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.