Unintended Consequences in Iraq
As we discussed two days ago, the battle with the Militias is ramping up. NBC reports that US Commanders in Iraq were surprised that Malaki personally took control of the Basra operation against the Mahdi Army. Juan Cole explains why now.
But if they have provincial elections, their chief ally, the Islamic Supreme Council, might well lose southern provinces to the Sadr Movement. In turn, the Sadrists are demanding a timetable for US withdrawal, whereas ISCI wants US troops to remain. So the setting of October, 2008, as the date for provincial elections provoked this crisis. I think Cheney probably told ISCI and Prime Minister al-Maliki that the way to fix this problem and forestall the Sadrists oming to power in Iraq, was to destroy the Mahdi Army, the Sadrists’ paramilitary. Without that coercive power, the Sadrists might not remain so important, is probably their thinking. I believe them to be wrong, and suspect that if the elections are fair, the Sadrists will sweep to power and may even get a sympathy vote. It is admittedly a big ‘if.’
The next two months could get ugly. We have rearmed the Sunni “Awakening Councils” and the Shiite Militias are about to lift their cease fire in the fight between the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army. Bush’s fairy tale that there is a strong central government in Iraq is about as real as the one about the Afghan government that can’t leave Kabul. A Government of laws must have “a monopoly on the use of force”, which is certainly not the case in either country.
The Australians who are pulling out all their troops this week got a wink and a nod from our President. The New Prime Minister Kevin Rudd showed up to give George Bush the news.
Saying he was not mad at Rudd for keeping a campaign promise to do so, Bush argued that foreign troops could be sent home because of Western successes in Iraq.
“Troops are coming out because we are successful,” he said. “That’s fundamentally different from saying, ‘It’s just too hard, pull ‘em out.’ “
If that’s true for the Aussies, why can’t we just declare victory and bring our men and women home?
I thought Bill Maher hit this on the head last night when he wondered how the folks in middle America felt about our troops fighting on the side of Islam?
Let’s just start right now calling it “McCain’s War”. He wants it; let’s give it to him. It’s not Bush’s war anymore; it’s got a life of it’s own, and McCain should own it in front of the American people. Maybe that will take the heat off of the Obama/Clinton brawl for a bit and put the focus where it needs to be.
Does that mean if you are rooting against McCain, you rooting against his war?
I think you are morally obligated to hope the war goes great, gets better, everyday. Otherwise you are a traitor. I’m sure this is not the case, and you really just don’t like McCain, but it is your war too, and until it is over, I hope you win it.
Morgan-Your language is inflamatory. To be a realist about what is going on is not to be a traitor. One does not have to embrace McCain and Clinton’s sorry reasoning for approving the war to be patriotic. One can define victory any way you want to and if you feel it was worth 4000 American lives and 10,000 amputees to get rid of Saddam, then have at it. Declare victory and go home.
Whoa, Morgan!
It’s not any war I would have voted for, and it was a scam all the way along. Bush’s cronies lied to congress to get approval for funding, and they knew they were lying. Hillary doesn’t have the guts to simply say she was wrong to vote for it and say she got fooled.
Patriotic would be doing what is right for America, and I can’t see a hell of a lot that our current administration has done in that realm. They’ve lied, cheated, scammed, and generally run up a bill that my great grand children will be paying off for a war that was “mission accomplished” several years ago.
Morgan, you seem to have a soft spot in your heart (and head) for the oiligarchy government we have right now. The best thing our fearless leaders could do would be to send their own children into whatever battles they believe in, OR start up the Manhattan project for energy self-sufficiency that will help get us the hell out of worrying about foreign oil.
Bush & Co can only think like oil men. McCain can only think like a soldier. Neither points of view do us justice or help our cause either here in the USA or abroad.
I say the traitors are the ones who have enslaved us to the oil shieks of the Middle East. They are the ones who spirited the Bin Laden family out of the country post 9-11. They are the ones who wanted a war so their cronies could bathe in petro-dollars or mercenary contracts and steal billions from the people of the United States while scaring the shit out of them. The traitors are living within the Beltway these days…
That’s a bunch of talk, I said:
“I think you are morally obligated to hope the war goes great, gets better, everyday. Otherwise you are a traitor.”
