Of Iraq And Non Sequiturs
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Archived — Comments (31) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I really fail to see how bringing 5,000 troops home is going to increase the pressure for a political settlement in Iraq. It will not. It will simply cause some to believe that whatever they fail to win at the bargaining table, they can win instead on the battlefield. If you want to argue that troops ought to be removed from Iraq because the reconstruction is just not destined to work, that's one thing. But to argue that tempting increased sectarian violence will cause all sects to sit down at the bargaining table--when a particular sect may actually perceive that its bargaining position will be enhanced via violence--is just bizarre.
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Of Iraq And Non Sequiturs 31 Comments (0 topical, 31 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
There is no moral authority, there is no stability. Good God man, come up with something else...Maliki is waiting us out to go to bed with Iran.
"All lies in jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest..."
Whoops! No controlling legal authority there either. How did the Republic survive without one?
James Hansen - Scott THomas Beauchamp with a PhD.
yes, winning hearts and minds thru infrastructure might be a great idea. When does it start, and when do we know it was successful?
"All lies in jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest..."
There is no politcal pressure in Iraq. the Shiites are merely waiting us out...so they can link up with Iran
"All lies in jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest...
where the American leftist terrorist supporters are demanding Americans declare themselves defeated just like John Kerry and his supporters did in Vietnam.
Makes no real sense unless Warner is just using it as a means of defusing some of the opposition to the war by proposing something that may well have been planned anyway. This isn't going to satisfy anyone, or send any real messages. However I'm somewhat relieved if this is all he is going to propose.
This will be rejected out of hand by the MoveOn directed puppets in Congress, making them look even more unreasonable and Warner will shrug his shoulders and return to full support of the President. I hope.
So do you want to see a Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd victory?
Democracy has failed us with Mailiki. Shall we partition Iraq?
"All lies in jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest...
IMO, democracy has done a much better job, than the American leftist terrorist supporters, who have tried every trick in the books to get Iraq to surrender to the terrorists. Prime Minister
Mailiki, has refused to surrender. That is what has the American leftist terrorist supporters and MSM so upset with him.
Seven years of failure. British soldiers still occupying parts of the Ohio Valley and arming indigenous peoples who fought against our weak and dilatory. Virginia and Maryland nearly engaged in a blue on blue fight over who got to pull crabs out of which part of The Chesapeake Bay. A whiskey rebellion in the back reaches of our uncharted wilderness. Oh my GOD! It's a quagmire!
James Hansen - Scott THomas Beauchamp with a PhD.
Most likely correct, Pejman. While, in fairness to Warner, I can understand the concept of signalling to the Iraqi leaders that we are serious about our threat to reduce support if they continue to balk at reconciliation, on balance any announcement of an intention to start withdrawing troops (beyond what we may have to do due to mapower constraints) would send the WRONG signals, making reconciliation LESS likely as the various sides focus even more intensely on preparing and positioning for a larger-scale civil war as we depart.
We SHOULD make our continued FULL support contingent upon at least a good-faith effort by the Iraqis toward national political reconciliation, but starting with a force reduction is not the way to go.
...mathematics that goes like this. 'If you can't mathematically rule something out, it will happen.'
Between April 1st,1945 and June 1st 1945, the Japanese sent 3,500 Kamikaze attacks against the United States Fleet gathered in and around the waters off Okinawa. When the 3,500 suicide pilots were finally killed by US Forces, the attacks stopped. When 100,000 out of the 120,000 Japanese Troops defending Okinawa were finally killed by US Forces, and the remaining 20,000 fully disarmed and sequestered behind barbed wire guarded by fully armed and determined United States Soldiers, the land conflict ended.
But that was a different generation of Americans, rugged, self reliant, confident in themselves and their actions.
Maybe if Senator Warner's staff would just pick up the telephone and call either the local CVS or Walgreens, one of the drugstore chains would be more than glad to oblige the Senator and his staff with a new supply of dry and clean Adult Huggies to change into. It's long overdue.
The issue isn't resolve or lack thereof, but a difference in mission. When we fought the Japanese, victory could be defined in two ways: Japanese surrender or no more Japan. We weren't aiming to "free the Japanese people" or to "provide military stability so that a democratically elected Japanese government could create a political stability." We were aiming to destroy the Japanese empire and any threat that it might pose to the U.S.
