Syria, the rush to judgement- from Sanders Research Associates
Sanders Research Associates, February 21, 2005
Deception
Deception is the first rule of war. We are at war, therefore look where your own feet stand
Orville X
Death in the afternoon
The assassination of Rafiq Hariri invited recollection of another Sidon native assassinated almost exactly thirty years ago in February 1975, Marouf Saad. The anniversary of Saad’s death has a meaning that cannot have escaped the notice of Hariri’s killers. His assassination is generally accepted as the event that precipitated the Lebanese civil war.
Hariri’s funeral two days after his killing completed the humiliation of the government of Emile Lahoud, who was pointedly told by the family of the dead Hariri to stay away. Syria, backer of the Lahoud government, was predictably blamed for the assassination, the premise being that he had called for Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon last October. The United States poured oil on the fire by recalling its ambassador to Syria, showing thereby who it blames for Hariri’s death and in the process upping the pressure on the Lahoud government and encouraging the Lebanese opposition.
Rush to judgment
Syria sensibly denied responsibility, equally sensibly pointing out that it had nothing to gain and a lot to lose by such an act. There is no doubt that the Syrian regime is ruthless enough to use assassination as a tool and competent enough to make it happen, but a rush to judgment is still just a rush and not a judgment. The most convincing argument we have heard is that Syria knows it will sooner or later have to bow to US, French and Israeli pressure to get out of Lebanon, and was unwilling to leave behind such a powerful and well-funded politician to fill the vacuum that Syria’s departure would leave. This is conceivable; the objective would be to leave behind a complete mess, the better to confuse and occupy the opposition. Without Hariri and his money it seems to us highly unlikely that the disparate groups that make up Lebanon’s “opposition†will find it possible to remain united.
Conceivable maybe, likely, not. Tempting as it may be to believe this line of reasoning, doing so is fraught with problems. To begin with, it is a high cost, high risk strategy with the costs front-end loaded. There is virtually no way that Syria would not be blamed for such an act, which could only isolate Syria in the court of world opinion and which can only advance the cause of those in Israel and the United States who would like to see regime change in Damascus. And it is difficult to imagine any country with more to lose from an unstable Lebanon than Syria.
Lost in the welter of accusations and counter accusations is much if any analysis of Hariri himself. This usually stops with crediting the billionaire with the reconstruction of Lebanon in the wake of its bloody civil war. While he gets the credit, the money came from Saudi Arabia, and he doled it out to every group in the country. Even so, the tangible results are pretty thin. The country still does not even have enough electric power, and the high profile reconstruction of central Beirut is actually confined to quite a small area. The towering and empty wreck of the old Holiday Inn is a grim reminder of how far the country has to go to put the war behind it. But the most important thing is that there is no evidence that we are aware of that Hariri was in any way anti-Syrian; indeed he seemed to be groping for a way to defuse the escalating conflict between the US and Israel on one side, and Syria and the Lahoud government on the other. There is no reason other than conjecture to suppose that Syria wanted to escalate matters, but there is good reason to think that the Americans and Israelis would.
It has to be said that in spite of his good press, Hariri was not universally admired. In Saudi Arabia he was for many a symbol of the corruption that went hand in hand with the expenditure of hundreds of billions in oil revenue. His specialty was building palaces and his patron was the now semi-comatose king, Fahd bin Abdulaziz, who used a maintenance contract for his palaces as the pipe through which to funnel the money used to buy off Lebanon’s factions. There is little wonder then that Hariri’s death is so universally mourned in that little country. He was the tap on the end of that pipe and competent to boot.
Disequilibrium politics
In retrospect his assassination should probably be less of a surprise than the fact that he survived as long as he did. He and his patron Fahd symbolise an old equilibrium in the politics of the region that became untenable once the United States decided on a global offensive informed by the regional priorities of its client Israel. The Taif Agreement of October 1989 legitimised the presence of Syrian troops in Lebanon and committed Saudi largesse as part of a larger strategic plan to stabilize the region under the aegis of the United States, an important part of which was the commitment of the latter to bring about a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It was this basic framework that made possible the coalition assembled by the US during the Gulf War in 1990, which, be it not forgotten, included Syrian troops.
The adoption by Messrs. Cheney, Rumsfeld & Bush of a strategic plan that is basically Israeli in origin and orientation[1] swept away the basis for the existing regional equilibrium. Indeed, sweeping away the equilibrium is exactly what that plan is intended to do. The Taif equilibrium bound Israel to find a settlement with the Palestinians toward which Israel’s leadership was at best equivocal, because that equilibrium neutralised Israeli freedom of action to unilaterally define its role in the regional pol itical economy. With the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the assumption of power by Binyamin Netanyahu in the mid-90s, equivocation became open hostility. The Israeli, or rather Zionist, dilemma was and is really quite simple. A settlement with the Palestinians and regional peace means openness, openness means Palestinian access to Saudi funding, and Saudi funding plus the Palestinian birthrate spell the end, ultimately, of an Israeli state defined by a Jewish as opposed to a national identity.
In politics there are only interests…
It is this basic alignment of interests that informs the behavior of the powers in the region. Israel talks the language of peace and democracy but cannot afford either because of the most basic issue of identity. The Arab states cannot win a war against a nuclear Israel with American resupply privileges, but they can win a peace. It is for this reason that Syria’s protestations of innocence in the Hariri affair are believable; applying the useful yardstick of the “cui bono?†principle it is difficult to see what the Syrians, whose behavior over the years has been nothing if not pragmatic, would gain.
Pragmatic too was the Russian-Syrian arms deal announced at the end of January, which will result in an upgrade of Syrian military capability that highlights the biggest challenge facing the American and Israeli offensive, time. In general, time is on the side of an offensive party as long as it can choose it. Delay only allows opposition to coalesce and organize. The US and Israel no longer have the advantage of strategic surprise and the clock is ticking, measured by the dollars the War on Terror is stripping from the US Treasury. Already, the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations have over two years surpassed $300 billion, making this the most expensive two years of warfare in American history. The Defense Department’s operating deficit for FY2004 (ended in September last year) was $650 billion. And belying the current fashion for so- called “austerityâ€[2], the cost of Medicare has soared thanks to the passage of the administration’s Medicare Prescription Drug Plan, which adds a stupefying $8.12 trillion net present value to future federal liabilities. Four years ago the net present value of future net Medicare expenditure was equal to the net present value of future net Social Security liabilities. Today it is double the comparable Social Security number.[3]
…even if they are crazy interests
The message from Washington could not be clearer: damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. The financial implications of the Medicare Prescription Drug Plan will not be lost on China, whose purchases of US debt are financing so much of the government’s deficit, and the strategic implications of its runaway military budget will not be lost on the other powers, who can only look at the financial and military mess in Iraq and shrug. After nearly four years of trying, the US has yet to score a real success in its War on Terror. It needs one badly, no matter what the price.