You don’t have to support the war. You don’t have to vote for guys who want to stay there.
But you have to ROOT for our side everyday we are there, that if they are out on patrol, and someone shoots at them, our guys shoot them first.
You have to root that tommorrow, the Iraqis Shi’ites in Basra find a solution, that Madhi Army (even Iran) remain peaceful and rout out their own most extreme factions, and figure their shit out – because that’s what is best for us.
The fact that you latched onto “traiter” is odd, I thought you’d say, “of course I hope the war goes great,” why the hell wouldn’t you?
Lastly,
“The best thing our fearless leaders could do would be to send their own children into whatever battles they believe in”
“I’m obviously very proud of my son,” the elder McCain told Time for a story in editions going on sale Monday, “but also understandably a little nervous.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/07/29/politics/main1847378.shtml
The only way this war can go great is for us to get the hell out. It never should have been our war in the first place, and it shouldn’t be ours now. Liars in Washington have screwed the pooch. May they rot in hell for it…if there is a hell for them to rot in.
I don’t have to root for our guys to go killing religious nuts in Iraq; I am morally obligated to root for someone to get them the hell out of there. I hope none of them die tomorrow or any other day, but they were scammed into being there, and it’s their sorry asses that were put on the line by the real traitors…a bunch of suits in Washington who are making money on this crap.
Morgan, from what I’ve read from your many posts here, you seem to be caught between the rock of Libertarianism and the hard place of imperialistic manifest destiny. How can you justify our meddling in foreign lands? McCain’s war is not about self defense…it’s about self aggrandizement and profit motive…and hubris.
Too put morality and war in the same sentence, that’s quite a feat.
And if you don’t hope for more and better you are a traitor to? Too?
So the world only goes around when it’s in your, under your terms?
And if you don’t hope for a better outcome, oh wait, that is what we are hoping for. That outcoming being the end not more or better.
It appears to me that under your terms that makes you the traitor and quite similar, I might add, to Mr. Bush/McSame in being if not responsible for at least part of the lie that has put us there. Now that’s what I call immoral.
Rick, you should get down off your perch, and stop thinking that guys who volunteered to go protect you were “scammed.”
Real regular people, the boots on the ground, overwhelmingly know/feel/believe they are helping, are glad they are there. The scam, is that you don’t know it. Why don’t you know it? Have you not spoken with guys who have returned? Haven’t you asked what they think?
And, of course this is about morality. You don’t have to be for the war, to root for the troops – right now, they are there – speak about them like they are intelligent patriots, nothing less.
You are completely able to root for an end to the war, and root for them to win, at least root for them to be safe.
What’s wrong is to come across like you are hoping for bad news, because right now you aren’t getting your way.
There is an election in November, and if whoever wins actually pulls out of the fighting – I won’t hope there is more violence to prove them wrong. Being for or against the war, has nothing to do with how you speak and act about the folks fighting.
This is the news you root for:
“BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr told his followers to stop fighting and cooperate with Iraqi security forces Sunday, as U.S. and Iraqi forces targeted his Mehdi Army in Basra and Baghdad.
In the nine-point statement — which was issued by his headquarters in Najaf and came a day after al-Sadr told his fighters not to surrender their weapons — the cleric demanded that the government give his supporters amnesty and release any of his followers that are being held.
“We announce our disavowal from anyone who carries weapons and targets government institutions, charities and political party offices,” said the statement that was distributed across the country and posted on Web sites linked to his movement.”
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/03/30/iraq.main/
So now you decide on who is and isn’t a traitor, based on what they think…and you also decide what they’re thinking.
Incidentally, how many years did you serve in Iraq, Mr. Get-Down-Off-Your-Perch?
