It's Gone All 'Splodey!

[richardf8]

It's been a while since I've written about Iraq, so I'm going to do a bit of that now. The pacifists say we should pull out now and cut our losses, because the longer we stay the more life will be lost without us ever achieving our objective. They are absolutely right.

On the other hand, the hawks say to us that we have to stay and finish the job because to do otherwise would demonstrate that we are weak and vulnerable, and another group says we have to stay because we broke it and have an obligation to fix it. They, too, are absolutely right.

How can they both be right? Aren't those positions contradictory and mutually exclusive? Well, yes. And that's the point. We have placed our selves in an impossible situation. There would have been no negative consequences from refraining from invading Iraq. Saddam would still be in power, yes, but he was, in many ways, a lesser evil than the bind we find ourselves in now. Because right now we're damned if we do and damned if we don't.

Ultimately, I think I'm with the doves now. Although I have argued in this space that we should stay and rebuild what we broke, I don't know that it's really possible. Because while repairing broken infrastructure seems the moral thing to do, the thing we really broke was the regime of fear that kept Iraq from breaking down into civil-war and revolution during Saddam's rule. The tensions from all those years are being released right now, and they really want us out of their way so they can kill each other with impunity. And we don't want to go because we know that at the end of it all, there will be another Islamic Republic run by Shiites, and we really don't want that.

But these intramural hostilities simmered under Saddam, and they will simmer until our inevitable leave taking. That being the case, we might as well pull out and let them have done with it, knowing that the blood they spill will be on our hands, and that the atrocities that they will perpetrate upon each other will almost certainly exceed what Saddam perpetrated upon them.

Saddam was the pin in this grenade. And we pulled it.

Comments

[deckardcanine.livejournal.com]

You've inspired me to make another analogy: Saddam was a knife in a back. We pulled it out without having the proper medical procedures ready, and now the victim's bleeding more profusely than before.

Eh, mine's a bit wordy. What do you think?

[kevinjdog.livejournal.com]

Yes, and this knife was practically the only thing holding the back together, apparently.

[makovette.livejournal.com]

I strongly agree.

We are in not only in an anti-US war in Iraq, but also in at least a three way civil war of Shiites, Sunni and Kurds.

We pull out and everyone shoots everyone else for a while, then maybe we go back in after the various militias and private armies have killed each other off somewhat?

I dunno, the June "handover" is going to be purely symbolic at this point.

We had rather more success in Afghanistan, but even there things are very unstable for the forseable fututre due to the tribal warlords doing what tribal war lords do...

Mako

[richardf8]

We pull out and everyone shoots everyone else for a while, then maybe we go back in after the various militias and private armies have killed each other off somewhat?

Ah but if we do that, we risk someone winning and a government coalescing. A government we won't like.

[lordrunningclam.livejournal.com]

At this point I think its important to try and imagine what, if anything can make a positive difference. Is there anything that can be done at all, aside from just bailing out.

I'm not sure that they'd appreciate a UN presence any more than ours and their Arab neighbors are notoriously unwilling offer even token help. Yes, I think that the US should pull out, but there has to be some other way to at least keep Iraq from turning into another Afghanistan.

I, however, are at a complete loss to imagine what could make that difference. In a facist state at least there is some security in order. By disbanding the Iraqi military and police, we've created a complete and utter vacuum that will allow the absolute worst elements to gain a foothold.

After WWII the US was criticized for using the existing German bureaucracy, including the civilian police, to help govern. However, it was exactly the right thing to do and this situation illustrates why. We've got 110,000 troops trying to do what it took Saddam 600,000 troops plus a particularly nasty secret police force to do. The situation is completely untenable.

I dread the aftermath, but a complete and unilateral pullout is, inevitably, the final result in any case. We may as well get on with it.

Israeli position

[(Anonymous)]

You've recently been posting many article defending various Israeli acts and policies.

I thought that the Sharon administration had been very supportive of the invasion of Iraq. Before that Israel provided support to Iran in the Iran-Iraq War. It seemed like they've been wanting to pull the Saddam pin for quite some time, based on some belief that Israel would be safer without Saddam. How do you rectify these policies of Israel with your anti Iraq-invasion stance?

- Inkan

Re: Israeli position

[richardf8]

Where to begin?

1) Just because I balk at the UN's "Israel Bad, Palestinians Good" approach to the I/P conflict does not mean that I unequivocally support Sharon's policies.

2) Our invasion of Iraq was done hastily, incompetently, with no foresight and too few troops to secure the place. It has become precisely the sort of mess I would expect from the man who screwed up Harken Energy and Texas. It was not the "What" that I opposed so much as the "Who." The things that many of us were warning of on the eve of the war have come to pass. When General Tommy Franks asked for more troops, he was told "no."

3) Just because Sharon thinks something is a good idea, doesn't mean it is. In fact, it means it probably isn't. Saddam was indeed supplying funds to Palestinian terrorists. But he was hardly a major source of funding and his ability to launch a direct assault on Israel was quite well hamstrung. Sharon's actions have done very little to improve Israel's safety. Though I think it noteworthy that the first two nights of Passover passed without incident in the wake of Yassin's death.

If you have a source for Israeli Aid to Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, please furnish it - that seems to me to be extremely unlikely.

Re: Israeli position

[(Anonymous)]

By "It was not the 'What' that I opposed so much as the 'Who'" I'm understanding that you would've supported an invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam had it been done more thoughtfully ( with world community support, adequete troops, and so forth ). I hope I'm understanding correctly.

As for Iran-Iraq here's an article regarding the Iran Contra scandal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_Affair

- Inkan

Re: Israeli position

[richardf8]

Inkan, since you post acnonymously and are certainly not seeing e-mail notifications, I do not know if there is much point to relying to this long cold thread, however . . .

Israel took the fall for instigating the Iran Contra scandal at the behest of the Office of the Vice President under Reagan. Bush had long since put that system in place, but between Kerry's investigation of BCCI and increased attention being given to Iran-Contra, they needed a way out fast . . . and Israel, being beholden to America for much of its budget, agreed to take the fall.

I will updated the wiki to reflect this.

[morgan1.livejournal.com]

This situation is striking me as very much like that of the former Yugoslavia. Tito held Yugoslavia together by supressing ethnic rivalries, but when he died, it all started going poof. Bloodily.

I also cannot help notice that Iraq is one of those countries whose boundaries were somewhat arbitrarily drawn by colonial European powers after WWI. Kind of like Czechoslovakia, which also split as soon as it got at chance, although quite a bit more peaceably than Yugoslavia.