Cole in Salon on Bush's Speech
My essay,
"Four more years?
As civilian casualties climb, the U.S. makes plans to keep 140,000 troops in Iraq until 2010. Will the public in either country permit it?"
is in Salon.com today.
Excerpt:
' On Wednesday, George W. Bush again laid out his rationale for declining to consider a drawdown of U.S. forces. . . Bush added, "We can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions or used to inflict economic damage on the West." Although he said he was willing to try new approaches in Iraq, the tenor of his remarks was "stay the course." '
Read the whole thing.
For those interested in the Middle East more generally see also Abu Aardvark's new omnibus "Qahwah Sada" (Black Coffee) page on the Middle East, which starts with Toby Jones on Bahrain.
posted by Juan Cole @ 10/12/2006 07:29:00 AM
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10 Comments:
No, the U.S. electorate ABSOLUTELY WON'T allow us to keep troops in Iraq until 2010.
However, in 2006 we will allow them to remain into 2007. And when 2007 rolls around, we will squirm but allow them to remain into 2008.
Then in 2008, we'll be even more antsy, but "cut and run? No way!" You get the picture.
The Brits planned to leave Northern Ireland in 1919. Almost a century later they remain occupiers intangled with sectarian violence.
The sole difference I see between Iraq and Northern Ireland is that in Ireland at least one of the warring sects want the occupiers to remain.
Does the American electorate strike you as brighter than the average British voter? The American President less filled with himself than the typical Prime Minister? I think not.
Even the president's argument for staying in Iraq is poorly formed. Iraq will not become a "terrorist" state. Iraq may splinter into a civil war of horrifying proportions with a region of Sunni tribes and Salafist militias. But, it's not going to become a state lead by al Masri or anything like that.
IS SADDAM'S FUTURE ON AN UPTICK ?
Who has gotten rid of Saddam? No one has gotten rid of Saddam.
As conventional wisdom begins to masticate a Tri-Part Iraq, which oddly was a plan first proffered forcibly by a Democrat, someone had better think through a couple of the moving parts and their all too likely consequences.
To wit, the Shia portion of the Tri-Part solution will come to rule with a component of Theocracy and a component of brutality, i.e. force under arms. The Kurds will continue with their existing autonomous political and military structure.
Arms and brutality will also, absolutely, have to be a component of the nascent Sunni Tri-Part element. What will this element look like? Who will be its leaders?
If this Tri-Part element is to be wholly Sunni it follows, as night follows day, that the previous in-control Bathist leaders, presently called insurgents, will gain or regain enormous sway.
If you wish to envision a scene of unimaginable incompetency and failure then simply follow the consequences of allowing a nationalistic Sunni entity to reform.
Saddam lives. He is now neutered. But if by some act of Kafkaesque incompetency the Sunnis reform politically he may again become a source of influence. If this transition from today's abject failure in Iraq to tomorrow's "Experiment To Win" plan is botched it may become politically impossible to execute Saddam.
That Saddam is no longer in power is the only surviving justification for the GOP's devastatingly inept and costly adventure in Iraq.
If Osama remains on the loose and it becomes impossible to execute Saddam the only word which will describe this administrations' foreign policy legacy is grotesque.
Sharansky plans to leave politics
Natan Shranky was not a super-star in political decision making, but he played a major ideological role in the neoconservative movement. His book "The Case for Democracy" explicitly outlines the main ideas of hardcore revolutionary neoconservatism.
Sharansky actively promoted such cornerstones of the neocon propaganda as the infamous analogy between ME and post-Soviet developments and the fight for "moral clarity".
Also, the book tells a story of Sharansky's crusade against the Oslo process, for marginalization of Arafat and secular PLO. The rise of Hamas is the direct result of Sharanskian policies!
So, if this neocon hawk will really leave, it will be a significant step comparable for example with Wolfowitz leaving the Pentagon.
A scary story: Bush may need to keep max troops in the area to support an attack on Iran. Since politics controls all of The Deciders major decisions, we should ask what the Bushies might gain politically from attacking Iran and when would such an attack be most likely to occurr? I don’t agree with some (see Huffington Post) that an attack on Iran might well be timed to influence 06 elections. Bush has another option that solves all his problems in one fell swoop – one that has a much bigger payoff than simply winning congressional elections. He has two years to use tactical (very small) nukes (his only viable military option) on Iran – I believe spring/summer of 08 would be the optimal timing. Once the nuclear genie gets out of the bottle, it is hard to put it back in. A strike on Iran using tactical nukes would likely lead in 3 to 6 months to having to use tactical nukes in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, which would lead to a strategic nuking of Pakistan (after Mushareif was deposed by anti-US rage and replaced by a radical Muslim government). His worst fears about Iran would instantly come true about Pakistan. Having already broken the nuclear barrier he would probably also strategically nuke N Korea while he is at it (big-nuke – must take nukes, nuke material, and the million man army out in one shot). That sets up the Republican Neocon uni-party endgame for a final easy delivery. Because of the horrendous circumstances (rabid world wide anti-US and anti-war sentiment) created at home and abroad, Bush and company would then declare martial law (just temporally of course), cancel the US 08 presidential election, purge the government and military of non-supporters, arrest dissenters under the pro-torture legislation just passed. In one bold stroke, Bush and the Neocon wingnuts arrive at the end-point of their eight year long wet-dream: the conversion of our democracy to a one-party authoritarian regime with them in charge. All hail Bush -- The American Savior! Long live the Benevolent American Empire (dedicated to spreading freedom and democracy everywhere, of course). The republican base, big oil, wealthy individual and corporate supporters, Christian fundamentalists, the reddest states and the cowed confused mainstream press would cheer wildly with patriotic fervor (being dictatorial by temperament themselves and thus getting off on the exhilarating power trip of destroying all their enemies at once -- like a super Rambo on steroids -- while dominating the world’s oil supply) but their happiness would be short lived as our economy (hopelessly intertwined with the rest of the world) tanks and goes belly up. How Russia, China and Europe react to a marauding totalitarian war-like Rambo-America controlling most of the world’s oil is anybody’s guess – probably not a pretty sight – maybe leading to the real WWIII. The inevitable result: America, now a rogue nuclear autocratic state feared and hated by all (including a third of the US population), a mass murderer of millions, perpetrator of war crimes, slowly self-destructs and is punished by a world united against it. The end.
