Baghdad Butchery
There's only one problem with George W. Bush's policy of "more of the same" from Iraq. All he's going to get is more of the same. The same negative press coverage, simply because the situation is so damn bleak. The President and his supporters can stand on their heads and repeat until they and we are purple and blue that progress is at hand and none of that will change the chilling, awful facts on the ground.
The news this morning is of wilding, murderous rampages in the heart of Iraq's capital city by Shia militas. In full daylight, at 10 in the morning, the gunmen set up roadblocks in the western, Sunni, section of Baghdad, randomly pulled victims from their cars, shot them to death and left the corpses to rot on the sidewalk. Another contingent literally went door to door looking for more victims. At least 42 were murdered in the bloody spree.
That this sort of brazen barbarity can take place in the capital, right under the noses of U.S. troops tells us of a completely failed occupation. The only experience I can draw on to try and comprehend the totality of all this is my years spent reporting on the war in El Salvador. Even at the most horrific peak of death squad murders, the Salvadoran gunmen had to operate in secrecy and under cover of night. They didn't quite have the brass pelotas, nor the objective conditions you could say, to set up checkpoints downtown and shoot people in their cars. But that was then, this is now. This is Iraq.
Quite predictably, the Shia onslaught in the morning was followed up later in the day by Sunni retaliation. Two car bombs went off in Shia-controlled Sadr City, killing at least seven and wounding many more, and proving that, indeed, Shia and Sunni are capable of the same inhumanity. I suppose that is some sort of equality.
This latest bloodbath comes only one day after the L.A. Times, relying on Iraqi government documents, revealed rampant violence, corruption, abuse and bribery among the new Iraqi police and security forces we're "standing up." Beyond the foamy bromides about fighting for democracy, building a new Iraq etc. etc. I'd love to hear one of the war supporters outline what he or she believes victory actually looks like. Right now it looks like an endless, open-ended commitment which will continue to plunge us into deeper moral and financial bankruptcy and with little to show for it other than the creation of ethnic death squads or perhaps civil war itself.
The sixty-some-odd Iraqis murdered overnight are no less dead than if they had been killed by Saddam.
July 10th, 2006 at 1:37 am
“I’d love to hear one of the war supporters outline what he or she believes victory actually looks like.”
We’re really in deep shit on this one, because most war supporters refuse to acknowledge the extraordinary mistakes that got Iraq into this situation–briefly, an invasion and occupation on the cheap by a bunch of people so ignorant of Iraqi realities that they didn’t dream of the chaos they would create–and most war opponents are satisfied to stick Bush with this debacle (rightfully so) but then leave it at that. In other words, people who really care deeply about the Iraqis themselves are hard to find, on both right and left.
It seems incredible and heartbreaking to have to conclude that the Bush adminstration’s mistakes have been so serious that they leave Iraq with almost no future except civil war, but it does seem that’s the way we are heading. There is nothing, NOTHING, that the USA can do to solve this situation, and whatever solutions are possible will need a US withdrawal before they have any chance.
And just to anticipate Woody, Liberty Dad, et al.: Yes, I am glad to see Saddam gone, but if the goal was to get rid of him and foster democracy, is it not totally clear by now that the US and the UK went about it totally the wrong way and in a way that was guaranteed to bring chaos and autocracy rather than democracy? Can we acknowledge that much, and accept the responsibility for what has happened? And can we acknowledge that if the Iraq invasion had not been sold to Americans on the false basis of WMD, there could have been a DEBATE in America about how to do this, when to do it, or whether to do it at all?
As I have said before, everyone who has not read George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate needs to do so, especially the Woodys and the Liberty Dads of this world, but also those on the left who need to understand better how this came about.
July 10th, 2006 at 6:27 am
A closer parallel comes to mind: the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s. The early phase was characterized by roadblocks in which militias would stop the collective taxis, pull out people, check their ID cards and then either murder them (or worse) or let them go. Eventually, the Green Line was established so that the two communities could try to find some semblance of safety in their own areas. For years the two sides tossed mortar shells over the line at each other, and the morning papers would read “XX killed in last night’s bombings.” Ronald Reagan’s attempt to get involved in that one ended in ignominious defeat and a hasty retreat.