Pity poor Lebanon in the cross fire.
-Chris Sanders
ted laurais:
Stan:
I admire you and beleive in the things you’ve written and said, but it seems to me that the Achilles heel of the Left is Israel. From the toppling of the twin towers to this latest assassination, it’s always Israel that’s somehow got a hand in it. If the Left continues to go overboard in its Israel-bashing, as I believe it has, it may find itself so hooked on this bete noir that its ability accurately to analyze where we’re going and how we’re being taken there could eventually be crippled. I’m not saying that Israel should be let off the hook for its responsibility in furthering the aims of imperialism, but when Israel becomes a shibboleth for everything in the world that goes wrong, a clear focus of prejudice, the Left, IMO, is copping out. I’m not aiming this comment just at you or even mostly at you. It seems to me that the Left and progressives as a whole have this blind spot when it comes to the need to scapegoat.
la laurienne
19 February 2005, 5:02 pmStan:
I would argue that many sectors of the so-called left have not gone far enough in cirticizing Israel, but that elides the contention in your comment — which confuses two different tendencies: one, the left that is clear that Israel’s role vis a vis US foreign policy has evolved, albeit with Israel always as the junior regional partner, and two, the notion that Israel is somehow holding the upper hand in the alliance (the latter tendency is shared by a number of closet anti-Semites) who have failed to differentiate between Jews — hardly an undifferentiated mass of people — and Zionism, a racist and expansionist political movement. The idea that people are scapegoating Zionism is a pretty bold flip of the script.
Neither Sanders no I have ever claimed that Israel had anything to do with 9/11. Come to think of it, I can think of not a single actual leftist who says that. Now the Illuminati-hunters and Buchananites have looked into it, but that is not the left.
The “Left” you describe here is a straw man.
Israel, however, is obviously playing a pivotal (not dominant) role in US foreign policy now, however. The administration right now is about as unvarnished a bunch of Zionists as we have seen yet… and that’s saying something… and the saber-rattling directed at Iran and Syria, while part of the larger Energy War that is being established from the Philippiines to Colombia, via SW Asia, the Balkans, and NW Africa (look at the proposed disposition of US forces in the Rumsfeld military re-shuffle!), is dovetailing so perfectly with Israeli ambitions that it’s hard not to see a US-Israeli symbiosis.
The main point of Sanders’ comment is that Syria had nothing to gain and everything to lose by killing Hariri. They are going to assassinate a deactivated politician with the sure knowledge that his killing could pull the scab off the Lebanese civil war, subjecting their own presence in a clam Lebanon to all the latent dangers therein, and at the precise moment that the US is breathing down their throats? Puleeese!
19 February 2005, 6:11 pmEd Haywood:
I feel cheated. The headliner link from the main page suggested an article full of preposterous allegations about the CIA, Mossad, and P2OG. Instead, I found a reasonable analysis of Syrian and Israeli motives in Lebanon.
The CIA and Mossad are a much greater threat on TV and in the imaginations of uninformed people than in real life. But with your background, you know this at least as well as me.
I didn’t pop into the forum to get into a discussion, but just to say hello. Stan, I’m certain you won’t remember me, but I was a cadet in your pre-Ranger program at USMA in 1987. I hope it won’t upset you to know that your example inspired me to strive to be a good soldier who leads from the front and takes care of his men, and not just another careerist officer. After knocking around in infantry, I wound up in SF for the last 12 years. I even did the long walk, but I guess they didn’t like me at the board. I’m still in, currently stuck in staff officer purgatory, and headed for retirement in 3 years.
Anyhow, just wanted to say hello and thank you for the leadership way back then. Judging from your writing, that may be a phase of your life that you regret now, but thanks anyways. I disagree with 95% of your positions, but respect you for acting on your convictions.
Ed
19 February 2005, 6:25 pmStan:
Certainly, I remember you. It’s a pleasure to hear from you, and on those disagreements, well, give it time. I try not to do regret. Seems a pretty pointless emotional luxury. I ust try to do amends. (-:
I’m delighted to have you on the blog. I’m out for three weeks come Monday, taking a little trip, but will recommend you check out my books, one about 3rd Group in Haiti, and the other that even talks about that godawful Huntington’s Model they made you guys rub your noses in there at West Point.
I definintely don’t mind the reference to leading by example, sharing hardship, and putting your people first. Those remain good principles for anyone wanting to lay claim to leadership, in any situation. Actually, I’m flattered to be remembered that way. Check the snapshot in the About Me section, and you’ll see I’m a little more weathered, grayer, and a bit fatter now. (-:
Hope your retirement brings as many happy transformations as mine did.
Stan
19 February 2005, 6:43 pmted laurais:
Stan:
The Zionism of the Right is no friend to Israel or to Jewish people generally. As to Israeli ambitions, maybe you know what they are, and maybe they’re more sinister than the desire to live at peace with their neighbors. What seems clear is that whoever the Palesstinian people may be, they appear to hold the key to whateber legitimacy Israel may hope to have in the eyes of much of the world.As you noted, there are lots of folks who are apt to reverse the labels and to call Israel the Big Satan that’s got America, the Little Satan, wrapped around its finger, but at least until recently, I’ve heard and read that presumption stated more often and more forcefully from sources that have no fondness for the American Left. If I were an Israeli, I’d be looking to strike what deals with my regional neighbors I could and wouldn’t want to be shilling for the Americans. We who live relatively peacefully on land stolen from the Indians haven’t yet had to pay the piper for our theft. Israelis don’t have that luxury or won’t have it for ling whether or not they may have been thieves, imperialist stooges or, in many cases, refugees that had no right to impose themselves upon people who now inhabited their ancestral lands and certainly didn’t want them to return to displace them.
19 February 2005, 8:21 pmStan:
“The Zionism of the Right is no friend to Israel or to Jewish people generally.”
Nonsense. This easy conflation of Zionism with the Jewish people here is disingenuous.
But more to the point, any active supporter of Zionism is a friend to Zionism. Are you seriously implying that having the full force of the American government behind one’s agenda is a disadvantage? I agree that in the future a thing can quickly turn into its opposite. But for now, without the US, Israel could not maintain its intransigent devotion to the “Armenianization” of Palestine. Ask Sharon if he thinks the neocons are not friends.
Zionism was openly and explicitly conceived, and well before they opportunistically laid claim to the holocaust, and after having consorted with fasicists themselves, as the racially-configured and forcible expropriation of land other people were living on. Zionism is, by its very definition, racist and expansionist. Read Jabotinsky:
“There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you has some general understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even one example when the colonization of a country took place with the agreement of the native population. Such an event has never occurred.
