notice. But what did we do? We blew it in about as big-time a fashion as is possible.
So thanks to the neo-cons and their enablers tyrants can now sleep easier in their beds.
And still people here think these same clowns are going to turn it around.
I can’t figure out whether they are stupid, blind or just cynically playing the my side/your side game. And now their hero is telling us it’ll be another 2 years before the much vaunted Iraq Army (or to be more precise - militias in disguise, receiving the arms and training that will serve them well once the Infidels piss off and leave them to it) can stand on its own feet.
We had the same shit all the way through Vietnam and compared to the Govt of the Green Zone, the South Vietnamese Govt was a model of power, probity and competence.
It didn’t have to cower behind an American wall. And Americans could step out from behind their walls.
Send in 360 tons of cash on pallets, totalling nearly $9 BILLION without adequate accounting in place? Check:
Yep. I’m reading Fiasco at the moment. The all-encompassing ineptitude of the execution of the entire project makes my head reel.
We all know we don’t keep the electricity on in Baghdad. Now there is no water. It is only 117 degrees there.
There is NO water? Thats not a slight exaggeration, is it? Because if there is NO water then everyone in the city will be dead within the week…10 days tops. Are you sure of that?
-XT