« John Roberts on Unlimited Warfare (Rumsfeld v. FAIR on the Solomon Amendment) | HomePage | Free, Open Source, and Microsoft »
Wednesday, March 08, 20061141851600
Bush Trying to Lose Iraq
"U.S. Is Seeking Better Balance In Iraqi Police," by Edward Wong, New York Times, 7 March 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/international/middleeast/07military.html (from Democratic Underground).
While his Chief Justice sidelines international law and supports the military, our Commander-in-Chief prepares to blow it away. If John Kerry was President, we would have a flip-flopper in charge of the military. The current situation is worse.
Let's hope we withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible, before Bush can do more damage.
Or at least, let's hope Bush starts reading tdaxp
Bush has not stopped dancing to the music of the guerrillas. He has not embraced the inevitable. He has not dared.
Earlier, I wrote about the need to realize that the American Federal government can't do everything in Iraq. From military contractors to ethnic militias, the super-state of America requires help from sub-state actors. This is the shape of the coming normalcy.
As John Boyd wrote in Patterns of Conflict, a central element of victory is attracting allies and isolating enemies:
Shape or influence events so that we not only amplify our spirit and strength but also influence the uncommitted or potential adversaries so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success,
...
Penetrate adversary’s moral-mental-physical being in order to isolate him from his allies, pull him apart, and collapse his will to resist.
Bush's policy is the opposite of this. al Qaeda in Iraq's destruction of mosques, weddings, and funerals has sickened the world. George Bush's repeated appeasement of the aQiI-supporting Sunni Arabs, designed with the short-term goal of "separating the insurgents," has succeeded merely in bloodying the hands of the United States in Iraq. Iraqi political leaders like al-Hakim, who obtained his role after al Qaeda religious assassination of his brother, noted that US Ambassador "gave the green light to the terrorist groups." What other explanation is there, when we respond to terrorism with prizes?
Sunni Iraqi Arabs tribes support al Qaeda in Iraq. Sunni Iraqi Arab tribes are infested with terrorists. Sunni Iraqi Arab tribes have pushed the Kurds and Shia to defend themselves, because we will not defend the innocents ourselves.
Our response? Stop!
As the threat of full-scale sectarian strife looms, the American military is scrambling to try to weed out ethnic or religious partisans from the Iraqi security forces.
Uh oh, it looks like some political parties may control the Iraqi government:
The United States faces the possibility that it has been arming one side in a prospective civil war. Early on, Americans ceded operational control of the police to the Iraqi government. Now, the police forces are overseen at the highest levels by religious Shiite parties with militias, and reports of uniformed death squads have risen sharply in the past year.
Why are the religious Shia parties running the Iraqi government? Because they won the election. . Because they are very popular. Because unlike the Sunni Arabs they do not harbor massive anti-civilian terrorist groups. Because unlike the Americans they do not try to hollow out Iraqi democracy.
The article gets so bad, it's funny
The American military is trying an array of possible solutions, including quotas to increase the number of Sunni Arab recruits in police academies, firing Shiite police commanders who appear to tolerate militias, and sending 200 training teams composed of military police officers or former civilian police officers to Iraqi stations, even in remote and risky locations.
That's right. We have a violent, rejectionist, 15% minority that is responsible for Iraq War in the first place. The proposed solution: giving them the army. With quotas.
At a time we should be embracing the Shia as allies in the war against al Qaeda, we now want to cripple the Shia police force:
The Iraqi Army poses less of a problem than the police, because the American military has direct operational control over it, and because the Americans took more care in building it up. Kurdish militiamen, though, make up a significant part of it.
Tom Barnett has called this period the Bush post-presidency. He's wrong. A post-presidency would not be nearly this disastrous. As far is Iraq policy goes, we are in the Bush anti-Presidency.
The real Bush post-Presidency begins with President John McCain's inauguration in January 2009. It may be a long 33 months.
