When did you last see a Bush partisan try to claim Iraq is a success?

[Barking_Mad]

Shutting down Democracy?! LOL Sounds like ermmm well not democracy. What's that other word.........?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Meanwhile, William Lind is proposing an exit strategy

First, announce that we will leave Iraq soon, and completely. Not one American base or soldier will remain on Iraqi soil. The spin should be, “We came only to remove Saddam from power, and we have accomplished that mission. Iraq now has a constitution and an elected government; we have no reason to remain.”

Second, open negotiations to set a date by which we will be gone. The formal negotiations will be with the Iraqi government. Behind the scenes, we will have to set a deadline for achieving an agreement, failing which we will announce a withdrawal unilaterally.

 

[oi2002]

Meanwhile, William Lind is proposing an exit strategy

Darn just posted that up over in ME. The 4GW people have been bang on the money about Iraq.

If your strategic goal is simply to extract DC arse from Iraq Bill's suggestions are very resonable. It should be possible for the US to make peace with a portion of the rebellion in return for a timetabled complete withdrawal back into Kuwait. That could provide a short window of stability allowing the US to sprint away before Iraq implodes. It might even look dignified if you spun it hard.

I doubt we'll see any such finesse. There'll be an escalation of the current shenigans in the Western desert until the last moment, Sunni cities will be trashed. Then they'll just withdraw into bases, start the drawdown and do little more than protect the Green Zone.

Kris Alexanders Intel Dump open thread on Iraq has turned into a shall we stay of shall we go debate :

We can win this and turn Iraq into a stable and successful nation-state that presents no threat to us or to others. If we don't then Iraq will be an unstable state that is a threat to us and to its neighbors. How is failure a better outcome? Because those that want us to "pay reparations" don't say to whom - if there is no government, who do we pay - the insurgents that want to destroy us? Those that say "pull out now" assume that this will restore the status quo ante, instead of the real outcome, which is chaos and civil war and $250/barrel oil leading to economic meltdown and chaos and fear and wars and competition for scarce resources occuring over the entire globe. Those that say "pull out now" don't want to consider the damage an Iraq that REALLY DOES support Islamic fundamentalist terrorism can do to all of us here at home. Sure, the link between Saddam and 9/11 was an outrageous and deliberate lie that Bush should be impeached and shamed for. It was always a bullshit argument. But it is true that if Iraq descends into chaos we don't know who will ultimately come to control its enormous wealth, and it might be someone like Osama, someone much less rational and more dangerous than Saddam ever was.

Bush, the complete idiot he is, put the United States on the back of a tiger, and those that say "just jump off" are right when they say we never should have jumped on, but wrong when they think just jumping off will lead to a better outcome than hanging on for dear life and doing what we can to ride this tiger until we have it tamed. Jump off now and we are tiger lunch, however much we have "wronged" the tiger, however much we should have stayed off in the first place.

And, given the resources and the political will and the HONESTY to assess what really needs to be done to win, the US can win in Iraq at a much lower cost in blood and treasure than failure will surely cost us.

There's still a whopping big carrot in Iraq: contracting to extract and administer the oil industry. My understanding is that Iraq has no indigenous capability to build and run their oil wells, pipelines, terminals, etc. Someone is going to run these, gaining about $10/barrel of oil (correct me if I'm wrong on the number, comes from Yergin's book The Prize). It used to be French and Russian firms, but since those countries failed to coalesce with the willing they're now excluded. Let them back for a piece of the action and their governments will contribute militarily to stabilizing Iraq, and will not be as automatically hated as the US. Yes, various Iraqi powers will play the French, Russians, and US off against each other. But politics and hard business is better than IEDs and a $2 billion/week occupation.

We have no interests in Iraq. None. The United States has committed an act of criminal aggression against Iraq. The first order of business is to STOP aggravating the offense, and the second is to bring the perpetrators to justice.

There is no possibility of the United States doing anything that will help Iraq or anyone else as long as the government of the United States is being run by a gang of criminals. The reality is that the United States is itself a both a rogue state and a failed state -- it just happens to be the richest and most powerful failed rogue state the world has ever seen.

We have four solid years of evidence in front of us, and it's obvious what the problem is: a catastrophic failure of command grounded in an utterly bankrupt and delusional set of grand-strategic concepts compounded by malicious criminal conduct bordering on treason on the part of the White House, DOJ, DoD/JCS, and the intelligence agencies.

The notion that the solution is to let these folks have an opportunity to reformulate their strategy and get it right is contra-indicated, to put it mildly. The evidence, including the entire canon of recorded history, says the only result of that approach will they get it more WRONG.

