We made our choice on Iraq, now we get Iran and N Korea
Thursday, July 10, 2008 at 4:28AM ARTICLE: 'Colin Powell talks Iraq in Aspen: Reduction of troops inevitable, says former chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff," By Scott Condon, Vail Daily, July 4, 2008
Now there's God's honest truth.
We did not run out of gear nor money in Iraq. We ran out of quality people, whom we burned out. I hear this all the time from commanders.
The Surge was hugely costly in this regard. Was it worth it? Petraeus may have just pulled it off, despite the lack of any accompanying diplomatic surge.
But it does leave us--just as inevitably--with a nuclear Iran as a byproduct (my argument since the fall of 04).
Would it have been nice not to have burned out the force so?
Sure, but you live with your choices (Iraq instead of Iran or North Korea) and your mistakes (Iraq postwar until 2007).
This is the essence of the Bush-Cheney legacy: By screwing up Iraq for so long, we're left with nuclear Iran (still disputed) and North Korea (basically sanctified now by Bush)..
Reader Comments (2)
Both Iraq and Afghanistan are still centuries old tribal conflict cultures that only seemed united under Saddam and Taliban ruthless leadership. Iraq's tribal players had the leverage of controlling or threatening oil production. Afghanistan's players could host terrorists threatening the region and grow opium. Soon they will hold hostage pipelines from Central Asia and Iran to India and Pakistan. That's only a modern version of the hoods Marco Polo wrote about harassing merchants traveling the Silk Road. So expect a slow, difficult learning experience as they 'connect.'
By contrast, Persia/Iran has had several experiences of civilized national identity and growth even before oil. They wanted to learn from Greeks, then the West, and to create their own modernization. But religion and resentment of English, Russian and American meddling created a situation that opened the door for religious and political extremists. Some combination of the Barnett, Powell and Nunn ideas can work there.
India, then Iran, and hopefully Pakistan can be the real stabilizers of the region's tribal extremists because they are closer than us, and they understand them better.
It has been argued that this was, by definition, a pogrom and very much like "anti-Jewish pogroms in tsarist Russia" says scholar Ashutosh Varshney. Incredibly, right after the Godhra train event, prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, ostensibly a moderate member ofthe BJP, declared at a news conference: "Wherever there are Muslims, they do not want to live in peace with others. Instead of living peacefully, they want to propagate their religion by creating terror in the minds of others.”
Scholar Sanjay Ruparelia interpretation: “The purpose of his statement was clear. By invoking the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States, Vajpayee sought to justify the events in Gujarat by contextualizing them within the wider perceived threat of pan-Islamic terrorism.”
In a provocative article entitled, “Normalizing Violence: Transitional Justice and the Gujarat Riots,” in the Columbia Journal of Gender & Law, Ratna Kapur argued that “the riots were a logical product or outcome of a discursive strategy pursued in and through liberal rights discourse and not in opposition to such rights.”
Ruparelia goes here: "Gujarat constitutes a laboratory of Hindutva, where a long-term militant strategy of stigmatizing non-Hindus, mobilizing for power along ethnoreligious lines, and expanding a network of activists has reaped greatest dividends."
New Core is at least half-Gap.