Iraq: Backwards Into the Future
People who thought that the primary goal of the post-invasion occupation of Iraq was to win over a wary population will be shocked, just shocked, to learn that a ranking U.S. general is now saying that heightened troop levels should be maintained into next year because key to the new counterinsurgency strategy is winning over a wary population.
This course of events -– an utterly botched occupation for which there was virtually no planning (remember, the White House was certain that U.S. troops were going to be greeted as liberators and would be withdrawing in mere months) followed by three years of confusion followed by a return to the key original objective -– would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.
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4 Responses to “Iraq: Backwards Into the Future”
We need to do the following :
1. Conduct a census
To know the composition of ethnic groups.
American assertion that Shias are majority is a lie.
2. Reinstate all Sunnis employees , whom Americans fired.
3. Hand-over the Affairs of Iraq to UN.
The “surge” (more like trickle) is not likely to work, and I am very much opposed to it, under the principle that, like Vietnam, we’ve already lost and more resources will not make things much better or our failure less apparent. But the surge is happening anyway, and since it is, I think that we have to give our confidence in the military high command (which does NOT mean the Administration) to do what they can. Opposing the “win them over” strategy on the grounds that you oppose our presence in Iraq is not productive. They are there, it’s not good, so let’s see what we can do within the mess of it all to make it the least bad we can.
I don’t really see a withdrawl happening until just before the ’08 elections or just after them. Until then, let the generals do what they need to do to keep their people alive.
Lynx:
I have to agree with you except for the last part. It is increasingly likely that Bush will dump the whole mess in his successor’s lap.
Shaun, Lynx — I mostly agree with both of you. If we had to invade Iraq—a very questionable assumption in my view, it should have at least been managed with competence. The way it has been mismanaged up until this point has put Petraeus in an almost impossible position. He has at the most 6 months to prove to Congress and the public that he is capable of restoring order in Baghdad with much fewer troops than most experts recommend, and with having to rely on unpredictable variables- the ability of the Iraqi government to function, the ability of a Shiite-dominated administration to achieve political compromise, and the willingness of the Iraqi army to defend the concept of national unity.
Should he not succeed, and I have more confidence in him than I do his mission, the partisan fallout will be endless. The ugly election politics we saw in ’06 will be nothing compared to what we will see in ’08.
How tragic that this administration put most of its efforts into creating political cover for its flawed war policies, and so little into the war policies themselves. When Bush ran in 2000, he had this to say about Clinton:
(his) cardinal mistake was “to launch today’s new causes with little thought of tomorrow’s consequences”. I’m trying to think of any consequences of the Clinton years that compare with the tragic consequences of Bush’s Iraq policy.
The only mystery that remains unsolved is whether he will turf this hot potato to the next administration, or be forced out of a lost cause by his own party after the summer’s over.