Iraq Option(s)
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Foreign Policy, The War On Terrorism, WarI asked the $87+ billion question yesterday and now M. Takhallus of Sideways Mencken has a few ideas of what we might be able to do in Iraq. However, as expected, none of them are pretty, and it appears as if only one of them is truly feasible. I don’t think I have to tell you which option that is.
Personally, the only idea that makes sense for me is listed as number 3 on his list, but it’s simply political hemlock:
Reload And Do It Right. This is what John McCain wants. What I want, too. The occupation was doomed by Don Rumsfeld’s obsession with minimizing the invasion force, and by the entire administration’s cheery Neo-Con Kool-Aid drinking binge. I assumed when we started this war, and when I supported it, that we were doing Japan 1945. It honestly never occurred to me that the adminsitration would have literally no plan for occupation and that they would simply not get what to me was self-evident: that the first rule of occupations is “place boot firmly on neck.” But there is no way, not now, not with all that’s happened, that we could convince the American people to go down this path. This ship has sailed.
I have to correct Takhallus here. This ship hasn’t just sailed, my friend. It’s been hit by a sectarian hurricane and ripped apart. And now we’re finding pieces of it being washed up on shore and cursing that we didn’t see this storm coming.
Then again, maybe our radar wasn’t working properly because the Neo-Cons had put video of clear skies on a loop.
Anybody care to predict a 7-year forecast for Iraq?
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 and is filed under Foreign Policy, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 16th, 2006 at 3:26 am
7 more years ?? Even when war mongers finally realize Iraq is a giant mess you still do not address the major problem !!
Lousy leaders !! You all have been saying nothing while countless errors were made, and now you wonder what to do. You will still support every dumb idea the administration dreams up from
la la land. Give up !! Stop trying to figure out anything. Stop writing and get a new job. Something you are good at. I could have told you 2 years ago what would happen.
7 year prediction : administration will continue same path, error followed by error. Iraq will split into 3. Iran will gain.
Terrorists will be in the new Sunni land. Kurds will be relatively peaceful but still anti-israel as will the entire mideast. There will be more anti American countries. If you are going to continue writing, push for new leaders.
August 16th, 2006 at 10:50 am
7 years hence (and optimistically):
- Shia control everything in Iraq except Kurdistan. They have set up their own theocracy . . . and are in fierce (but so far non-military) competition with Iran for leadership of world Islam (as the two of them see it), or Shia Islam (as the rest of the Islamic world sees it).
- Iraqi Sunnis would have discovered that they weren’t a majority after all, except that now the few who are left barely count as a minority. As a result, they (or their refugees, to be accurate) complain bitterly that the US didn’t put _more_ troops in originally and suppress the various insurgencies.
- The US has a lone base remaining in northern Iraq (among the Kurds). Primarily this has the purpose of discouraging the Turks from invading.
- The US has moved towards isolationism, not to mention trade protectionism. With the predictable bad effects on the national economy. The rest of the world discovers that a major American recession doesn’t do their economies any good either.
- The US President has reprised Lend/Lease to get the Israelis a couple of nuclear subs to park their nuclear missiles on. The Iranian government has ground its teeth . . . and replaced its President with someone who isn’t likely to seek martyrdom for its own sake.
August 16th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
“Reload and Do It Right” has not even the beginning of specifics and falsely implies that a plan that would have worked the first time will still work. If we could “Rewind and Do It Right” then I’d say that was a good plan. Perhaps we should ask all the Iraqis to revert back to the pre-invasion state so we can start over. It does make a good mantra though which could become dangerously in vogue. My favorite snarky comment about mantras came from the Confederate Yankee (def pro-war) blog “When they stand up we stand down is a nursery rhyme, not a strategy.”
August 16th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
I think the time has come for the US to pull back into well fortified military bases in Iraq and await developements in Iran.
We should say that duty and democracy has been established and that the current blood shed is no more that long standing rivalries (about 13 centuries) and that the Iraqi society will have to work this out on its own.