Iraq
I meant to get to this over the weekend. Then again, if I'd done all that I'd meant to I'd have won the Powerball lottery on Saturday night.
Christopher Dickey writes that the Bush administration's decisions in Iraq have been disastrous and are now irreversible.
Ever since it became clear toward the end of 2001 that the Bush administration was headed for war with Iraq, I?ve been thinking about John O?Hara?s classic 1934 novel ?Appointment in Samarra.? Although the title refers to a town north of Baghdad,* the story is actually about a Cadillac dealer in Pennsylvania. After a few too many drinks one Christmas eve, he makes a fatally stupid gesture, and nothing he can do afterward will retrieve the moment or stop the tragic series of events it sets in motion.
The first thing I note is that 15 or more months before the invasion of Iraq, and before the Congressional resolution authorizing the war, and before the UN Resolution giving Saddam an ultimatum, Dickey was against the war. I suppose this is an "I told you so", then.
This administration is a lot like that Cadillac dealer, I?m afraid. You can see it trying to reverse course, struggling to back away from one rash misjudgment after another in the Middle East. But it can?t even begin to set things straight, and at this point I?m not sure anybody can. Among students of the region?in government and in think tanks, in the United States and around the world?there?s a rapidly accumulating sense of doom, and I use the word advisedly.
I'm not an anti-intellectual. I think the fact that some smart people study places, cultures, and all that, is good. But, there's no reason for me to believe that the "students" he refers to, that is, the students of the Middle East and Iraq, are those whose opinions I might respect. There's a ton of nonsense among academia and think tanks that wax poetically while morally equivalizing over the US and Israel, and the horrible fate of the poor poor Iraqis and Palestinians living under jackboots. There's boatloads of multi-cultural idiots who'll overlook terrorists killing a mother and her four children in order to preserve "diversity". I don't know who Dickey refers to, and you won't find it from reading the whole thing because he doesn't tell you. But already, I don't trust the guy, who was against even thinking about going to Iraq as early as 2001.
He goes on:
It?s obvious that many U.S. officials, and possibly the president himself, now understand how badly we?ve screwed up. But they keep coming up with yesterday?s solutions today, and those won?t work anymore. ?The history of post-Saddam Iraq is one of successive, short-lived attempts by the U.S. to mold a political reality to its liking,? says a just-released report from the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. ?With each false start and failed plan, realistic options for a successful and stable political transition have become narrower and less attractive.?
Let's go to the videotape. The International Crisis Group article to which he refers is found here, and the first sentence of the executive summary (from which Dickey's quote was taken) reads:
The situation in Iraq is more precarious than at any time since the April 2003 ouster of the Baathist regime, largely reflecting the Coalition's inability to establish a legitimate and representative political transition process. [italics added].
Help me out here, friends, but doesn't it percolate through even the CNMSNBABCBS filter that the troubles in Fallujah and Najaf are due to a) Baathists and Al Quaeda fighters who don't give a rats ass about representative political transition processes, and/or b) an upstart Islamo-fascist Mullah who saves his rat's asses for much more worthy causes? I guess the ICG are the "students" of Iraq to which he was referring? Is anyone impressed yet?
He turns his eye toward Israel and the Palestinians later in the piece. I know I'm not up on the intracacies there but his analysis is long on how Bush has just screwed the Palestinians and short on how Palestinians terrorists are the reason why that's happened, if in fact it is what happened.
I've quoted only three paragraphs (out of the first four) and it's pretty clear: proposing the use of force if Saddam Hussein didn't comply with UN resolutions regarding weapons disclosure was in itself a bad idea. If that's so, he's got to make his case. Instead its just a drive-by with an AK-47. He finishes with this:
In the meantime, all over the map you can hear the tick-tock of Al-Qaeda-style terrorism counting down to catastrophe. In Britain an attempt to build a chemical bomb was disrupted, then a plot to stage suicide attacks and provoke mass panic in a soccer stadium was stopped. In Jordan, terrorists plotting to set off an enormous toxic explosion were rounded up. Saudi Arabia stopped several bombings earlier in the month, but missed the terrorists who blew up one of the internal security service?s administrative buildings. In Syria, just last night, running gun battles echoed along the streets of embassy row in Damascus. In Thailand, meanwhile, more than 110 people died in what looked like an abortive uprising by Muslim zealots. ?The air is too hot,? says Justo Lacunza-Balda, who runs the Vatican?s well-informed Pontifical Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. ?I have this impression that something very big is being cooked.?Yet when President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney testify in tandem before the 9/11 commission tomorrow, the one phrase unlikely to be heard in that closed-door session is ?sorry.? Even when this administration makes a radical U-turn, it never admits it was headed in the wrong direction to begin with, which may be one reason we?re stuck on this road from Bad to Worse.
What are they supposed to apologize for? Islamo-fascist terrorists killing people or trying to? Dickey's an apologist for terrorists. It's our fault that they are so mad. Well at least the first four letter's of his name are apropo.
So the doomsayers are telling us the war is lost or practically so. The problem is, they've been telling us all sorts of doom and gloom stories all along. They told us hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's would be killed, that there would be street to street fighting, that blah blah blah. I'm certain the war has not gone "as planned" but that's because war by definition does not go as planned. And I'm confident those running this one know that.
I'm not able to parse where more troops, or a different approach, might have made things better today than they have. But what I can parse is this: we are much more capable than we are given credit for by the likes of Dickey.
What really strikes me too about the war is that finding soldiers, either over in Iraq or rotated home, who support the war is like shooting at the broad side of a barn. Air American would love to find an Iraq War Kerry Clone, and for all I know they have. But they are a rare species, indeed.
I don't like that progress towards establishing a democratically elected Iraqi government seems uncertain, nor that Fallujah and Najaf, and a few other hot zones have resulted in many casualties these last several weeks. But I have no faith in those who say it was a mistake from the beginning see-I-told-you-so because they'd be saying that now even if it wasn't a mistake from the beginning. To be fair, those who thought it was a good idea from the beginning (yours truly included) will say just because the job isn't done doesn't mean it can't be done. I'm still betting it works though. As Glenn Reynolds says: we're not going to turn Iraq into Connecticut, or even Turkey, overnight.
Fair enough. But President Bush didn't promise that either. And he didn't promise the troops would be home by now. He told us its dangerous and risky. That's been true so far, as I always thought it would be, and the likes of Mr. Dickey doesn't sway me a bit.