15:00 Posted by Dan tdaxp in Iraq | Permalink | Comments (5) | Email this
Comments
Dan,
I don't see how letting the civil war burn full force without us, helps us in our strategy. All it does is leave Mesopotamia in failed state status, undoing the good work in the Kurdish north, the Shiite South and possibly igniting further tensions in the region between the Turks and Kurds, Iran and the rest of the Gulf. While it may give us the benefit of seeing some of the dictatorships overthrown, it cannot guarantee that any better governments will come up in their place, but leaves us with the specter that the region will be filled with failed states without any governmental authority or control where al Qaeda and other groups find even more fertile ground for their ideology, not to mention, recruits.
++++Sunni Iraqi Arabs tribes support al Qaeda in Iraq. Sunni Iraqi Arab tribes are infested with terrorists.+++++
and yet what we are hearing from there is that they have turned against al Qaeda and are running them out of town or killing them. Lest you say its only the MSM, here's another post from blogger Bill Roggio.
+++++Why are the religious Shia parties running the Iraqi government? Because they won the election.++++
Did the Shiites really win the election? I mean, they did by numbers of reps, they have almost half of the reps in the new parliament, but if the Kurds, Sunnis, Secularists and smaller parties combine together, they can either oppose much of what the UIA wants, or even form their own, albeit fractuous, government. That is what the UIA is afraid of and why they are seeking to postpone the first meeting of parliament. Yes, the Shiites if they get the Kurds to go along can form a government, but so far the Kurds have been non-committal and have toyed with the idea of forming a government with the secularist and sunni blocs.
Posted by: nykrindc | Thursday, March 09, 2006
Hey, your site does not support html comments and I just lost all the links I inserted.
Here are the links
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=15914
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601596.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030700786.html?nav=rss_world
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/06/AR2006030601596.html
http://billroggio.com/archives/2006/03/more_sunni_alqaeda_d.php
Posted by: nykrindc | Thursday, March 09, 2006
Nykrindc,
Thanks for the comment! I'll reply to the substance of it, but first two technical notes.
1. Yes, blogspirit doesn't allow html comments. That sucks.
2. Blogspirit lets in way too much spam trackbacks. That sucks too.
After deleting the spam trackbacks I got I no longer saw yours, so I reposted them. I tried to copy-and-paste from the email notification, but if what is now online doesn't match what you typed, that's why.
Thank you for your patience
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | Thursday, March 09, 2006
It's good to see you're rooting for McCain too. Mother Jones starting to take shots at him is a good sign for the McCain campaign- he's being taken seriously.
Posted by: Adam | Thursday, March 09, 2006
Nykrindc,
Anbar Province is a failed state. It shows no indication of not being a failed state.
Nearly all Iraq plans are really just debates on what degree of failure to embrace. The Bush Administration wishes to turn Sunniland into the "Northwest Frontier Province" of Iraq (that is what is meant by a "national unity government" in Iraq).
The solution I laid out would turn it into the "West Bank" of Iraq.
The tdaxp plan is preferable. Allowing terrorists to operate unmolested, which is basically what Bush is advocating by attempting to destroy the functional Iraqi police force, allows al Qaeda to drag down all of Iraq. We should not give them that chance. We should not allow the 85% of Iraqis who wish to be free to be held hostage by the 15% that's more interested in collaborating with terrorists.
The best solution would be to spin-off the Sunni Arab provinces and treat it like the 3rd world bastion of disconnectedness it is. Above all, that remnant of Mesopotamian apartheid should not be allowed to degrade the security and connectivity situation of Shia Iraq or Kurdistan.
As General John Abizaid talked about the increasingly fragile security "sectarian" situation, I don't think it's appropriate to view violent tribe-Qaeda bargaining as anything other than what it is: violent bargaining.
Yes, the Shia won the election. It was a blow-out, because the Sunni Arabs (unlike the Afrikaners, who they most recently represent) attempted to destroy the democratic system of Iraq by not voting en masse. More recently, they rallied and got all of -- what -- 15% (ish) of the vote?
Thanks for the links.
Adam,
McCain is looking not just strong, but good. The Republican party naturally "takes "turn" in Presidential elections -- and it's clearly McCain's turn. Further, he's been very skilled this time around. I especially like his "intelligent design" theory rhetoric (Darwin as a personal hero, students should have a say over what is taught.)
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | Thursday, March 09, 2006