Iraq, A Rock

“a stone which causes them to stumble, and a rock which makes them to fall”

A large majority of Americans wish that George W. Bush hadn’t led us into this quagmire in Iraq, and want us to get out of there.

Muslim leaders in the Middle East say that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have to be kidding when they talk about a rapid withdrawal.

Clinton has the albatross around her neck that she DID vote to go in there, and publicly justified that vote in many speeches. It seemed the politically prudent thing to do at the time. She blithely turned around when she calculated she could get more votes in 2008 by opposing the whole debacle she voted for.

John McCain admits that the man he ran against for the Republican nomination in 2000 made serious strategic errors getting in, but firmly supports “staying the course” now that we are there.

The obvious specter is that either Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia will take over if we leave, or that Iran, Turkey and any other neighbor will move in to pick up the pieces.

Everyone still wonders, is there anything in all this for American soldiers to die for, and American taxpayers to run up huge deficits, with the national debt being purchased by the national bank of China, flush with the profits of outsourcing manufacturing for American brand names?

The bottom line is, we have no friends in Iraq. The cardinal rules for intervening in someone else’s civil war are:

1. Don’t.

2. If you do, pick a side.

3. Make sure your side wins.

“Our side,” according to George W. Bush and VP Cheney, was an overwhelming majority of “the Iraqi people” who would “welcome us as liberators,” elect a government committed to democratic pluralism and free enterprise, and live happily ever after, a beacon of hope to the Middle East. Remember that delusion?

Well, there is no such thing. Iraq is a fictional nation, created by British military officers and diplomats after World War I, who didn’t know beans about the people of the land. Now it is a mess of feuding tribes, ethnicities and religious sects. Our closest thing to friends in that nation are Sunni Arab tribes, who were the political base of Saddam Hussein, the man we moved in to overthrow.

The government we are shedding American blood to uphold is led by corrupt, venal, politicians, playing the Shia Muslim religious card, and cozying up to Iran. Oh, and then there are the Kurds, who under the protection of our air cover, while Saddam Hussein ruled in Bagdhad, built up a fairly prosperous mini-state, occasionally fighting civil wars between political factions. But if we leave them, Turkey will no doubt invade, because Turkey has its own Kurdish revolt on their side of the border.

The problem for John McCain is, how can he justify sacrificing American lives to defend such a corrupt, factionalized government? Especially when some of the parties IN the government have militias who periodically declare war on OUR soldiers who are there to preserve and protect that same government?

The problem for any anti-war candidate is, now that our country, albeit under the most incompetent leadership we have had since Millard Fillmore and James Polk, has broken Iraq open, how can we just leave it to its fate, with all the disasters that might present for its neighbors, some of whom are our friends, and the opportunities it would present for other neighbors, some of whom way nasty things about America?

The corrupt factions sitting in the Green Zone in Bagdhad, pretending to be a government, know that is our dilemma. Therefore, they assume they can do whatever they want, and our troops will pay the price of keeping them in office. The sad truth is, we cannot build someone else’s country for them. General Petraeus has done an amazing job, but he freely admits that the military can only buy time, not do the work of creating a peaceful, prosperous, united nation. Nor have our diplomats persuaded any significant political faction in Iraq to do so. The time to heed General Petraeus was in 2003, not 2008.

We probably owe it to our few remaining friends in the region, and those who have in some way helped us and relied upon us, to execute a staged withdrawal, not simply get out in February 2009. It will be hard to tell the families of servicemen and women, who die during that protracted withdrawal, that we couldn’t get their son, daughter, brother, sister, cousin, wife, husband, father, mother out of there sooner, because we had to stay long enough to clean up our own mess. But that was decided when we went in. We can’t get all the troops out in one day. Someone has to be the rear guard, or even more troops would die on the way out.

Our president, whoever that may be, must communicate by action, not words, to the political cliques in Bagdhad, that we are going, and they will have to step up to the plate, now. They have had a free ride on our backs, exercising the rhetoric of sovereignty without many of the responsiblities. We will not be blackmailed by the probability of chaos to continue paying their prices, letting them fiddle while their country burns. That means we have to start pulling out. We can’t do any more for them than we already have.

On the way out, perhaps we should keep some presence in support of the Kurds, who have shown they can run their own little mini-state with some success, and arm the Sunni tribes who have helped us against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. They are going to be a minority in Iraq when we leave. We owe them some protection. They could continue to be helpful, if they don’t feel used and betrayed.