I think it is true that in Iraq, like Vietnam, we have reached a point where it might not be possible to achieve and outcome that is universally accepted as positive. We are likely looking at choices between different evils. I suspect the question of what course to pursue has more to do with what outcomes we think are both possible and desireable than what with strategy we would use to get there.

How important is a unified Iraq? How important is it that it be an ally of the US? How important is it that it be democratic, pluralistic, western oriented or religiously tolerant? How important is it that it have a free market economy? How important is it that it give preference to the US when it exports oil? How important is it that it provide the US with military bases? How important is it that it deny sanctuary to terrorists? How important is it that it be politically stable?

You can make a long list of desireable traits. Many are probably in conflict with one another. I don't really think there has been much serious public debate over what our objectives should be even though that is a critical question to ask before you start talking about what we should do next.

 

[oi2002]

Mark Engler considers the idea that the Iraq war was a vast Capitalist conspiracy and reaches an interesting conclusion that it actually pretty bad for American buisness.

In short: If Bush is an oil president, he's not a Disney president, nor a Coca-Cola one. If Cheney is working diligently to help Halliburton rebound, the war he helped lead hasn't worked out nearly so well for Starbucks.

 

[nino_savatte]

Mark Engler considers the idea that the Iraq war was a vast Capitalist conspiracy and reaches an interesting conclusion that it actually pretty bad for American buisness.

It is typical of the short-sighted carpetbaggers not to see any of this. It is also obvious that the most prominent voices in favour of the invasion are closely connected to the military-industrial complex. I have always said that this war (and many other wars) have been fought for the benefit of capitalists. When I have made the comment "capitalism kills" I often get flak from the usual suspects but the simple truth is, without the profit motive of the defense industries, wars and invasions - such as this - would not have occured in the first place.

But despite the rush to grab Iraq's wealth, it hasn't helped the US economy much. In fact, the war/occupation must be costing the taxpayer billions each month. Is it worth it? No.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Sistani is reported to be planning to call for the US to leave after the elections in December.

NAJAF, Iraq -- Iraq's top Shiite cleric is considering demanding a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. and foreign troops after a democratically elected government takes office next year, according to associates of the Iranian-born cleric.

If the Americans and their coalition partners do not comply, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani would use peaceful means such as mass street protests to step up pressure for a pullout schedule, according to two associates of the cleric. <snip>

Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor of strategic studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I., said a public declaration by al-Sistani "will leave us without any legs to stand on in Iraq."

source

For what it's worth, I think the prof is right. If Sistani tells the US/UK to leave, their position in Iraq is no longer tenable.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

War Nerd tells it like it is:

The US countermeasures have been pretty lame so far. Convoys travel with jammers that make it harder to detonate the IED by cell phone or garage door opener-Nokia and Genie sales are going to drop in the Sunni Triangle. But like I said, low-tech is the guerrilla's friend. These days they've gone back to wires, and I hear some are even using string. You can't jam a string.

Beyond that, Bush policy is to blame Iran, or Syria, or Satan or whoever.

Iran? Maybe. Syria? No way. Syria's scared to death, ready to do anything to make Uncle Sam happy. And if it is Iran, what can we do about it? There are still a few neocons so totally out of their little gourds they want us to invade Iran. I have to wonder if they're agents of Dr Evil, programmed to destroy America. Because invading Iran would do it, it'd end us once and for all.

This blame stuff is a sign of frustration. Nobody knows how to stop IEDs, even with all the Popular Mechanics geeks sending in their garage-tech brainstorms. That's because-damn, how many times do I have to repeat it?-guerrilla war has no technical solution. Or even military solution. The only effective CI techniques are torture, reprisal and, ultimately, genocide.

My guess is that genocide will come back one day. That was how the Ancients dealt with rebellious towns: wiped 'em out. One of these days some first-world country is going to get impatient and a problem child like the Sunni Triangle will be a big, radioactive ghost town.

If we don't do it, the Kurds may end up doing it the old-fashioned way they learned from the Turks: one bullet, one village at a time. It's been done before--seen any Armenians up there lately? Probably not, but most of "Kurdistan" used to be "Armenia." A few of the Armenians made it to Fresno, but the rest are buried up there.

We're talking about Mesopotamia here, the place where war was invented. Hundreds of peoples have been wiped out forever in those parts. All these Holocaust lobbyists get furious if anybody says Jews aren't the only tribe to get genocided, but that's just politics-"Our genocide is better than your genocide!"

