Don't want the time?
Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 1:15PM ARTICLE: "Surging Ahead In Iraq," By Max Boot, Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2007, Pg. 17
Combine this article with Jaffe's and Ignatius' and one gets the feeling of complete disarray in this administration.
You can blame the disconnect cited on the Dems, but they act on the mandate of the midterms--the public's pronounced political feedback to Bush. Blaming them now is like blaming the judge for sentencing after the jury convicts. You don't want the time? Then don't commit the crime, which here is losing the American public over the poor administration of these postwar rebuilds in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The sad thing is, we waste so much time in this premature, two-plus-year-long postpresidency masquerading as the real deal.
The opportunity costs here are simply stunning. This downside alone will yield incredibly harsh historical judgments on Bush-Cheney.
Reader Comments (4)
And note that librulz needed no actual power or influence overany decision the US government made in the preparation andconduct of this war in order to do so.
So be careful now, you don't want to be thrown in amongstthose traitorous librulz, now...
That meme does not require any new development.
Iraq right now is in the position that we haven't lost yet and we might still lose, and that is what the Democrats in Cogress are working overtime to make happen. It's probably more like the spring of 1864 than any other historic analogy that I can think of. Do you think that there might have been any adverse consequences today if President McClellan and the Peace Democrats had agreed to the creation of the CSA? I can certainly anticipate a great many adverse consequences if we abandon Iraq.
It might help to restate the problems in the terms that the paricipants do, rather than masking them with nation-state ideas that seem to make no sense in either region, or at least to have shallow roots.
In Afghanistan, the Pashtun in the South have always had much stronger ties to the Pashtun in Pakistan and cross easily over a border that has little meaning. A Pashtun Republic would make much more sense to most of the power figures there, and the reasons this isn't considered is because it's obviously unpopular with both Kabul and Islamabad. It is however quite popular in India, which has made some overtures to Taliban and Pashtun leaders (not the same thing necessarily) on the assumption that NATO will fail in the South. (This last is according to Eric Margolis).
In Iraq, most Shia in the South have closer contacts or loyalties with the relatively oppressed Shia in the Gulf region than with those in Iran. After all, they've had little to do with each other since 1979. Despite the Iranian administration's effort to proselytize the idea that the Arab Shia are sitting on the oil for good divine reason, Arab versus Persian interests aren't the same and the political issues aren't the same. The most telling hint of this is the suggestion by Israeli PM Ehud Olmert that he's quite willing to work from the Saudi peace proposals, and that he considers Iran and Hizbollah (both Shia) to be the real threats to Israel.
The complication in Iraq is more that, indeed, the Shia and Kurds are sitting on most of the oil, and also that Baghdad itself has a large Shia underclass that is prone to self-defense and attacks by those who want sectarian violence to polarize the capital for whatever reason.
So if we restate all these conflicts correctly and look at what might actually address each one, we'd be talking about, in Afghanistan:
1. A Pashtun autonomy issue that manifests itself as a rejection of Western views and election of warlords to parliament in Kabul, and has the risk of splitting Pakistan under direct or indirect influence of India.
2. The related problem of the region's dependence on poppy and hemp crops. Both of which have many other uses that could be easily exploited to reduce the power of the drug lords.
3. The opportunity that the Taliban, which are anti-drug, and the warlords, may come to divide interests.
4. The opportunity that the return of prosperity to the North may cause support for insurgency in the South to wither away, especially if more conversions of key religious and political leaders can occur. There is an active debate now in Canada whether it should be constructing its own camps for prisoners of war there rather than hand them over to the Afghan government. One consequence of running such camps could be exposure to a culture with different priorities and an emphasis on rehabilitation, options, and education. Of course if it looks like Camp X-Ray, opportunity lost.
In Iraq, also:
5. The conundrum of Baghdad which may simply have to be partitioned like Berlin was for nearly forty years. It might be cheaper to wire up the entire place with many millions of cheap sensors and cameras and electronic passes and high bandwidth Internet so no one has to go out, than to fix it in any other way. Anything is cheaper than what's going on now.
6. A serious region-wide effort to defuse and denature the oppression of Shia in the Gulf region and especially in Saudi Arabia so the pan-Shia movement is unlikely to gain traction. This includes at least the election of local gov't in the region, and a degree of participation in oil revenue presently controlled by a few Sunni families.
7. A serious effort to help Iranian dissidents and the alternative parties there to work within its flawed democracy. Farsi is the fourth-most-blogged tongue on the planet. That's got to be worth something. All democracies are flawed, so what? Some of the moderate imams - those who answer up to ten million emails a year in Qom for instance - could be forces for good.
8. An equitable agreement on oil revenues that does not simply cut the Sunni out of these should the country split into three countries, as seems very likely. A UN-, EU- and OPEC-brokered agreement to enforce this revenue split down to the municipal level if necessary would remove most of the incentive for sectarian violence. Especially if security costs came directly from oil revenues.
9. An accomodation, already well developed, between Turkey and Kurdistan, under the auspices of the EU whose high human rights standards have radically reduced the tension between Ankara and the Kurds in the East of the country. If Kurdistan can become one of those states that sits like Russia or Belarus on the edge of the EU waiting to clean up, so much the better. Europe has been engaged with the Kurds since the days of Saladin.
It was a 1919 compromise that left them without a country, ultimately. One of several errors that year.
I believe in globalization's forcing function on remapping the postcolonial world.