IF there were a sizeable ORGANIZED number of Iraqis who said “we are Shia and Sunni and we don’t want armed gangs turning us against each other, give us a protected enclave where we can live in peace together and we will help you hunt down and kill the armed factions” that might be a viable strategy. It is not enough that INDIVIDUALS say that. They need to be a political FORCE in the nation. Any president who could put together the diplomacy and military operation to accomplish that would go down in history as a hero. But it would mean trampling, at least temporarily, on the forms of Iraqi sovereignty.

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is going to be nothing once there are no more Americans in Iraq to blow up. They and the Shia majority hate each other. They have alienated the Sunnis as well. They are for the most part foreign interlopers, who get away with raising a so-called “insurgency” because they are foreigners who speak the same language, less foreign than the Americans. With the Americans gone, the Shia and Sunnis will do horrible things to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, slaughtering and torturing them in ways that our armed forces are not allowed to do.

Finally, all voters should remember that, whoever we elect, we don’t know what our new president is going to end up doing, and neither does he or she. Events change. George W. Bush didn’t know in 2000 what was going to happen September 11, 2001. At least, we hope he didn’t. Presidents try out new programs, some work, some don’t. We need to get the president who has shown the best judgment in the past, and trust him or her to lead us well through the hazards of the next few years, which we can’t even guess at. It is doubtful that anyone who voted to get us into this mess can succeed at getting us out of it.

Abortion

First of all, the President of the United States has no authority regarding abortion. Zip. Nada. Nothing. Article II of the Constitution defines the Executive Power. It says nothing about abortion. It is not a suitable subject for national policy. If any criminal statute is going to be passed, that is properly a matter for the states, not the federal government. This is still a federal republic, even if it is a fact of life that our commerce is almost all interstate these days, and federal jurisdiction is a lot bigger than it used to be.

So its really not a significant issue in a campaign for president. But as a matter of moral leadership, Bill Clinton had it right when he said that abortion should be safe, legal and rare.

Hardly anybody is “in favor of abortion.” Most of the rest of us don’t listen to those who think there is some liberating positive good to having an abortion. Any woman who has had an abortion knows there are physical, psychological and spiritual prices. ANY decision in life has prices, as well as, sometimes, benefits, or the benefit of avoiding even more painful prices.

To the extent that abortion is a spiritual question, we should look to spiritual means to prevent it, not look to government to do what is truthfully a very delicate job that requires reaching out one on one. History teaches that criminal laws concerning abortion do more harm than good.

The Supreme Court has never ruled that abortion is a good thing, nor that there is a constitutional right to abortion. The Supreme Court has ruled, on many subjects, that there are matters in our private and family lives that the government is constitutionally restrained from butting into. The Supreme Court has ruled that during the first trimester of pregnancy, abortion is one such matter, and to a lesser extent, during the second trimester as well.

Those who are opposed on principle to abortion may someday have cause to be thankful for the ruling in Roe v. Wade. Consider the possibility that a government may come to power in the United States committed to a vast program of social engineering. Suppose the newly elected congress passes a law requiring women to have abortion in certain circumstances: because the mother cannot provide for the baby, because it would be cruel to bring a severely deformed child into the world, to prevent a financial burden upon taxpayers and society... There are many legal advocacy groups who would rush into court for an injunction protecting women from enforcement of such a law, probably including the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Rutherford Foundation, not to mention Focus on the Family.

Lawyers for these organizations would find their best legal foundation in Roe v. Wade. If the government may not intervene, then the government may not intervene. Period. The government may no more decree that a woman must abort than the government may forbid abortion. Either the government has power over the decision, or it does not. The constitution is indifferent as to how a legislature exercises power it does have. The constitution only defines whether the government does or does not have authority to act. As to the third trimester, the state’s power to intervene derives ONLY from the development of a fetus much closer to independent viable existence as a distinct person. If the fetus is not a person, the state may not intervene at all. If the fetus is a person, the state may intervene only to protect, not to destroy, as with any other person.

Let’s also remember that it is an arrogant myth that electing a president can sway the Supreme Court. Presidents have always been shocked, surprised, disappointed by their Supreme Court appointees. Rightly so. On the court, as judges, men and women have assumed the very real responsibilities of an independent branch of government. This is not unlike the appointment of Thomas a Beckett, by England’s King Henry II, to be Archbishop of Canterbury. Thomas warned his good friend Henry, if you make me Archbishop, I will act like an Archbishop. And he did. A president who approaches Supreme Court appointments with suitable humility will look for distinguished, well qualified judges, knowing that the president can never predict how they will decide any particular case.

