Flipping Around Iraq, Heading for a Flop

So, it seems that the news from Iraq is relatively good, or at least not so bad as it once was, and now the media expect that Barack Obama must be getting ready to flip-flop about the war. There is this much truth to such speculation: if the war in Iraq had been a painless, stunning success, with little cost in taxpayer dollars and soldier’s lives, if it gave us an upbeat parade at little cost, a good sized majority of American voters would have cared less about any moral arguments. Likewise, if the war drags on and on with no clear purpose or visible benchmarks of victory, a good sized majority will get tired of it, regardless of any moral purpose to staying the course. After all, nobody wanted to fight Hitler on account of persecuted Jews, until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

But if Barack Obama has the sense that he seemed to show in his best-selling books, he can handle this subject without flip-flopping.

First, whoever we elect as president is going to be leading us through situations we haven’t even imagined yet. So the first question is, who has the good judgment to deal with the NEXT few crises to come along.

Going into Iraq was a bad idea. Obama called that correctly in 2003, when he said he wasn’t against all wars, he was against dumb wars. Our so-called allies in Iraq (remember Ahmed Chalabi?) were cynically manipulating a presidential cabinet who were just begging to be manipulated. The pretexts for going in have turned out to be stone cold lies, for the most part. Most important, our president sold us on the idea it would be a cheap war with a fast rosy ending. If he wasn’t lying, if he believed that, he was a fool.

Now, while things may be calming down a bit, it remains true that we have no real friends in Iraq, with the possible exception of the Kurds, who need us more than anyone else does. If we have any other friends, it is the Sunni Arabs we went in to knock out of power, who need us to protect them from the Shia political parties we thought were our allies, who are in fact just waiting for us to leave.

Neither George W. Bush nor John McCain can give us a clear definition of “victory.” Neither one of us can tell us what we get out of “staying the course.” That is because the raw material for an outcome worth the expenditure of American blood and tax dollars simply doesn’t exist in Iraq. That’s why it was a dumb war in the first place.

In World War II, we knew who we were fighting, and why we needed to secure unconditional surrender from the Axis powers. In the Korean War, we knew that either reaching the Yalu River or stabilizing an armistice at the 38^th parallel would make some sense of all we had put into the war. In Vietnam, at least we knew there was a clique of cynical, manipulative, corrupt military officers whose continued presence in office meant that we had not lost. We don’t have any of that in Iraq. The “government” we are fighting to stabilize is just waiting for us to go so they can run their own agenda without interference. The only way we might have gotten a really positive outcome is if we totally occupied the place, as we did with Germany after WW II. That would have required millions of soldiers, and a military draft, plus a much larger budget.

We should be looking for a president who will continually examine all the facts, and do what is best, not stick to an outdated program to make himself look good. If McCain keeps our troops bleeding for 100 years so nobody can say he was wrong about staying the course, he’d be a bad president. If Obama pulls the plug on a complicated situation, where we pay prices for either staying in or pulling out, he’d be a bad president too. Obama should remain firm that this whole war was a dumb idea, ineptly planned and ineptly led. He should also forthrightly let us know that he is prepared to work with all new information which comes in, adjusting policy to whatever will get the best results now. What should not be lost sight of us:

1) Our real security interests lie more in Afghanistan and Pakistan than in Iraq.

2) Our military are stretched thin, and our all-volunteer military force is paying an unacceptable price for it.

3) IF it is necessary to really pour more time and effort into Iraq for some reason, that will require a massively enlarged military. We either must all be prepared to make the sacrifices required, or stop pretending we are going to “stay the course” when a tiny fraction of American families are asked to pay most of the prices.

4) Getting out of Iraq will be handled in a responsible way, which may mean adjusting time-tables, deployment, in consultation with the military commanders, so we get the best possible result from a bad situation.

5) No candidate who is honest can really say what the situation on the ground will be on January 20, 2009, so nobody should make their promises in absolute numbers. We do need to know what kind of judgment a candidate will bring to the job, and what their priorities will be, as they review a constant stream of incoming, ever-changing, facts from the field.

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.