Epilog:
Though millions die, are tortured and imprisoned, eventually Bush, Chaney, Rumsfield, Rice, and others are caught, tried for treason, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and are summarily jailed or executed. American fascism returns to the murky underground wing-nut fringe where it has always flourished. The US, though reduced to third-world power status, reasserts its constitutional democracy, and begins to rebuild and reform its political process.
Don’t ya just love it when a scary story has a happy ending?
Why we still fight
Would they let thousands more young Americans get killed or wounded just so George W. does not have to face the consequences of his own folly? In a heartbeat.
There is even a somewhat graceful way out of Iraq, if the Dems will ask themselves my favorite foreign policy question, WWBD – What Would Bismarck Do? He would transfer sufficient Swiss francs to interested parties so that the current government of Iraq asks us to leave. They, not we, would then hold the world’s ugliest baby, even though it was America’s indiscretion that gave the bastard birth.
Staying the course in Iraq is only allowing our military to be bled dry.
And they want to do it for Four More Years? The current Iraqi leadership will define the country in the next four years. And I am sorry to tell you that they are not concerned with the welfare of the Iraqi people. If it's NOT a civil war, at the very least its' a series of intricate powergrabs by the men who run the militias. If it's NOT a civil war, its because they haven't quite got their power structures cemented quite yet. When they do, it won't matter if there is an American Military presence or not. The real bloodshed will begin in earnest, and our troops will be stuck in the middle.
As it is, our troops are being killed at the rate of 30-40 per month. So in 48 more months, that will be another 1700 American dead and probably 7000 badly wounded. Is your son or daughter there? Your brother, sister,father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin, friend? Our troops presence there is NOT preventing 100's of Iraqis from dying every single day. Its time to get them out of this useless exercise in "Staying the course".
In your Salon.com article you ask: "Is the United States making the situation worse rather than better? In terms of terrorism against the US I think Robert Pape has given the definitive answer: Pape’s results show that the stationing of American combat troops was the most important factor in accounting for suicide terrorism. In terms of Iraq itself it is hard to see how continuing as we are is making things better.
We should try the gradual withdrawal from specific towns and provinces you recommended months ago, tell the Iraqi government we're going to slowly withdraw and then negotiate it with them a la Brzezinski, and perhaps redeploy in part to Kurd territory and Kuwait where we are welcome. Then if we came back it would be by invitation and we wouldn't be seen as occupiers. Since so many are being killed anyway it might be necessary to allow the ethnic groups to fight each other awhile without us so perhaps they would be more willing to compromise with one another if after a period they invited us back as peacekeepers. There is NO bloodless way to disengage and so something less than ideal must be tried or we're left with "Stay the course".
I think it is amazing that people are swallowing this at all:
"We can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions or used to inflict economic damage on the West."
The US military goes in and creates havoc - and that havoc becomes the new excuse to control Iraq's resources.
Naomi Klein had written that that was the plan two years ago - http://nologo.org/ "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neo-con utopia" (linked at Harper's).
I think that Bush's new comments are just another expression of that plan.
Beyond that - Bush seems to be saying that the US will not alllow any country that is at odds with the US to control their own resources. At least that is what I'm hearing.
The Republican political apparatus has successfully framed the Iraqi situation in terms of "stay the course" and "cut and run." While we see this bemoaned as an obvious ploy in the blogosphere, the general public still thinks of the alternatives in Iraq as distillable into one of these vague and simplistic options.
Because "cut and run" has been made so anathema in the public mind, "stay the course" is left as the only palatable policy choice; despite the obvious failure it is proving to be. Yet, it must be maintained with public buy-in. But how?
Despite its seeming intractable bent on endless war, this Administration has certainly "stayed the course" politically by insisting there will be no reinstitution of the draft. Yet, we have exhausted our existing fighting force, and are reaching very far to find good candidates for voluntary service. This bunch has never intended in my opinion to leave Iraq or have any kind of stability there, which would justify a public demand to withdraw.
We have been given so many hints and promises at troop drawdowns, and have before us the ever elusive shape changing mirage of Iraqi self defense (we'll sit down as they stand up rhetoric), which by design can and will never be fulfilled, and we are being conditioned step by step to troop presence into the next decade. So, by molding public opinion over these years, they wish to succeed in boiling the frog by degrees, and bring us to the point where the national dialogue is fenced entirely in "stay the course," and the collective expectations have absorbed a nebulous timeline well beyond anyone's ability to project reasonably.
Since the only rational conclusion to be drawn by any stay-the-course framework is to add greatly to the number of troops, the national argument will conclude on its own that "hey, we have no other choice." We need more troops, we can't get them through voluntary recruitment, therefore . . . we must institute the draft to make this work.
We will, as a nation, of our own naivete about how political manipulation works, end up calling for the draft without the political machinery ever uttering the "D" word.
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