Roe v. Wade is a fine legal framework for the power of the state to intervene in a personal or family decision. That said, many things can and should be done to make the individual decision to seek an abortion as rare as possible. The most obvious is, every person who is morally opposed to abortion should make the offer to a pregnant woman, whatever you need, to carry that baby to term, I will provide it. That is a responsible way to act on pro-life principles. We should all be prepared to pay the prices of acting upon our beliefs; it is cheap to say to another, you pay this price, because I believe you should, and I will call the police if you don’t do it my way.

There are steps government can take also, steps which promote the general welfare and the public good, which will make abortion increasingly rare. Some of the lowest rates of abortion are found in European nations where the operation is legal, and the social safety net strong. Some of the highest rates of abortion are found in nations where abortion is strictly punished by law, and there is virtually no social safety net.

We need to move beyond the two failures of the 20th century: giving any woman who has a baby eighteen years of welfare, or putting mothers to work full time when their youngest child reaches the age of two. But we have to assure pregnant women that any baby they choose to carry to term, will have a healthy future available. Children take time, providing for children costs money. Unfortunately, government is not and cannot be the village that raises a child. Private initiatives, local community initiatives, and stable families, are indispensible. Government, especially the federal government, can only foster opportunities and provide essential resources.

Torture

Let’s apply a little common sense to the debate about use of torture by police, military and intelligence forces.

If we have a man or woman in custody, who we know for a fact has information on where a nuclear bomb was placed in a major city, and when it will detonate, we are justified in using ANY means to extract that information from them. Whatever they suffer, it is secondary to the thousands or millions of lives to be saved, and even larger numbers of lifelong painful burns and cancers to be averted.

Of course, we are hardly ever so lucky as that.

More likely, we have a few dozen people in custody, some frightened raw recruits, some innocent people who happened to be swept up, maybe a couple of hardened veterans, and even those may or may not know anything useful.

Torture will induce a man or woman who knows nothing to make up anything to stop the pain. We send our best forces off on a wild goose chase, put civilian populations through all kinds of annoying security measures, and accomplish nothing. We might even miss something that was really going on, because we were so confident of the lies we extracted by use of torture.

Torture will inspire an innocent man or woman to join whatever it is the torturers are fighting against, out of sheer personal hate for what they went through. It will also inspire their families, neighbors, even people who read about it in the newspaper, to fear and loathe whatever principles we thought we could offer to the world. Statements obtained through torture should never be admitted as evidence in any court: they are never reliable.

For those who have the luxury of considering pure spiritual concerns, freed from the gross material concerns of everyday life, it is true that to inflict torture dehumanizes the interrogator. They come back to civilian life someday, and they think its OK to treat their spouses, children, neighbors, coworkers, more or less the same way. There is no evidence that God calls us to torture, maim, or terrorize.

There are many good reasons not to torture prisoners, no matter what they have done or tried to do. There are exceptions to every rule. There are ways every rule, and every exception, can be abused. To forbid torture is a good policy. If we make an exception for a very good reason, we need to be sure we know exactly what we are doing and why. Then we need to have enough oversight to be sure it really was a good reason, and won’t ever be done again for any lesser reason.

Immigration

There is, at the train station in Cudahy, Wisconsin, a new brick plaza with a recently commissioned set of statues, called the “Immigrant Family Monument.” It is not unknown that people driving past the sign which advertises this memorial remark “Immigrants? Oh, no, I don’t support that.”

Of course, the immigrants portrayed by the monument appear to be Polish, or German, Slovenian or Serbian, the kind of immigrants most local residents are descended from. These are the people who made Cudahy the industrial powerhouse it once was.

When the United States of American ratified a constitution creating a federal government, the right of free travel between these previously independent states was guaranteed to citizens of any state. But it can still be a federal offense to cross state lines for the purpose of committing a crime. And when it comes to national borders... they ARE borders. Nations retain the right to control who enters or leaves their jurisdiction.

Immigration throughout our history started with some industry offering people jobs if they would only come here to work. Workmen who were already here complained that this would undermine their wage scales and standard of living. It did. Captains of industry didn’t care. They were making money. The immigrants came anyway. Their children joined unions and pushed the wage scales back up.