“The natives will always struggle obstinately against the colonists – and it is all the same whether they are cultured or uncultured. The comrades in arms of [Hernan] Cortez or [Francisco] Pizarro conducted themselves like brigands. The Redskins fought with uncompromising fervor against both evil and good-hearted colonizers. The natives struggled because any kind of colonization anywhere at anytime is inadmissible to any native people.
“Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they will be complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the Palestinian Arabs.
“They have the precise psychology that we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope.
“It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and by every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs and the same condition exists now.
“Even an agreement with non-Palestinians represents the same kind of fantasy. In order for Arab nationalists of Baghdad and Mecca and Damascus to agree to pay so serious a price they would have to refuse to maintain the Arab character of Palestine.
“We cannot give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall through which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.
“Whether through the Balfour Declaration or the Mandate, external force is a necessity for establishing in the country conditions of rule and defense through which the local population, regardless of what it wishes, will be deprived of the possibility of impeding our colonization, administratively or physically. Force must play its role – with strength and without indulgence. In this, there are no meaningful differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other an Iron Wall of English bayonets.
“To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer, ’absolutely untrue.’ This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes – not for any sweet words nor for any tasty morsel, because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall.”
At least Jabotinsky was honest.
I recommend Scheonman’s on-line history at http://www.marxists.de/middleast/schoenman/.
Now back to the original point… show how the “Left” is scapegoating Israel. Be specific. No personal disrespect intended, but I disagree with your thesis that Israel is the left’s inappropriate bete noir.
19 February 2005, 9:24 pmEd Haywood:
Stan,
We are all older, greyer, and rounder. And my knees probably ache as much as yours, a process that may have started with those ruck runs up past Michie Stadium.
I’m familiar with your work, and with your ongoing intellectual journey. I can’t admit to understanding some of the conclusions you have reached (Marxism???), but I will not be so presumptuous as to psychoanalyze you. Your book on Haiti intrigues me and I will pick up a copy. I probably know some of the people in it, although I am a 10th Grouper.
I will stick around for as long as my views are welcome. I suspect I will become the literary equivalent of the Washington Generals on this forum, a good natured right wing punching bag. I try very hard to be open-minded, and I learn a great deal from having to defend my views against articulate criticism. On the other hand, if you assess me as having potential access and placement for your campaign (terms you will understand), then know that I am at least as committed to my views as you are. In particular, having spent plenty of time in Iraq, I am absolutely convinced we are doing the right thing there.
So I’ll enter the discussion here. A simple question: is there a statute of limitations on ancestral claims of land? Is the strength of the claim determined mainly by recency? In other words, do the Palestinians have a stronger claim to Palestine than the Seminoles do to Florida?
Good luck on your trip!
Ed
20 February 2005, 9:28 amStan:
Not a lot of time to answer, but the comparison between Palestinians and First Natons here is a better comparison than some, though no comparison between any two circumstances can absorb the particularity of each. Not being of a legalistic frame of mind, the question of a statute of limitations does not interest me. Rather, I will say that I would have aligned with the Seminoles then (and now.. my own great grandma escaped from an Oklahoma rez by stealing a team of horses), as I align with the Palestinian struggle against genocide and for self-determination now. The strengfht of any claim will ultimately be determined by global political alignments and the organization of the Palestinian resistance. Legal and treaty claims merely underline these faits accompli.
It shouldn’t surprise you that I am an “armed struggle” guy, having a pretty good idea what actual and not abstract power projection really looks like, and what it takes to confront it. I completely endorse Palestinian resistance by any means necessary, even though I provide no material support, nor do I think myself qualified to tell Palestinians what form that struggle needs to take.
On Iraq you are plainly wrong. And I don’t defend my position on the basis of simple legality — the war is unequivocally illegal, because the US is a signatory to the UN Charter, which the invasion violated. Legality does not determine the limits of US action, because there is no conventional enforcement mechanism availabe to the rest of the world to back it up. The limits to US action right now are being defined by the Iraqi armed resistance.
I oppose US imperialism not merely on moral grounds, but because the system it represents is a disaster for the majority of humanity, and will in short order be a disaster for all of humanity.
The war itself, though you may have exceptionally been with Kurds in the North, I don’t know, is characterized systemically and not anecdotally by both Abu Ghriab and the operation in Fallujah — where men of ‘military age’ were turned back into the city during the evacuation, then subjected to a free-fire zone once the assault began. So the actual conduct of the war is illegal as well — a clear serial violation of the Geneva Conventions, to which the US is also signatory.
But the larger picture is not only that US motives are ultimately representative of the mid-term interests of a US ruling class that is facing a global crisis of profit — held at bay by military power enforcing monetary chicanery in the form of dollar hegemony. It is that this war will undermine the interests of that class even faster than the tendencies that were already in motion.
So the ultimate irony may be that those who support US imperial ambitions (and who should be arguing for some kind of soft landing at the end of the American Imperium) and those who oppose them, like me, and most of the rest of the world [for those who actually care about democratic majorities], both have good reason to argue for the evacuation of Iraq.
I hope you will have the time and inclination to see a few of the more detailed arguments on this blog that describe this process more thoroughly… and perhaps even respond to them.
Best,
Stan
PS - The Ranger School cadre called back to CPT May and me asking if we trained cyborgs. Our knees are now telling us the price of that reputation. It’s hard to stay that special with an ordinary body.
20 February 2005, 11:25 amEd:
Stan, you probably won’t read this until you return, but I’ll post now while it’s fresh in my mind.
I ask about a statute for limitations for a simple and obvious reason. The Jewish people have their own ancestral claim to the land of Israel, having been systematically purged and scattered from Israel by the Romans, the Islamic Caliphate, the Crusaders, and the Ottoman Turks. So until the Canaanites show up, the Jews seem to have first dibs on the place.
If victimology is the criteria of choice, well the Israeli people have that in spades. Anti-Semitism greatly predates the Holocaust and Zionism. Pogroms and genocidal campaigns against the Jews have been a fact of history since the early middle ages, in many countries for many reasons.
However, if you want to conclude that the legitimacy of a claim is ultimately decided by the strength of the fight for it, then let’s go there. From that viewpoint, then Zionism must stand as the greatest resistance movement in the history of mankind. Imagine, being driven off your homeland and scattered to alien countries, repressed for 2000 years, yet maintaining enough cultural identity that you return to reclaim your homeland by force and defend it against all comers.
If you advocate armed resistance by any means necessary, then you forfeit the right to demand ethical conduct from the other side. Both sides are plenty blameworthy, but only the Israelis make some attempt to target based on justifiable rules of engagement. The Palestinian ROE are simple: kill as many Jews as you can, by any means neccessary. How any moral being can rationalize a suicide bomber on a public bus is beyond me.
If Abbas can assert control over Hamas and similar groups, and Sharon can assert control over the settlers and the Hebrew far right, there might just be a chance for a legitimate peace. Otherwise, it will ultimately be decided by force of arms, and the Arabs always seem to fare badly in those contests.