Iraq is different. We want the various factions in Iraq to get along and live peacefully in a democratic society. Some of those factions, at present, would rather kill each other. In addition, we have al Qaeda, a group of people (using the term loosely) who are undistinguishable from the rest of the population, instigating the factions against each other at every opportunity. How is the lesson of Japan supposed to apply here? Are we to just start killing Iraqis until the agree to stop fighting one another? We are trying to remove the cancer that is al Qaeda without destroying the rest of the body of citizens, but such a mission is much harder than merely conquering an identified military force. In addition, in Japan we were willing to kill some Japanese citizens in order to get the government and its military to relent. Killing Iraqi citizens would accomplish nothing, since, for the most part, they aren't part of the body that al Qaeda represents.
In short, a military action aimed at making people get along while simultaneously trying to eradicate a terrorist threat is quite unlike one where the goal is to eradicate the threat of another nation-state. While the latter would take about a month and a half for the U.S. to accomplish against anyone crazy enough to challenge us, the former is a new kind of war for which we don't really know the rules or methods (or even if such a military action is one that can be accomplished).
Warner is betting that it can't, or at least he's hedging his electoral bets in case it can't. That's all this is about. He knows that the next month is going to be an endless drumbeat of stories in the MSM about how the surge has failed and Iraq is a lost cause, and Warner is a canny politican who is getting out in front right now so that he can cover his bases. That's it.
The people in Congress know what the next month is going to bring in terms of media coverage of the war and the surge. It started today in earnest. It's going to continue for about another 30 days until the poll numbers expressing support for the surge are approximately 0.
then Warner's "plan" makes perfect sense.
Warner is becoming a serious threat to Biden as the dumbest senator currently in office.
But don't you think that referring to Babs Boxer (Commie-CA) as "stupid" is actually quite an insult toward stupid people?
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Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
She's one of my Senators, so I've paid more attention to her than most have I'm thinking. She and Pelosi really make me shake my head.
And I don't call all socialists stupid. There are smart people on the left. Deeply misguided and misinformed, but there is intelligence out there.
Nancy Pelosi's statements in the runup to Iraq showed a complete lack of logic, though. She literally just wasn't thinking clearly. That's when I started classifying her in the not-too-bright category.
And Boxer... well, she's not in the same league as Pelosi (in the sense of her intellect being 20,000 leagues under the sea), but when she proposed that we install missile defense systems on every passenger jet in America, well, that was an amusing moment.
The region is unstable. It's not just Iraq, it's the entire region. Iran and Syria are waiting to divide up the Middle East, much like they have started in Lebanon.
For those who think that we are putting pressure on Maliki by withdrawing, what universe do you live in? If Maliki is indeed pro-Sadr, which is pro-Iran, our withdrawal simply moves Iraq into the Iranian camp, and Maliki and Sadr add to the already significant threat of Iran.
Perhaps we should depose Maliki and kill Sadr. I would feel better, but I'm not sure that the Shi'ite Iraqis would. Our forcible removal of Maliki would likely tip the scales to Iran, and then we are screwed.
Warner, and everyone who sees "wisdom" in Warner's proposal, is unwilling to admit that the terrorist threats still exist. Does he really believe that the murderers who carried out the Cole bombing, the first World Trade center, the embassy bombing Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, are now satisfied and are no longer dangerous? What a moron!!! The actual percentage of Moslems want to destroy us is unimportant. There are enough of them to be a real threat.
Maintaining a presence in Iraq is the only means available to manage that threat. Every serious candidate knows that we cannot withdraw from Iraq for at least 10 years. First pacification, then a presence. Without pacification, a small presence simply endangers the servicemen who are left, much like the Marines in Beirut.
That is the new realpolitik. We either resist or we face decades of attack and death.
Actually, erp, I think Warner just passed Biden as the dumbest Senator. Biden understands the reality of Iraq much better than Warner. But your point is still very apropos. Warner is an idiot who should have been removed years ago.
then we won't have to care if Iran annexes a good chunk of Iraq, or Iraq allies with Iran. If we don't, Iran's going to be a problem regardless of what happens in Iraq. I think Iran is the higher priority right now, especially with the threat of it going nuclear if we wait indefinitely.