It is true that if millions of average Joes, desperately seeking a job, can get across our borders without going through customs, then sophisticated drug smuggling networks and ruthlessly trained terrorists can also do so with ease. In that sense, it is important to get control of our national borders. It is also true that when millions are crossing the border out of necessity, those with a more ominous purpose have plenty of cover for their own itinerary.

Most people do not cross borders for the purpose of invasion or subversion. They are motivated by necessity. They are hungry, displaced, unemployed, and they hear if you go to American, and work very hard, you can make enough money to get by. Its true, they can. Somehow, there are jobs they can get when they arrive. As long as that is true, little will be accomplished by building walls and mounting patrols. The key to immigration policy is:

(1) Conducting our commerce, foreign policy, and global trade in a way that leaves people options for survival in their nations of origin. People immigrate because people have to “follow the money.” If we don’t want the whole world coming here, we have to be sure the money flows through the countries people are immigrating from. It will flow back here too. Money doesn’t sit still. We have to be sure all our neighbors are in the loop.

(2) A cold, hard look at the jobs immigrants are attracted by: are there American citizens out of work who would take those jobs? Why aren’t they being hired? Are they applying? Is the rate of pay unconscionably low? Are our labor protection laws being enforced in that industry? If there really is nobody to do those jobs, what orderly process will allow them to be filled legally, without undermining anyone else’s job or standard of living?

Vigorous enforcement of our laws, all of them, and fair trade policies, are the key. As for physically securing the borders, walls are not the key. We don’t want someone coming to our border with a Ronald Reagan mask crying out “Tear down this wall.” Information, rapidly relayed, and mobile border patrols trained to move swiftly, are the key to secure borders.

Yes, sometimes we may be up against paramilitary narcotices smugglers with automatic weapons. We need strike forces trained and equipped to take them out, successfully. Other times we may be up against two young men chasing stray cows. We don’t need to be sending combat troops with automatic weapons to apprehend them. Intelligence and rapid response, the right response for the real situation on the ground, will get the job done.

Oh, and let’s remember what the French colonel said when he took command of a deteriorating military situation in The Battle of Algiers: “You can forget about those checkpoints to ask everyone for I.D. If anyone has their I.D. in order, it is the terrorists.”

Vietnam and Iraq, John Kerry and George W. Bush

From the way he ran his campaign, it appears that John Kerry thought he could run in a tense political atmosphere, focused on national security, as a military veteran and something of a minor war hero. Perhaps he believed that nobody would remember his high-profile role in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, or his widely published statement before a congressional committee “We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this Administration has wiped away their memories of us.”

He didn’t have to run his campaign that way. He could have run proudly and honestly on his entire record.

Kerry was a veteran of honorable military service. The men who served under his command unanimously testified to that. (The self-styled Swift Vote Beterans for Truth served on other boats; they would have us believe they spent their time in combat peering through the darkness to take notes on how Kerry was performing, rather than engaging the enemy or paying attention to the duties of their own commands.)

Kerry was also an articulate and passionate leader in the anti-war movement.

Contradition? It didn’t have to be.

Looking at the quagmire George W. Bush had blithely led us into in Iraq, Kerry could have forthrightly told the country that he served honorably in Vietnam, that he saw from first hand experience that the mission on the ground was not worthy of the sacrifices of American service men and women, and that he had the courage to come home and say so.

American was still full of the glory of fighting for freedom and democracy in World War II, but shedding blood for Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky was rather like going to war on behalf of the Vichy government in France. Enough of the people of Vietnam were against us, and few enough for us, that soldiers were put in a position where survival, let alone hope of tactical victories, required committing acts that, on a calm, sane, thoughtful day, anyone would call atrocities.

And so, in 2004, led by a president who had never served in the military, had no idea what front line combat was, had bumbled into a war where we had no friends, where even those we were more or less fighting to keep in power were cynically using our troops until the day we would leave, Kerry could have said:

We need a president who understands what combat is, what the price of victory is, who has served on the front lines, who knows from experience what our troops are going through, who has shown the courage to come back from honorable service and proclaim that the Emperor Has No Clothes, who can define a strategic course that will extricate us from this new quagmire.

Too bad nobody on his campaign staff ever thought of that. Even worse, too bad John Kerry himself never thought to present himself that way.