On to Iraq. I find it telling that you declare me wrong without even hearing my arguments. And not just wrong in your opinion, but wrong period. Very dogmatic, almost a religious response.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a forced subjugation of 80% of the people by the other 20%. The Sunnis exercised absolute power over the Kurds and Shiites, and knew no bounds in exercising that power. Overturning that regime and installing a viable democratic process was moral, legal, ethical, and smart for US interests.
Your characterization of Abu G and Fallujah as being typical of the conduct of the war is disingenuous and without basis. I have been in all geographic areas of Iraq during the last 18 months, and have seen the conduct of the war from both a command policy viewpoint and a boots-on-the-ground viewpoint. The large majority of US troops and their commanders strive to accomplish their missions in an ethical and legal manner. Men make mistakes, organizations screw up, and some men do evil things intentionally, but that is NOT representative of the entire US war effort. It dismays me that a man with your experience and credibility on the matter would support such a simplistic viewpoint. You KNOW it’s more complicated than you portray.
There are several faces to the insurgency, but none of them represent anything near a majority opinion of Iraqis. The Sunni insurgent movement is a transparent attempt to preserve by force what the Sunnis would lose at the ballot box. The Jihadis and Wahabis claim to be expelling the US, but their targeting seems to be driven mainly by hate for Shiites. Insurgents kill and maim far more Iraqi civilians than the US does, and they kill far more Iraqis than they kill US troops.
Nobody wants to get out of Iraq more than the military. The thrill was gone about 18 months ago, when we realized that this was to be no Grenada or Panama … those CIBs were coming with plenty of purple hearts and body bags. But to pull out right now would be the height of irresponsible and amoral behavior. We have put a process in motion that should lead to a government that represents the people, and we have to see it through.
Not that we haven’t made mistakes, including an unwillingness to declare a timetable for withdrawal. I’d be happy to discuss such mistakes in another location on this blog if it suits you. Perhaps my presence as OPFOR will attract lefty blog traffic?
In the meantime, have fun on your trip.
Ed
PS: All bodies are ordinary, but some minds are not. Kipling’s words ring true: “If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone …” I got my first lesson on that from the ruck runs and land nav courses you ran. I got my worst lesson so far in a laurel thicket after a hanging bridge.
20 February 2005, 5:30 pmcharlie orrock:
Ed, it’s 5 days later, I don’t know if you’re still looking at this site, so don’t know if this will ever get to you. Or if it does, if you’ll be interested in replying. I’m not Stan, nor do I speak for him. As I said in my comment to his announcement of a 3-week hiatus, I’m a fellow SF’er, tho not a lifer like you & Stan. However, I was a 10th Grouper, like yourself. If you have any interest in dialoging, I’d like to touch on a couple of points you raised in your comments. Stan said you were wrong on Iraq, & you objected to such a conclusion without having heard you out. Fair enough; I’m sure when he gets back in a situation where dialogue can pick back up, that the 2 of you can go at it point by point. But I think when you state that the US is right in Iraq, it’s legitimate to say that’s wrong in general before the particularities are gone into.
One particularity I would like to mention & hope that you will reply to: you say it’s disengenuous & without basis to claim that Abu Gharaib & the assault on Falluja characterize the US presence in Iraq. You argue this point on the basis of having seen US troops and their commanders all over Iraq. But what are you contrasting? The values of military individuals & their efforts to win hearts & minds with command decisions that reach up to the top. Do you agree that the destruction of Fallaja, isolating the hospital, turning the city into a free-fire zone, etc did not happen as a result of a few bad apples, but was the result of a command decision, the application of our policy? I imagine that the example of Abu G may get more of an argument. After all Rumsfeld & the president do say that was the work of a few bad apples, but the FBI reports out of Gitmo, the Red Cross reports from Barghram, the Gonzalez memos, the investigative work of Seymour Hirsch, etc, expose the fact that it wasn’t a whole lot of bad apples all doing the same thing simultaneously, it was command policy.
The other point: what is an OPFOR & how will your presence as such attract lefty blog traffic? I do hope to hear back from you, but if you are content to wait for Stan’s return, I’ll just read your contributions in that context. I appreciate your straight-forwardness and willingnes to engage with someone who has gone such a long way from the original path. I first became aware of Stan from reading his book, Hideous Dream. Look forward to reading your reaction to it. Charlie Orrock
25 February 2005, 4:16 pmEd:
Charlie,
Yes, I’m still checking and would be glad to discuss with you. Let me start by thanking you for the tone of your message. I wish I could be as consistently civil in my discussions with those I disagree with.
Fallujah was a terrible tragedy, but it had to be done. That town had become an operational sanctuary for insurgents and terrorists, from which car bombs and IEDs radiated out throughout the country and killed both Iraqis and Americans. Increasingly, they killed innocent Iraqis.
We went to great lengths to minimize civilian deaths in Fallujah. For one thing, we did our best to motivate and facilitate a voluntary evacuation of the city prior to the start of battle. We essentially announced when the attack would start, in order to give civilians maximum chance to get the hell out of there. Once engaged, we did our best to devise ROE that protected both civilians and our own soldiers.
The ugly fact is that no amount of planning and precision will prevent all civilian casualties. That is especially so for an urban battlefield. You, and especially Stan, should know the impossibility of preventing all civilian deaths in such a tactical environment. I happen to think we did a pretty good job of keeping them as low as possible. But if you want to assign blame, look no further than the resistance fighters who deliberately chose to make Fallujah a defensive stand, and deliberately discouraged their people from evacuating. They used their own families as human shields.
Abu Ghraib can be discussed on 2 levels, the policy level and the action level. Unfortunately, the left chooses to blur the levels into one, mainly because it suits their purposes to do so.
At the policy level, of course we had policies that dictated what could and couldn’t be done to detainees. Such policies were in effect at Abu G, Gitmo, and plenty of other places. From what I have seen, these policies were reasonable and legal. In fact, I have seen few authorized techniques that I have not had done to me during resistance training. I’m sure that the treatment I got in SERE and Stan got in his training would have violated the rules at Gitmo or Abu G.
At the action level, there were people who disregarded policies and made their own. This will always happen. Nothing is more dangerous than young people with absolute control over others. That is why we have a chain of command … to enforce the rules.
When the chain of command fails, as it did so abjectly at Abu G, you see the results. The tactical leadership there was staggeringly bad. The company commander was openly mocked by his troops to his face. The battalion commander was similiarly weak. The Brigade commander, BG Karpinski, says she did not inspect the prison because “she was not allowed to enter.” And she was supposedly in command! Is it any wonder that the environment inside that prison went horribly wrong?