July 10th, 2006 at 6:27 am
While I haven’t defined “victory” for myself, and it can be a moving target, I can see that victory for the left is just giving up. At least, I don’t accept quitting and making our sacrificies in vain.
Why we went to Iraq and what is true depends upon what you want to believe. For instance, Hussein did have WMD’s and used them, and anyone who says that isn’t true is lying or never read the paper or watched the news. How we got into this is a lesson for history books and doesn’t matter at this point to direct our future course of action. What we do now that we’re there is based on an adjusted and expanded set of criteria.
The Europeans, Russians, and other people on the take had twelve years doing it “their way” and no good came from it except more corruption and murders by Hussein. Why should we have stayed the course with that failed approach? There’s a time to put up or shut up, and they never would put up. They were too busy lining their pockets.
I didn’t agree with going into Iraq, but once the decision was made I supported our leaders rather than back-stabbing and sniping at them and taking away from our efforts to conclude the war. And, believe me, our national leaders have more information and a lot more brain power than the moderator and commenters here. A common defect of the left is that its members have an over-inflated view of their intelligence.
The similiarity with Iraq and Vietnam is that we are seeing the same anti-American left (yes, it is anti-American, so don’t try to lie to me) giving encouragement to the enemy to prolong the war and, thus, build the death toll. Our enemies have seen from the history of the left that they can win if they can hold on long enough, until the left gets elected or undermines our will.
So, to the Balters of the world, who accuse the Woody’s and Liberty Dad’s, you cause more death and more destruction by backing the effort to quit rather than backing the effort to win. There was blood on your hands by doing nothing to stop Hussein and there is blood on your hands by encouraging the enemy to not give up.
July 10th, 2006 at 6:37 am
“So, to the Balters of the world, who accuse the Woody’s and Liberty Dad’s, you cause more death and more destruction by backing the effort to quit rather than backing the effort to win.”
What effort to win? That is question Marc has posed for this thread. What is the plan, what is the goal, how will it be achieved? Can’t help but noticing that Woody has not addressed this. We on the left are not running the war in Iraq, the Bush administration is. So what are they doing that will result in a good end to it, so I will know what I should be supporting?
July 10th, 2006 at 7:16 am
If things are as bad as the incidents described indicate (and frankly, I don’t trust the press to give an accurate overall picture), it may be time, as some have suggested, for partition.
Iraq was a British invention by Gertrude Bell and others. One reason for the brutality of Saddam was the fact that there was not much other glue to keep this artificial country together.
At some point, if things don’t improve, the Kurds will do what they’d like to do anyway, and declare independence. If the Turks can be restrained from invading, that will probably stick.
At that point, the Sunni and Shi’a areas could divide. The problem is the mixed areas, including Baghdad, where more violence is likely.
Partition has led to a reduction in violence in Cyprus and ex-Yugoslavia. Even in India-Pakistan, where the initial violence was horrendous, things have settled down once the lines were drawn. It’s not an ideal solution, but the situation is hardly ideal, and full-blown civil war (which hasn’t come yet), would be far worse than a reasonably peaceful partition.
The Saudis and the Gulf States wouldn’t like it, because it would be a precedent for their Shi’a minorities around the shores of the Gulf to seek their own states.
I’m not yet convinced, but it may be worth considering, especially if the initial impetus, Kurdish independence, comes from there, not from Washington.
July 10th, 2006 at 8:18 am
If I’m in favor of staying in, it wouldn’t be for victory as Bush defines it: a democratic, stable, prosperous, terror-free, unified Iraq. Not that those aren’t desirable things. It’s just that achieving all of them together is laughably unrealistic now, and wouldn’t have been very realistic even if everything had somehow been done as well as it could have been done. At this point, you can’t get more than one or two of those desiderata.