The fact is, genocide is, historically, the most common result when one tribe runs into another. And something tells me the next big wipeout will happen right there in Central Iraq.

source

I'm sure Rumsfeld would be right up for that, but is the great US public?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Meanwhile Bush is throwing tantrums about being criticised for lying and incompetence and says that everything will be fine as long as nobody undermines the national will by drawing attention to his lies and incompetence. source

"These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will."

 

[Bernie Gunther]

More US military analysts suggesting that they are breaking their army in Iraq.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 (UPI) -- Unless the Bush administration significantly cuts American troop levels in Iraq next year, the U.S. military's roughly 140,000-strong presence there will become a detriment to America's national security, according to a report released this week.

In the latest instance of foreign policy experts calling for the Bush administration to set a timetable for U.S. troop reductions in Iraq, the Center for American Progress, a think tank headed by President Bill Clinton's former chief of staff John Podesta, Wednesday said the future of America's military hangs in the balance.

"It has become clear that if we still have 140,000 ground troops in Iraq a year from now, we will destroy the all-volunteer army," said the a report written by the center's Lawrence Korb and Brian Katulis. Korb served as assistant secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan.

source

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Here's a jolly little analysis I found via Juan Cole, from 1996 of where the Russians went wrong in Afghanistan. It sounds very much like what the US are trying to do, with equal success, in Iraq.

The Soviet concept for military occupation of Afghanistan was based on the following:

# stabilizing the country by garrisoning the main routes, major cities, airbases and logistics sites;
# relieving the Afghan government forces of garrison duties and pushing them into the countryside to battle the resistance;
# providing logistic, air, artillery and intelligence support to the Afghan forces;
# providing minimum interface between the Soviet occupation forces and the local populace;
# accepting minimal Soviet casualties; and,
# strengthening the Afghan forces, so once the resistance was defeated, the Soviet Army could be withdrawn.

source

 

[oi2002]

Here's a jolly little analysis I found via Juan Cole, from 1996 of where the Russians went wrong in Afghanistan. It sounds very much like what the US are trying to do, with equal success, in Iraq. source

The Yanks seem finally to have got control of the Baghdad Airport road.

I don't know if it's worthwhile comparing the Soviet Afghan war to Iraq; the geography and politics is very different. The USSR had the huge advantage that it was supporting a pre-existing native Communist party, that regime survived for a couple years after their retreat. On the otherhand they faced a far more active rebellion securely based in Pakistan, lead by ISI asets and financed by the US/Saudi. One accurate comparison is the similarity of the Bush and Breshnev doctrines and their disasterous exposure of chinks in the Imperial armor.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I certainly don't think that you can compare them in all respects. There are some interesting parallels though. The expectation that it'd all be over fast. The difficulties of an army set up to wage high-tech warfare against a similarly equipped foe in dealing with the attrition of the guerilla war. The refusal of the leadership in both cases to notice reality and their tendency to take refuge in media control rather than facing up to reality. The morale effects of occupying a hostile country when told you're its liberators and so on.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Interesting article about the Baghdad road. How many troops did that require I wonder, and can they do the same to all their other supply routes as well?

 

[oi2002]

A Vietnamese view on the rebellion:

"Our struggle was well organized," Tran said in an IPS interview. "We had an address and official contacts, but with Iraq you never know who the resistance is and what their objectives are."

Pointing to what he sees as a serious flaw in the Iraqi resistance, he added, "Sure, the fighters all want the Americans out, but there's no unifying political program."

In Iraq, the insurgency's appeal flows primarily from the pain of the occupation. Much of its support comes from regular Iraqis who have relatives who have been killed or imprisoned by US forces and they want to get even. "This kind of resistance leads nowhere," Tran said. "Resistance has to have a clear objective. Ours was independence and socialism; not reaction but revolution."

The primacy of ideology in the Maoist approach to warfare perhaps exagerates its necessity but he makes a good point here the rebellion lacks the coherrence needed to seize power. Two years on not one credible leadership figure has emerged.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

This is interesting, from the article linked above.

It is a classic case of divide and rule. Indeed, from the start of the occupation, the US government actively encouraged the Iraqi people to organize themselves along sectarian lines. The US administration even hired a company, Research Triangle Institute (RTI), and charged it with selecting local governments based solely on the ethnic make-up in each of Iraq's regions. In March 2003, RTI was awarded a contract worth US$466 million to create 180 local and provincial governments in Iraq and obtain wide public participation in a new political process, but government auditors pointed out irregularities.