But to say that Abu G is typical of our detainee operations is just plain false. I’ve seen plenty of detention facilities, and I’ve handled prisoners. In every case I saw, prisoners were treated humanely and legally, if not always “nicely.”
One thing about the media that really pisses me off lately is the watering down of the meaning of torture. Those of us in SOF don’t take that word lightly, since we have all prepared ourselves for the possibility of being tortured ourselves. I want the employment of actual torture to be as widely condemned as possible, to reduce the chances that I or my brothers in arms will ever have to endure it.
Defining every incident of loutish or unpleasant behavior as torture does just the opposite. It desensitizes the public to what should be a shocking word, something that horrifies and galvanizes us to action. It gives the impression that everyone tortures, and that torture is commonplace in US custody, something that is just not true.
Make no mistake; I do not want to be beaten, slapped around, or forced to stand up for hours. I don’t want to be stripped naked, humiliated, or mocked. But that isn’t torture. Cutting off my fingers, squeezing my balls in a vise, burning my skin … that is torture. Let’s not water down the word for political gain.
OPFOR is short for Opposing Forces. Those are the guys in the funny uniforms that opposed you on training exercises. Having a token right winger around as OPFOR would presumably make a blog more interesting than a simple left wing echo chamber where everyone agrees with each other. I mean, without me or someone like me, the dialog would get sort of boring, eh? Sample:
“Boy, Abu G is bad.”
“Actually, Abu G is really bad.”
“You’re both wrong. Abu G is really really bad.”
25 February 2005, 8:33 pmcharlie orrock:
Ed,
ok, I’d like to respond to your comments about Fallujah, but before one can discuss the destruction of a city in order to save it, minimalization of civilian deaths or not, the whole mission has to be examined.
I mean, if a foreign power were trying to install an amenable government here in the US, and Philadelphia, say, was a center of resistance to that effort, then whether or not the destruction of Philly is a necessary tragedy or not depends on the whether the foreign power has a righteous cause or not.
In your last note to Stan you say the US is justified because Saddam Hussein’s regime was a forced subjugation of 80% of the people by the other 20%. We won’t go into the fact that that was never the argument used by the Bush administration to us or the rest of the world to justify the invasion. Let’s just pretend he had said that all along.
He would still be lying. The US has intervened in many countries & changed a lot of regimes, but I can’t think of one instance where the US unilaterally (which takes WWII out of consideration) promoted democracy (meaning the will of the people, not pro-US).
It has, however, overturned democracy, thwarted the will of the people, replacing democratically elected governments with military juntas, usually, monarchies, at least once. Examples? Guatamala, 1954. the Congo, 1960. Dominican Republic, 1965. Indonesia, 1965. Chile, 1973. Haiti, 1990 and 2004. Just a few examples. There were quite a few failed attempts, also, the most recent being Venezula 2 years ago.
Lets talk about the most relevant example to Iraq. The democratically elected government of the modernist, secular prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossedegh, was overthrown in a CIA sponsored coup in 1953 which installed our boy, the Shah. The organizer of the coup, Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy’s grandson, and later top exec of Gulf Oil), wrote a memoir of his successful regime change, which is instructive. Mossedegh was not acceptable to the US for several reasons, one of which, the replacement of the British as prime arbiter of Iranan oil I need to know more about. Two others I understand well. M was too neutralist in the cold war, and also he was promoting a plan to nationalize his country’s oil. (Interestingly enough, something similar got Guatamala’s Jacobo Arbenz in trouble the following year–he wanted to start modestly taxing Chiquita Bannana, I mean, United Fruit.)
In organizing his coup, Roosevelt employed the standard tactics of hiring street mobs and such, but his real ace-in-the-hole was Ayatolla Khomeni and his fundamentalist mullahs, who didnt like M’s secularism. (Shades of Afghanistan in the 1980’s, when the US’s favorite anti-secularist was Osama Bin Laden)
I guess the Shah didn’t enforce the moral values sufficiently enough for the Ayatolla, since Khomeni turned against him & went into Parisian exile. Nonetheless, the Shah had a long enriching reign, but his support evidently wasn’t as big as Saddam Hussein’s 20%. There were, and are, a lot of secular, freedom-loving people in Iran, but they fell in behind the mullahs when the 1979 revolution resulted in a confontation with the US.
The US lost big when they lost Iran; the response was to encourage Saddam Hussein’s 1980’s war with Iran. I’m sure you’ve heard the “leftist” accusations of US satellite and chemical support for SH’s gassing of the Iranians. I urge you to do a little research, Ed, from various sources, because it really happened. During your research, try to find one instance of US condemnation of SH’s gassing of the Kurds–
26 February 2005, 11:20 pmcharlie orrock:
Sorry, little interrupt there. Try to find some official US condemnation of SH’s gassing of the Kurds when it happenned in the 80’s, not in 2002. You wont find any, because SH was our boy! Just like Noriega, Osama, countless others. SH must have really felt sucker punched at the US response to his invasion of Kuwait, after US ambassador April Gillespie told him that the US had no opinion of his threats to resolve Iraq’s border dispute with Kuwait by force.
So Bush was not only lying when he said Iraq posed an iminent threat with its possession of WMD, he’s lying now when he says that the REAL reason for the invasion & occupation of Iraq is because he wants to replace a bad guy with democracy. SH is a bad guy, just like he was in the 80’s, when he was Rumsfeld’s darling. The difference between 2003 & the 80’s is two-fold. 1. in the 80’s he served US geopolitical goals. 2. After that, he was extremely vulnerable (presicely because he didn’t have WMD)
Bush may carpet-bomb Iran, maybe even Korea, but he sure ain’t gonna try to invade and regime change them. They’re a lot stronger than their erstwhile partner in the axis-of-evil.
It’ll be a few days before I’ll have the time to get back online, and I don’t think blogging is supposed to look like this anyway. Let’s do this a little more bite-sized. Charlie
26 February 2005, 11:53 pmEd:
Charlie:
Early in this discussion, Stan said something very profound: “I try not to do regret. Seems a pretty pointless emotional luxury. I just try to do amends.”
I believe in applying the same principle to US policy. So I really don’t care what bad things we’ve done in the past. They really have no bearing on whether we are doing the right thing now. Failure to support democracy in 1953 or 1979 does not force us to follow the same path in 2005.
Likewise, what George Bush did or didn’t say in the runup to the war is also irrelevant. This isn’t about one person, no matter how much you may hate or distrust him. His statements have no bearing on the morality or wisdom of the US effort there.
Only one thing matters. You bring it up and then never address it. 80% of the country was brutally subjugated by a military junta supported by about 15% of the country. Now the entire country has a chance to build a new power structure based on self-government and the rule of law. The left should be overjoyed by this prospect. Yet you are all too fixated with settling the scores of the past to recognize that you are on the wrong side of history in Iraq.