"The actual percentage of Moslems want to destroy us is unimportant."
No, it's not. That the terrorists are so few in number and so spread out makes a difference in fighting them. The best solution for subduing Germany or Japan after WWII may not apply here.
That a presence is useful in Iraq for the long term is undeniable. Whether it's wise to put so many eggs in this one basket is another.
and airwing (CVW-3) on the USS John F Kennedy when we were returning from Desert Storm. His words of wisdom were "You have made war, now it's time to make love". I'm not kidding... I haven't taken much he's said seriously since then.
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"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison
The reason for these statements and the two top articles that are currently on the front page of the New York Times' website is that the politicians are looking for poll numbers to tell them how to vote. And the journalists are trying to give the public the infotainment they need so that they can be reflected in the poll numbers telling the politicians how to vote.
It has nothing to do with the "effectiveness" of 5,000 troops and whether or not they should be moved out of the country. It has much more to do with public opinion here in the United States.
The outcome of this war is going to be decided by opinion polls in the United States, not circumstances on the ground in Iraq. You're witnessing the opinion-shaping onslaught right now.
You're a very earnest and forthright kind of guy, and you actually believe that arguments of the kind you're proposing to make actually make a difference in the real world.
They don't. Nobody cares about arguments. They care about opinions and stories, and competing narratives.
Like this one | and this one | and this one and this one and this one.
The American people aren't interested in *debating* ideas, they're interested in *receiving* them and answering a poll and having their politicians vote based on how they answer the poll. As a result, the news sources aforementioned have almost complete control over this particular aspect of American foreign and military policy. It's not a matter of argument when so many people at the New York Times and the Washington Post with much wider readership than anybody on this blog are telling people day in and day out that the war is lost.
They said it's lost, and that means it's lost. See?
Our President is a terrible narrator. The only story that he can tell with any wide reporting in the MSM is that "We're making progress."
Well, people got bored of hearing that about 3 years ago. All the other narratives out there are much, much strong, Jeff's contributions here on RedState notwithstanding.
Because although E.J. is saying something ominous and almost trite, he's correct:
No wonder our politicians find it so attractive to trash Maliki. He has become the punching bag for American failures. But come 2008, if things don't get better in Iraq, it is Bush's policies, not Maliki's, that American voters will judge.
And to the extent that they fail, and the extent the public believes they've failed, 2008 will be an absolutely *dismal* year for Republicans. So everybody who reads this blog had better hope that the President has something better than his narrative behind his assertions of "progress" or it's going to be a *very* long four to eight years.
He's got to:
1. Emphasize the consequences of leaving.
2. Point to the progress.
3. Acknowledge the insufficient effort by Iraqis on political reconciliation and the importance of such reconciliation.
4. Announce a policy of pledging continued FULL commitment, but contingent upon sufficient effort by Iraqis on political reconciliation (without which we'll narrow our objectives and role).
Otherwise the argument will (rightly) be made by Dems, some Republicans, analysts in government and in the media, etc. that we should not continue our full support if the Iraqi leaders are not serious about reconciliation. (The Dems, of course, will take it way too far and claim we should just leave and argue erroneously that leaving will INCREASE the likelihood of reconciliation).
numbers:
In November 2006 Warner had approval 60, disapproval 28. In July 2007 he had approval 53, disapproval 40. His numbers have been steadily going the wrong way, especially the ramatic rise in disapproval.
This is what it's about, no more than that. Not worthy of analysis beyond simple desire to survive.
the central government compromise if we're going to put down any rebellion? Why would factions compromise if we're the main pillar holding the central government up, and we're leaving soon?
A government needs moral authority to be stable. I'm afraid the only way to get it is to provide services, such as creating peace the hard way. If we do all the work, it's going to take the Iraqi government a long, long time to be perceived as legitimate. This is one reason George Washington was so much more effective than Maliki.
I grant this proposal makes no sense if we're going to stay in force over the long term, but that's not what Warner has in mind.