Almost as if they were actually trying to create the conditions for civil war.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Apologies for bumping an old thread, but it seemed timely after I read this:

There is almost a complete breakdown in law and order. Often criminals wear police uniforms. Three groups of gunmen disguised as police yesterday kidnapped 24 Iraqis working in a currency exchange and two electronic stores. Kidnapping has been rife since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 but the kidnap gangs are operating ever more brazenly kidnapping many people at the same time. Earlier this month gunmen dressed as police commandos seized 50 men from a security company.

The objective of the kidnappers is money. Many business and professional people have fled the country. One senior political figure said this week: " A kidnap gang seized my nephew. There was nothing he could do to resist because they boxed in his car with seven cars filled with gunmen. They asked for $200,000 but settled for $20,000."

It is often not clear if criminals are disguised as police or are real policemen engaged in criminal activities. Even a large number of bodyguards may not be sufficient protection. A wealthy banker from Basra and his son were kidnapped in Baghdad by men dressed as police who cordoned off the street where they lived and killed seven of their bodyguards.

Iraqi society is dissolving because of the breakdown of law and order. Sami Mudhafar, Higher Education and Scientific Research Minister, said recently that he wanted to lay to rest exaggerated accounts of the number of university professors murdered in the last three years. He said the true figure was only 89 professors killed over three years, Mr Mudhafar's other piece of comforting news was that there was no murder campaign directed against the Iraqi intelligentsia and they were simply being killed because they lived in Iraq. In addition to the professors 311 teachers have been killed in the last four months. He added that the government was too weak to defend anybody

source

 

[Azrael23]

This is interesting, from the article linked above. Almost as if they were actually trying to create the conditions for civil war.

Well thats what the Pentagon strategy was in the first place, but people called me a whacko for saying it. They want a civil war so they can blame it all on insurgency and invade who they like.
Its not going to wash with the British public nor the US public.

People will not accept another war.

 

[teqniq]

I would have to agree that the whole thing is a complete shambles - whither now? I am not very optomistic. I rather suspect that the clowns in (or out of) control of this unfolding catastrophe did have and perhaps still do, a grand plan for the whole region but they omitted to pay attention to the finer details. Something like believing your own bullshit.

This has been a brilliant thread, very informative.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I'm not sure how many people have been keeping up with events on the Iraq News & Developments thread, given that it's not used for comments. Barking Mad has been doing a great job there.

It's worth taking a look at the latest page I think.

http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=36711&page=211&pp=25

To describe it a total disaster would not be unfair I think. Here are some snippets.

US Morale in the toilet.

I think we are about to see all hell break loose. All hell already broke loose, but it ain’t sh.t to what is about to come down. I think that in the next few months we’ll be taking so many casualties that it will look like a cakewalk to have only 2300 dead. I said it before we deployed and it was even worse than I could have put in my paranoid mind.

We need to get the f..k out of here in the next two or three months. The brass keep saying if we pull out that the country will fall into civil unrest and factional violence. I don’t know if they are watching the news, but for God’s sake what do you call this sh.t right now? Get us the f..k out of here and let them kill each other.

http://www.williambowles.info/iraq/2006/0306/letters_iraq_pt1.html

A military court yesterday recommended for court-martial additional charges against a former New York National Guard staff sergeant accused of killing Capt. Phillip Esposito of Suffern and another officer in Iraq. Investigating officer Col. Patrick J. Reinert announced his decision after hearing testimony from four witnesses during a second hearing for Staff Sgt. Alberto B. Martinez, 38, of Troy, N.Y.

Martinez is accused of premeditated murder in the June 7 deaths of Esposito, who was his company commander, and 1st Lt. Louis Allen, the company's operations officer, at Forward Operating Base Danger near Tikrit. This is believed to be the first prosecution of a soldier accused of killing a superior officer — also known as fragging — while in Iraq.

http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060404/NEWS03/604040354/1019

WASHINGTON -- Despite President Bush's repeated denials, the figures are clear: 900 sectarian killings in a single month in Iraq means a civil war is well under way.

Iraq is a nation of 25 million people. In the United States, that level of killing would proportionately equal almost 11,000 people killed in riots, reprisal killings and sectarian clashes in a single month.

source

More than 40,000 internal refugees.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/471ad86c2f6e9375f78a6d84d75be1f1.htm

 

[phildwyer]

The only bit I disagree with is the suggestion that the US is about to take many more casualties. In fact, US casualty rates have been declining recently, as Iraqi casualties increase. Basically, they're locking themselves in their barracks and letting the natives fight it out. Same in Afghanistan.

 

[phildwyer]

This, from the American soldier's blog posted by Barking Mad on the other thread, seems to be the prevelant atttitude:

"Fine, let them kill each other; they seem to be happy doing it. I just don’t want to give them a chance to kill me."