Speaking of being on the wrong side of history; you say you can’t think of an example where the US has promoted democracy. I’ll give you a recent one: Afghanistan. The Taliban was one of the most repressive, reactionary, miscegenistic regimes in recent history. Their downfall was inarguably a victory for the Afghan people.
Regards,
27 February 2005, 10:27 amEd
charlie orrock:
Ed,
the past is never irrelevant; the only reason the world is the way it is is because of the way the present was created from the past. But I’m willing to disregard history if it’ll help create a better present. I was only bringing it up to say why words like “liberty” spoken by certain people have no ring of authenticity with me.
So let’s start with a clean slate. SH is overthrown, but we have a foreign occupying power, and that makes for, I think, an impossibility to succor democracy. Now if that foreign occupying power accedes to the wishes of the people even if the people’s will is that it withdraw, we maight have the basis for something positive developing.
Speaking of Afghanistan, I think the Taliban had some serious competition for the titles you gave it in Saudi Arabia today. They still behead women, don’t they?
And speaking of the left; we’re not all so fixated by the sins of the past to see the reality of Iraq. There’s a few self-described leftists who are part of the coalition of the willing. Christopher Hitchens is the one who is best known to me. Charlie
28 February 2005, 3:49 amEd:
Charlie:
There’s one thing that I and the insurgents agree upon. We both want the occupation to end. We just disagree on the conditions that it should end under.
I think it ends when Iraq has a functioning representative government that can continue the process of growing democracy in Iraq. The Insurgents explicitly want the occupation to end BEFORE this happens, and for good reason. They want the opportunity to kill said representative government before it can take hold.
Of course that is a bit of an oversimplification. A large part of the insurgency now is what I would call “armed negotiation”. These are the Sunnis who are protecting themselves from what they believe they will lose in a fair democratic process dominated by Kurds and Shiites. They will lay down their arms if given sufficient guarantees of protection as a new minority. AMZ and the jihadists, on the other hand, will never give up and will have to be exterminated.
If you advocate complete and immediate withdrawal, please describe to me what you believe will happen after we pull out. If not, then you and I agree; we just need to work out the details.
Yes, Christopher Hitchens gets it. So does Andrew Sullivan. And to their credit, so do many “Liberal” Democrats, like Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton (yeech). It’s good to see diversity of thought among our ideologies.
Sorry so long winded. This stuff gets me going.
Ed
28 February 2005, 6:39 pmcharlie orrock:
Yes, I believe in complete & immediate withdrawal. Of course that will not begin to pay for what the US govt owes the Iraqi’s for the death & destruction rained down upon that country. What do I believe will then happen? That’s a hard question. Quite a few possibilities, but who could possibly predict which one of them will be correct?
The people who justified this completely illegal war with outright lies and manipulations didn’t worry too much about the consequences of their premptive strategy. That or they were filled with so much hubris they refused to consider the many fine military and intelligence sources that pointed out some of the more obvious consequences.
I do know this much. Whatever the consequences may be for the US to reverse its policy & end the occupation, it will make an Iragi solution possible. Might not be a good solution, but it won’t be one imposed by a foreign occupation, one which would have very little or no legitamacy in the eyes of most Iraqi’s, Muslims thruout the world and most of the rest the planet’s population.
Why is this not obvious? Any government which depends upon foreign troops for its power is the client of those troops govt. Was the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Vietnam worse than the 2 million killed in the conflict?
There are many Shiite forces opposed to the occupation. There could actually be some eventual accomodation worked out between Sunni & Shiite. Or maybe not. But as long as a foreign power calls the shots, then any gov’t coexisting under the umbrella of that power is not going to be seen by Iraqi’s as anything but a puppet. How would you feel, Ed, if your candidate had to wear a Goodhousekeeping Seal of Approval, or its newspaper would have to be shut down by foreign troops. Why is it so hard to imagine wearing someone else’s shoes?
I don’t understand why the Iraqi policy of this administration has any support left. There has been no truth told, no sober analysis, just confident predictions, which turned out to be completly ungrounded in reality. A back-door draft, horrible misuse of troops, and scapegoating of a “few bad apples”, whenever the consequences of this terrible position the US admin has put these stop-lossed, stressed-out trops in. Yet the actions of the people who, against all common sense, maintain their loyalty to the draft-dodger-in-chief and all his chickenhawk handlers think they’re “supporting the troops” by slapping these yellow ribbons on the back of their cars. I tell you, history is not going to be too kind to this hypocritical “support”.
So go ahead, Ed. Get as long-winded as your passion compels you to. I just wish you would combine your passion with a willingness to walk a mile in the other fellow’s shoes
Charlie
2 March 2005, 4:01 amEd:
Every time I ask you to address the future, you answer with the past. If you can’t address the likely consequences of an immediate pullout, then you have no business advocating it … not if your professed concern for the Iraqis is genuine. Anger and bitterness are no basis for decision-making.
2 March 2005, 7:56 pmSteve:
I’m dismayed to see what started as a refreshingly civil and open exchange take on something of a bitter, ad-hominem tinge in the last two posts. I have high hopes that this blog can transcend the digital shouting matches and echo-chamber politics that mar so much of what passes for political discussion these days.
Ed, I have a few questions for you:
1) What evidence can you point to that suggests that an outside military force can impose a stable liberal democracy on an area riven by ethnic divisions and with no democratic tradition? Are there historical examples that give you hope that such a thing is possible?
2)If the intention of the US government is only to create stable democratic institutions for a free and self-managed Iraq (and not, as many believe, to get a firm grip on the oil spigot), why are permanent military installations (I’ve heard as many as 13) being constructed on Iraqi soil?
2 March 2005, 8:15 pmEd:
Steve:
Yeah, you’re right on the tone. I’ll dial it down.
1) Short trite answer: Never been done before. Longer answer: Germany and Japan (minus the ethnic division). And Afghanistan, though the book is obviously still out on the stable part.
But let’s not get unrealistic here. I’m not claiming that Iraq will become a warm, sandy Canada overnight. Our expectations should be for a representative government with legal safeguards for groups not in power. I believe, given the negotiating positions of the 3 major ethnic groups, that this is achievable, though the Sunnis will be tough to bring into the fold.
A question back at you: why does the left refuse to acknowledge that getting rid of Saddam can be a good thing for the Iraqi people?
2) I’ve been to most of the major bases in Iraq, and none of them are even remotely permanent. Sorry, but that information is just wrong.
Ed
2 March 2005, 10:40 pmGil:
Hi, Ed.
I like to see what you are saying. You are “righ wing”, but dont seem the Right-fundamentalists, and cinic people i see in “Wall Street” Journal comments (Mark Bowden include). You seem to be more reflective.
Because this, i effort to write this message, althoug my very bad english..:(
Think about, man….