I can reconcile hoping that no more American soldiers get killed in Iraq without wanting them to be there. I see the war as a traitorous misuse of military power by a government that has misled the American public to scam support for this exercise in futility. And beyond misuse, it’s an abuse of the men and women who have been fooled into serving.
How many times do volunteers have to be dragged back, before they no longer really count as volunteers?
STS, God dude, the movie failed (like all the Iraq movies failed for good reason). C’mon. If you are fair about it, here are tons of re-enlistments. Guys as smart as you and I who have been there, and think it is worth it to go back. It isn’t our own Vietnam.
I’m support compulsory service – 1 year in the military for everybody. Let the very best who want to stay, be paid really well if they make the cut, managing the system, make everyone see what we fight against. Visiting foreign lands in your early years, it is good, for you to be forced to confront why we have borders. Once you see that, you can go visit Paris. Though the French are themselves as good reason to have borders.
I think that bringing back the draft would be absolutely fantastic. That would end our involvement in Iraq faster than you could spit across the room. Bushco doesn’t dare. They’re scared shitless of the ’60s, and they know that’s the surest way to bring that era of protest back. Nothing quite like a bunch of draft card burners tearing up the streets…
Exactly, Rick. They stopped tearing up the streets when the year 1972 ended and the draft with it. No more scared Republicans in DC. So the next year the U.S. dropped more payload on Souteast Asia in the month of May alone than was dropped on all of Europe in all of WWII. But no more tearing up the streets. The protesters were safe from the draft.
And in that nice safe year Dr. Henry Kissinger, the reknowned climatologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Just so I’m clear. Everybody for one year and out. Peacetime and wartime. Rich, black, white, poor – first year out of high school.
And we’d be much less likely to go to war, because we wouldn’t be such nancies. There would be a cold look in our eye towards those against our interests, they would be afraid.
What kinda libertarian are you, Morgan?
I’m not sure. I’m inclined to say that it should be left up to the military authorities and the C-in-C to submit legislation to Congress. Surely DoD, and the Selective Service System in particular, have looked such a scenario, which would be frought with problems, I think, even if we just copied Switzerland or Israel.
For example, there’d need to be a proviso that each session of Congress does not get to carve out new exceptions for those who wish to commit instead to the latest do-good program invented by the Chair of a juice committee or the presidential incumbent of the moment. You’d need to enact something binding to establish that the conscripts are the military’s labor pool and no one else’s. (The President can always get at them that way.) And to enact such a prohibition, you’d have to figure out how to bind a future Congress without amending the Constitution.
You’d have to let the services set whatever screening criteria they need to set to ensure that the military doesn’t become a dumping ground, and the role of women would have to be debated all the way to the U.S. Sup. Ct. And even after all of that, Congress would still continually try to catch rejects on the rebound and put them to work for a year according to the caprice of the politicians and their diverse paymasters.
Yeah, thats what I mean, the president gets them, all of them. That’s what 750 military bases are for.
I’m the kind of libertarian who is concerned about people voting to have others people money. Sure, drugs and hookers and abortions and all that, but mostly I am totally disgusted with “vote for me and get X,” because the only defense to that is deficits, and the whole thing just screws up the onward march and resulting benefits of capitalism.
My approach is to establish an agreed upon maximum amount of money that can be taken from the earners, before receipts go down, and within that metric pay down the debt.
With an agreed cap on taxes, we can then think in terms of Jon’s new federalism.
But even if we aren’t going to get a new federalism, I’d still advocate that this $MAX tax receipts be published in a nice web 2.0 environment, and every congressman, show their plan for disbursing it and paying down the debt, because it represents a cap to the total possible vote buying largess, before we get screwed by democracy.
People should see Democracy for what it is, and those voting to get stuff, should be dealing with it directly.
The abstract newspeak isn’t needed, it should be a brutally frank statement, “we want your stuff,” and have the votes to get it.
I think tax policy would be a good route to an explicit social contract between citizen and state, Morgan. You’re right, in my book. Moreover, that’s where Jefferson was coming from. We just didn’t finish the process of negotiation, and the time passed. He said as much in 1826. He lamented it.