What is the Iraq exit strategy to be?

[FruitandNut]

Iraq will become a divided/semi-divided vassal state of Syria, Iran and Turkey.

Once the lions and hyenas leave the 'kill'/'weakened', the vultures and jackals will take over.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

One other point to bear in mind. The Iraq insurgency, unlike many historical insurgencies, doesn't need outside support to keep running. It's pretty much self-financing.

BAGHDAD The sabotage attacks that have crippled Iraq's oil pipelines and refineries for the past three years are now being used to aid a vast smuggling network that is costing the Iraqi government billions of dollars a year, senior Iraqi and American officials here say.

Once thought to be only a tool for insurgents to undermine the government, the pipeline attacks have evolved into a lucrative moneymaking scheme for insurgents and enterprising criminal gangs alike. Ali Al Alak, the inspector general for the Oil Ministry, said the attacks are now orchestrated by both groups to force the government to import and distribute as much fuel as possible using thousands of tanker trucks.

In turn, the insurgents and criminal gangs - distinguishing among them has become increasingly problematic - have transformed the trucking trade into a potent tool for smuggling.

source

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Iraqi and American officials said they could not offer a total figure for what smuggling is costing the country every year, beyond asserting that it is in the billions.

But Oil Ministry data suggest that the total was $2.5 billion to $4 billion in 2005, said Yahia Said, a research fellow at the London School of Economics and director of the Iraq Revenue Watch at the Open Society Institute, a policy foundation.

Even at the low end, that would mean smuggling costs account for almost 10 percent of Iraq's gross domestic product, $29.3 billion in 2005.

source above.

Given the ready availability of weapons in the region, it looks to me like the Iraq insurgency has a potential for military expenditure greater than quite a few countries, even assuming only half that revenue goes to the insurgents rather than ordinary smuggler gangs.

Of course, they're buying old artillery shells to use as IEDs, mortars, AKs and RPGs mostly, rather than air traffic control systems. So it probably goes a lot further.

 

[Yossarian]

And of course, they'd have to give it "a name"...

There's still a few plausible options for achieving victory left...

 

[dash]

The British Empire would have had no problem back in the day.

We'd have recruited loads of Afghani Pathan tribesman, armed them to the teeth, and then moved them to the Sunni Triangle in Iraq to get stuck in.

As Stalin was reputed to have said: "No people, no problem."

The Coalition Forces simply cannot entertain such tactics, even though they are probably the only way in which invading forces could bring 'peace' to Iraq.

What was it Condi Rice was saying a few years ago, that if you thought a stable democracy couldn't happen in Iraq, yet with Japan and Germany becoming such after WW2, then you were a Bad Person?

Iraq has:

A literacy rate of just 40%.

A population dividing itself mainly into two mutually antagonistic strands of Islam.

A population dividing itself further into numerous clans.

Marriage practices which mean that over 50% of them are to first cousins, second cousins, and other relatives, thus reinforcing clan loyalties and rivalries.

A reputation among other Middle Eastern peoples as a country of headbangers.

 

[audiotech]

This is interesting.

US are in contact with representatives of the Armed Iraqi National Resistance for possible conditions for a ceasefire and a change of regime in Baghdad.

Anti-war US activist Tom Hayden asks whether there is a faction of the US administration in talks with the Sunni resistance, since the US failed to defeat them militarily? If so, these forces will probably require a deadline for withdrawal and further talks. These talks are being kept secret because the administration don't want it to be known they are talking to groups they have told the US public are the enemy.

Hayden also asks that maybe the US has realised that the Shia they have put in power has created a pro-Iran Shia state, starting in southern Iraq. It also seems that the US want to launch an urban offensive against the militias of Muqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City leading to a bloodbath. But to be able to do that the US will have to remove the present Iraqi Prime Minister and put a strongman in his place.

Hayden believes that there are multiple scenarios being run, but he thinks that this is not a plan to get out of Iraq, but rather to reduce dramatically US casualties so as to enable the US military to stay in the country.

To think, this present US regime are now secretly trying to pull the wool over the US public's eyes (who gave them a bloody nose in the recent elections), to enable them to stay in the country they destroyed; who then created a civil war and destabilised the whole region for decades to come.

