Our War
[note this post started life as part of the previous, but I decided
it was just too long and spent a few days untangling it from the Cindy
Sheehan post.]
It's our war not George W. Bush's. He just started it, it is
the property of the American people - to dispose of as they see fit. We
are entitled to ask: are we seeing a thousand points of light at the
end of the tunnel, in his call for total victory, or imagining a point of light at the end of a
thousand tunnels. With some hesitancy (well, with a lot frankly) I look
to leadership from the left. The first thing you encounter here is the
striking inability of the Democratic party leadership to develop a
consensus position
Democrats Split Over Position on Iraq War.
No real reasons, No Debate = No referendum. If one never felt
the war was good policy, properly debated, or even legitimately
grounded; what responsibility exists to seeing it though to its stated
outcome. The election is often brought up by conservatives as
validating the presidents policy. But those in the GOP leadership know
better perhaps better than the left, that last years election was an
anti-referendum. Discussion of the war was displaced by side arguments
irrelevancies, symbols that referred to other things, a wall of
skulking straw-men. They did not want discussion, did not want to
answer questions, did not want to defend every reason they had for this
war. As a result they got little or nothing in return - they didn't get a
referendum because they didn't ask for one. They don't really know what
the public is thinking, or feeling either.
Neither Kerry or anyone else forced the issue at the time. They had
no answers that they felt would stand up. The situation in Iraq
continues to deteriorate steadily from the ostensive goals of the
administration. Now we find ourselves seriously regarding the viability
of the leave now position of the peace movement TPMCafe || Naive Questions on Getting Out of Iraq (also the Nation article by Ari Berman that Mark Schmitt links to). Does leaving now
"encourage" our "enemies"? Does it make no real difference
because the current situation suits them? Does our "Staying the Course"
make things worse, does our presence make things harder for those
Iraqi's trying to build a secular democratic system? Do large numbers
of US troops pacify or simply present more targets? The US commitment
is settling into an irrational intransigence. It reacts to rather than
leads events and weakly.
Answers that come from the democrats need to consider the
strategic issues that exist indistinctly behind the immediate problems:
basing and long term regional stability. U S Military basing had three
goals: regional stability for transport of oil from production to market
via pipelines or shipping, contingent ability to seize fields directly
to prevent a catastrophic collapse of the American economy, regional
stability which would have the collateral benefit of forestalling
another Arab-Israeli war. I imagine a component of this would be to
keep any single regional power from dominating the rest. Other issues
such as maintaining buffer zones between emerging and emergent world
powers and opening of the Arab world as a mass export market (opposed
to Saudi Arabia, a specialized elite market) were of lesser
consideration.
To this add the new goal of prosecuting the "war" on terror
and managing | containing Radical Islam. Even here you must decide
whether radical Islam has a locus and whether it truly distinguishes
between the "near enemy and the far enemy" : Britain: homegrown terror. Given the possibility of
loss of bases in ex Soviet states, can the goals be met by confining US
military presence to the periphery. Is our military structure set up to
accomplish this kind of distance education, or do we really need to set
up in a H-3 to garrison oil fields, inclusive of Saudi, Kuwaiti, and
Iraqi fields. What are the US Strategic goals now?
A lot has been said about the grand wilsonian visionary
foreign policy of the Bush-41 administration. What is there to be seen
though? Corporatism: following big business, servile and not leading.
the prime foreign as well as domestic policy. Desperation: attempting
to stave off perceived long term global prosperity shifts by leveraging
a technologically superior military more peerless than any in
history at this moment. This is unfortunately all reducible to
arrogance and war: the procedure was unilateral, the tone
arrogant, the tool was warfare. Beyond the question of justice in war -
just war. To move beyond law and order (the procedures of which -- due
process exist natively in all cultures for a reason). To disregard and
disparage the many other tools diplomacy offers to approach disorder is
not the way of the just. War is death and destruction. Pain and
deprivation, callous, cruel and un-containably indiscriminate. To
initiate a war of discretion is nothing less than looking for a hole to
hell and shouting down the shaft: "You Scratch, Lucifer, whatever. Get
your scaly red ass up here and I mean now. We've got work for you,
boy." It is an abomination. It is not to be countenanced. War is to
call Hell upon earth.
What were the war aims, Beyond the war excuses. Make the
distinction between the war on terror -- the Afghanistan war for
instance, and the Iraq War no more than a beast spun out of jealous
history ten years prior. Consider the origins and implications of the
Clean Break and a New Model Middle East. This is the full version of a
transformed Iraq which would serve as a de-baathised beacon of values
to the Arab Middle East (see
Baghdad Year Zero by Naomi Klein). The phrase the Administration used at
the time for this "clean break" echoed of a position paper Doug Feith
Richard Perle and others had written for Benjamin Netanyahu's 1996
campaign
A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. This described a vision of strategic alliances for Israel, a
fantasy transformation of the 100 year politics of the region. The two
usages were not all together unrelated.
What are the aims now? Mostly to choose from a sliding scale
of remaining possibilities
The Globe and Mail: Partition lurks as an option to stabilize war-torn Iraq. A Free Market Democracy for Iraq? A market
economy perhaps but without the full set of financial institutions to
be independent. Democracy fully embraced now will give a future
democracy comprised of limited local autonomy. Show elections at the
national level with opposition parties being legalized on a per
election basis. A shadow elite of clerics. In a word the Iranification
of Iraq. A strategic setback for the US.
The administrations current largely unstated goal is a
federated partial democracy of nominally unified regions. This is what
the force and direction of its program of constitution and government
is directed towards. Iran's influence is checked, but a long
casualty-ridden quelling of the sunni insurgency by the US army is
probably necessary to allow and motivate sunni acceptance of a shiite
majority government. The drawdown of the rotating multi battalion US
force would still be tied to markers of Iraqi progress, and not
reducible to any timetable of withdrawal.
From these choices the country flies apart. Into the chaos of
civil war and regional jockeying carried out by proxies of everyone's
secret police apparatus with Hammas and al Qaeda taking the lead. This
is the probable outcome of withdrawing American forces in the near
term.
What the Sunnis want most of all is to not live under a shiite
majority they treated despotically for 30 years. Their non negotiating
it seems to some is still a negotiation - for terms of a deal not yet
offered. It would involve giving up much of Iraq's oil wealth which is
largely not in Sunni areas and would require careful negotiation of the
status of ethnic groups living in each others primary territory. This
tripartite mediated partition would deflate the insurgency and remove
the platform for foreign fighters. The US Army would likely be asked to
leave Iraq at this point, but the gains of any return to normalcy in
Iraq the possibilty that the Kurds and Shiites would continue to view the US favorably
Playing The Shiite Card and concurrent freedom to redirect military and diplomatic
energy
First Step? Admit There's a Problem to other goals would offset this greatly.
7:49:36 PM  ;;
|