You say:
- “Dont look at the past”
- “Dont listen what Bush Say”
- “Dont look at Abu Ghraib”
- “Dont look at Iraqui People say”
- “Dont worry about Al Qaeda cells, now prospering in Iraqui” (after the invasion).
- “Forget about false WMD”….
Dont you think we go to stay blind, deaf, and forgoten (absent-minded)??
This is no-see what is going on… ignore the big pieces of reality. This is … han.. self-illusion?? or maybe, auto-protection system…..??
Like to say: “Don’t look at the Past, Don’t look at the Present We are making good things…. in the future.”
But, in the Future… nothing will happen. The Iraquians dont want this intervenction…. The western Democracy don’t appear to be a good thing in the Clans tradiction of Iraquian…….
I think, man… “In the future….The Past repeat”.
I like to continue talk whith yours, but my language limitations in english is an obstacle…-_-’…
Thank for listen.. sorry the bad english^^
Gil (Brazillian)
3 March 2005, 6:13 pmSteve:
Ed,
I suppose the answer to your question about whether removing Saddam can be a good thing in Iraq depends on the qualification, compared to what? Compared to the pan-arab socialism that we leftists like to imagine might have emerged in the region in the 1960s without the meddling of the CIA? No. Compared to the Iraq that might have emerged from internal resistance to Saddam after the Gulf War but was stifled by US duplicitousness, probably not. Compared to an indefinite continuation of the murderous sanctions? Probably.
The leftists I know have no love lost for Saddam, so I can’t speak for those that may (though I suspect the Saddam-loving leftist is a straw man created by the right). Many leftists believe, as I do, that Hussein was helped into power by the CIA and supported in the worst excesses of his barbarity by the US (e.g. gassing the Kurds). Further, from what I understand, many of the same neocons now holding the reins were involved in the decision to promise and then withold support for an internal uprising against Saddam in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. We who are skeptical of the claim that improving the lives of Iraqis was the motivation for the occupation are equally skeptical that it will be the result.
I am dubious that a stable political formation can be achieved by US fiat. I suspect that the divisions in Iraqi society will come to a violent reckoning sooner or later, and that our presence there is sort of like the lid on the pressure cooker.
4 March 2005, 12:17 amcharlie orrock:
Ed & Steve, I don’t know if you’re still around, Ed, but I get your point that your presence can be a magnet for lefty response. I don’t understand your comment responding to my last entry–that whenever you ask me to address the future, I answer with the past. I thought I was addressing the future if the US withdraws. The future’s basically unknowable–it may go very bad for the Iraqi people, it may go good, or somewhere in between. What I further said was that it will continue to go bad for the Iraqis if the occupation remains, because the US presence will preclude any Iraqi resolution. US troops will be a target, and any regime under its protection will be a target.
It’s not only legitimate to look at the past when trying to figure out the future, it’s necessary. Steve’s reply about the overthrow of SH makes points very well taken. Since the US has removed many people, mostly good, some bad, then the removal of anyone, good or bad, by the US unilaterally, can be nothing but a bad thing. That’s why intervention in a genocidal or similarly atrocious situation has to be done by a international force, one that has credibility as to its motives. Another reason why history is relevant.
The only point you made, Steve, that I question is whether the US occupation really is a lid on the pressure cooker, or the fire under the pressure cooker. I agree that it will be very difficult for the the Iraqis and any truly supportive friends to prevent a violent reckoning of the divisions there. That’s why superpowers shouldn’t engage in preemptive warmaking. One of the more compelling reasons why the UN was created at the end of WWII.
Charlie
4 March 2005, 9:34 amcharlie orrock:
Gil,
I am just now reading your entry again.Writing it may have been a struggle, and it may have required constant use of a dictionary. But it reads like poetry. Your English, whether you feel it’s easy or not, reads like a poem. La luta continua! Charlie
4 March 2005, 9:59 amEd:
Gil: Welcome to the discussion. Your English is far better than my Portuguese.
All: I avoid getting dragged into historical discussions for 2 reasons. First, I think you all subscribe to a very selective, self serving interpretation of events that does little more than confirm your own ideology. Doubtless you think the same of me. So discussion seems pointless, as it will quickly break down into rhetoric.
But more importantly, hashing over such arguments just draws the focus off the central question, which thankfully we have now narrowed in on: Should the US withdraw now, or wait?
There is only one way for any rational person to formulate an answer to that question. That is to ask “what will happen if we do,” and compare it to “what will happen if we don’t”. You make your best prediction for each, and select the course of action you believe likely to produce the best outcome.
Charlie, of course you can’t know the future for sure. But that’s the way life works, isn’t it? You make your best guess and place your bet. If you can’t do that, then you sit on the sideline.
My best guess is that if we withdraw now, Iraq will immediately split into 3 nations, with massive violence as the competing sides seek to consolidate their hold on disputed areas. (Now if someone wants to argue that Iraq is a recent, artificial construct that SHOULD split up, that’s a whole separate discussion in its own right.) But to think that, upon our departure, the Iraqis will magically find a way to reconcile peacefully … well that’s just wishful thinking, and frankly rather laughable.
On the other hand, I believe that if we stay for another 1 to 2 years, the Iraqis have a good chance of forging some sort of power-sharing agreement that avoids full-scale warfare. I base that belief on the massive turnout for the elections, on the progress currently being made in negotiations, and on the statements and positions of influential Iraqi leaders such as Sistani and Talabani.
By the way, several of you persist in your belief that a majority of Iraqis are opposed to what we are trying to do in Iraq. What do you base that belief on? The Kurds, at 20% of the population, overwhelmingly support us. The Shiites, at 60% of the population, will strongly support the process as long as Sistani keeps telling them to, which he has and does. That’s nearly 80% support right there. So at best about 20% of the population is opposed to the current transitional government process. Seems like some of you are basing your positions on the demands of a violent minority. Strange.
Steve, I can’t imagine any self-respecting liberal or leftist would have any affinity for Saddam. That’s why I’m so surprised that more of you are not welcoming his departure from power. It is inarguably a good thing for the Iraqi people that he is gone.
See, told ya that I would draw lefties to the website. Like moths to a flame.
Ed
5 March 2005, 12:38 amGil:
Charlie,
….
.. Thank you very much!! I don’t think this poor vocabulary can be like this.. very thanx!(surprised)
6 March 2005, 6:26 amGil:
Ed,
I think you are reducing so much options, and saying me to dont consider the possibility of try to withdraw in a organizated and graduated form, in order to listen the iraquian people desire (the Shiitas appear to be very patient, althoug a bad and injustice fame the western people gave to them).
I think we have to wonder if good things can be in course, for a simply reason: the geopolitical estrategists.. the real war reason.