Listen here:
http://www.democracynow.org/streampage.pl

Article here:
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1122-20.htm

 

[London_Calling]

Hayden believes that there are multiple scenarios being run, but he thinks that this is not a plan to get out of Iraq, but rather to reduce dramatically US casualties so as to enable the US military to stay in the country.

As i say in post 20 of this thread, the USA cannot leave Iraq. To do so eclipses the empire and sets it firmly on the road of decline.

As always, in order to know the policy you need only to follow the oil.

 

[marksl]

The US is going to make the same problems every other empire has made in history its going to go blindly forward believing it knows what is best it occupy iraq for decades and kill its own people as well as the locals.

To eventually it either withdraw or forced out.

 

[newharper]

Fun rant in The Christian Science Monitor concerning The Iraq Study Group.

Charging this crowd with assessing the Iraq war is like convening a committee of Roman Catholic bishops to investigate the church's clergy sex-abuse scandal. Even without explicit instructions, the group's members know which questions not to ask and which remedies not to advance. Sadly, the average Catholic's traditional deference to the church hierarchy finds its counterpart in the average American's deference to "experts" when it comes to foreign policy. The ISG exemplifies the result: a befuddled, but essentially passive-electorate looks for guidance to a small group of unelected insiders reflecting a narrow range of views and operating largely behind closed doors.

The guardians of the foreign policy status quo are counting on the panel to extricate the US from Iraq. More broadly, they are counting on it to avoid inquiring into the origins of our predicament. So don't think for a moment that the ISG will assess the implications of America's growing addiction to foreign oil. Don't expect it to question the wisdom of President Bush's doctrine of preventive war or the feasibility of his Freedom Agenda, which promises to implant democracy across the Islamic world.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1128-28.htm


Noone should ever forget how, fundamentally, Washington is bipartisan.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Meanwhile, that Rumsfeld memo that was leaked seems to be purely about how to spin the fact that the US has no clue what to do in or about Iraq now.

“In my view it is time for a major adjustment,” wrote Mr. Rumsfeld, who has been a symbol of a dogged stay-the-course policy. “Clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough.”

Nor did Mr. Rumsfeld seem confident that the administration would readily develop an effective alternative. To limit the political fallout from shifting course, he suggested the administration consider a campaign to lower public expectations.

“Announce that whatever new approach the U.S. decides on, the U.S. is doing so on a trial basis,” he wrote. “This will give us the ability to readjust and move to another course, if necessary, and therefore not ‘lose.’ ”

Here's that little ray of sunshine William Lind again.

The latest serpent at which a drowning Washington Establishment is grasping is the idea of sending more American troops to Iraq. Would more troops turn the war there in our favor? No.

Why not? First, because nothing can. The war in Iraq is irredeemably lost. Neither we nor, at present, anyone else can create a new Iraqi state to replace the one our invasion destroyed. Maybe that will happen after the Iraqi civil was is resolved, maybe not. It is in any case out of our hands.

Nor could more American troops control the forces driving Iraq’s intensifying civil war. The passions of ethnic and religious hatred unleashed by the disintegration of the Iraqi state will not cool because a few more American patrols pass through the streets. Iraqi’s are quite capable of fighting us and each other at the same time.

A second reason more troops would make no difference is that the troops we have there now don’t know what to do, or at least their leaders don’t know what they should do. For the most part, American troops in Iraq sit on their Forward Operating Bases; in effect, we are besieging ourselves. Troops under siege are seldom effective at controlling the surrounding countryside, regardless of their number.

When American troops do leave their FOBs, it is almost always to run convoys, which is to say to provide targets; to engage in meaningless patrols, again providing targets; or to do raids, which are downright counterproductive, because they turn the people even more strongly against us, where that is possible.

Doing more of any of these things would help us not at all.

More Troops?

 

[dilute micro]

If the civil war expands into a regional war it seem to me that it would be an incentive for the US to stay seeing itself as a stabilizer. In fact the very presence of American troops might keep it from happening. But with only a civil war inside of Iraq the US continues with its tits-on-a-boar existence there.