You are so engaged in a dangerous campain, in astrange land, and i think a time to see other points of view (kepping the mind open, and dont reduce or ignore things, calling them ‘left’, ‘civil’, or any form of credibility attack)is a very good for you, today or tomorrow
Its making so difficulty to keep the discussion, my limits are so evident, and the dead end is nearly. I think is better to stop here, or i gonna explode my head, and my dictionary, and you dont understand what i’m trying to say. Thank very much for all of you. I’m continue to read your interesting …. hn.. coloqui??. You see… limitatins are avident…. bye, people.
Gil
Ps.: Ed, I’m not “left”. Here, in Brazil, all the left and right teory, had been brough from European and US, except for a minority people, this concept is misty, and no-sense. Our history are so different of American History, our experience are other. Because this, right and left, althoug exists here,is to misty ideas.
6 March 2005, 6:52 amEd:
Gil:
If you believe that the US should “withdraw in an orderly and graduated form, in order to listen to the will of the Iraqi people”, then you and I are in complete agreement. Moreover, you are in agreement with the stated policy and intentions of the US government. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do there. Get an Iraqi representative government going, get Iraqi military and police forces stood up to protect it, and then get the heck out.
I think you underestimate your ability to make your point. Stick around. It’s always worthwhile to have other points of view in the discussion, especially those not constrained by our thinking.
Ed
6 March 2005, 8:51 amsteve:
Ed,
I think you overestimate Iraqi support for the continued US occupation– you arrive at the 80% figure through fuzzy math that glosses over the difference of opinion within the ethnic groups you cite. for instance, a majority of Shiites doesn’t equal 60% of the Iraqi population, it equals somewhere between 30% and 60%, depending on how strong a majority it is. I wasn’t able to track down any recent opinion polls, but the ones taken around this time last year show support for the US remaining in the country at slightly better or slighty worse than 50%, depending on which poll you believe. I wonder whether that figure might have changed in the last year.
(http://www.j-n-v.org/AW_briefings/JNV_briefing056.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-04-28-poll-cover_x.htm
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5217874/site/newsweek/
)
I can understand your reticence to engage in discussion of the history of US involvement in 3rd world countries in this forum, as I doubt many of us have the historical background to make point-for-point analyses of given situations that would make for fruitful discussion.
For my part, reading history that gives an alternate picture of events to the one we all learned in High School has been formative of my understanding of how the world works. I’m curious how much you have engaged with critical histories of the US– Zinn, Chomsky, Blum, etc. Chomsky’s historical critique of US foreign policy is based largely on internal government documents, which makes his most damning indictments difficult to dismiss as ’self-serving interpretation’.
You cite in your last post ‘the stated policy and intentions’ of the gov’t. What is your take on the shift in these stated intentions from neutralizing the threat of WMD to nation-building? Do you believe that the initial justification for the war was simply based on ‘faulty intelligence’? Is this the same intelligence apparatus that we are supposed to trust to give us a clean read on the basis of the Iraqi resistance?
-Steve
6 March 2005, 8:23 pmGil:
Hi, Ed.
About agreements:
8 March 2005, 12:42 pmI don’t believe in US intentions. I don’t believe because i think is difficulty to trust in Bush’s Administration.
About withdraw: well… you are in Iraq. Government of Iraq, now don’t exist, except for Alawi (i think Iraq people dont trust in Alawi, too). But the problem, is not about how to whitdraw.. the problem is how make bushs Government accept the whitdraw. They don’t want peace and Democracy, i think. they want Geopolitical Control.
I think i disagree this notion of a state-Policy, becaus i can’t trust in people like Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz…
They make the state, you are calling Policy.. but they are not Good Cops.
If we don’t to questione what they say, the Policy state can turn into Gangster-state.
Ed:
Steve,
Some very good points.
Yes, I engaged in fuzzy math. But the rudimentary analysis that you and I did was far more in depth than most people engage in. From the left, it seems to me that most analysis is along the lines of “there is an insurgency, therefore the majority of the Iraqi people must be opposed to the US effort there.” They exhibit zero willingness to actually look at the varying opinions among the varying ethic groups.
Will you at least concede that a large majority of both Shiites and Kurds was in favor of Saddam’s fall?
I don’t know how reliable a poll would be, and like all polls it would depend on the specific wording of the questions. Such results would be difficult to interpret because of cultural variations.
I think the most reliable indicator of public sentiment was the recent election. About 58% of the population chose to risk their lives to vote. I won’t try to interpret that vote as being in favor of the US presence. But it clearly was a vote in favor of a democratic process leading to a representative government. If you or anyone else has an idea for protecting a democratic process leading to a representative government WITHOUT US troops protecting the process in the early stages, let’s hear it.
Sorry, haven’t read any of those authors, with the exception of Chomsky. I read some of his stuff and found it intellectually dishonest. Yes, he uses internal documents, but he cherrypicks. Anyone can sift thru documents and pick out only the ones that confirm the point they want to make, while ignoring all evidence to the contrary. In so doing they knowingly present a false picture while maintaining the illusion of objective research. Isn’t that what you all accuse the Bush administration of doing with WMD evidence? Anyhow, Chomsky is not the least bit persuasive to me. Give me someone with personal experience in a region, like Tom Friedman, and I’ll read his analysis.
Re “stated intentions”: there were always 3 stated reasons for the war. One was WMD. The other was to remove a brutal dictator. The third was to implant democracy in the heart of the Arab world. The administration may have emphasized WMD in certain forums, such as the UN, where that argument was most persuasive. The media may have seized upon WMD as the most controversial and thus most news-worthy, and reported it the most. But President Bush and his administration always cited all three reasons.
In fact, for some of the most vilified persons, like Paul Wolfowitz, democratization may have been the MOST persuasive reason and their true underlying motive. Wolfowitz is someone who has been seized upon as a bogeyman by the left, without even bothering to look at his personal history and what he stands for. Were you to look closer, you would be surprised at how close your views are to his in some ways.
Gil, might want to get current with your facts. Alawi is out, and Jafari and Talabani are in. And both will be selected not by the US, but by elected representatives of a majority of the Iraqi people. How will you discredit them when they are leading the government on March 16th?
I understand most of you won’t trust the US government long enough to see how things develop. All I can say is that, quite frankly, your trust is not needed at this point. Bush won the election, which removes the one realistic chance you had to get the US out of Iraq anytime soon. So we WILL get to see the outcome of this project in 4 years.
Ed
8 March 2005, 10:28 pmEd:
Steve,
Sorry, overlooked your question about trusting the administration to give a clean read on the basis of the insurgency. You shouldn’t. Now that Iraq is a fairly open society, you don’t need to rely on government estimates. There is plenty of open source media available. After following due precautions to make sure you get a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints, you can make up your own mind.
Ed
9 March 2005, 6:54 pmGil:
Hi, Ed
I Know Bush win, and US don’t need my trust not-needed. Iraq trust is Priority.Peace is better to conquer this.
15 March 2005, 6:56 am