Kurdistan considered alone might meet all of them to the 70-80% mark, except that Kurdistan doesn’t count as “unified Iraq”. A democratic and free Iraq will be more exposed to terrorism, not less — it takes a police state to make terrorism impossible, when there are nationalist claims on sovereign territory. Or, as Israel seems to have decided, it takes a wall — but there goes unity again, doesn’t it? Multi-state stability guaranteed in part by neighbors — well, there goes unity again. And you probably won’t get much democracy out of it, outside of Kurdistan. Saddam’s Arabization programs virtually guarantee that multi-state stability comes at the short-term price of ethnic cleansing, and the long-term price of more terrorism, as the “cleansed” wreak vengeance for their displacement.
No, you just can’t get all the Bush Victory puzzle pieces to fit together. The more realistic of those who really trying to think through how staying in could be the best of some very bad options will always admit that we’ve got a mess on our hands.
To get something you could plausibly call victory to the American voter, I think we have to be in there for 15 or 20 more years, recarving the puzzle pieces until they fit, or else … well, how many times have I mooted the Kurdistan Petro-State Quasi-Exit Strategy in this forum? Too many.
The one glimmer of hope I see in this recent spate of violence is related to its evident purpose.
Both Al Qaeda and the (only nominally) Islamist ex-Baathist insurgents threaten to reignite the old Shi’a/Sunni civil war within Islam, with these terror attacks on Shi’ites. In the case of the ex-Ba’athists, it’s brinksmanship, but they don’t really want it to go over the brink, unless threatened with extinction. It’s their virtual nuclear deterrent. In the case of Al Qaeda, it’s opportunism — they really DO want it to happen, because such a war would create boundless opportunities for them. And if there’s one thing that all of the neighboring states can agree on, AND all of the oil-consuming superpowers, it’s that this eventuality would be a disaster without parallel in the post-war world. So there’s hope for international unity around preventing that disaster — but only if it seems imminent.
However bizarre it might sound, the best long-term hope for stability might be in nuclear deterrence: Iran getting nukes and extending an umbrella over a virtually annexed Shi’ite south; Iran sharing its nukes with Syria for a similar umbrella over a virtually annexed Sunni triangle, Kurdistan getting nukes (probably from Israel) to deter both, then maybe Turkey also nuclearizing to draw a line in the sand with Kurdistan.
Is this weird and sick? Yes, this is weird and sick. But the MAD doctrine was weird and sick, and I grew up under that cloud, and here I am, 50 years old now, still alive, I don’t glow in the dark, because what I had so many nightmares about while growing up … didn’t happen.
Would a nuclearization of the Middle East beyond Israel’s deterrent nevertheless leave contested territory and terrorism related to it? No doubt. However, India and Pakistan are still fighting over Kashmir, but somehow haven’t nuked each other, despite having the means. Sometimes, cooler heads prevail under appalling conditions only when an even more appalling possibilites suddenly loom. May cooler heads prevail in any case. It’s nice to dream about half a dozen Ghandi-figures springing up through the region, spreading sweetness and light. But remember how Ghandi died. And what motivated his hot-head assassin.
Peace through mutual assured destruction in the Middle East? An Iraq partitioned into local superpower protectorates? None dare call it victory. Not even me. It’s a sad statement on the current sorry mess that this might be the best of some very, very bad choices over the long run.
July 10th, 2006 at 8:31 am
The comments by Grumpy Old Man and Michael Turner are interesting, but one big problem with them: Neither they, nor the US, have the power nor the ability to bring them about. Only the Iraqis can determine their own future, and I don’t mean this just in the moral sense but in the strategic and practical senses too. This was always the case. The US, UK, and other countries could have helped the internal resistance to Saddam’s rule in various ways (note that I say internal, not external, Chalabi et al. never had any real idea what was going on inside their own country because they had been away too long as George Packer demonstrates) just as they did with anti-Soviet forces, but ultimately it is up to the people of a particular nation whether they want to live under a dictatorship or not. This is the point that Vaclav Havel made after the fall of Communism, and made very eloquently. The huge error of the Bush administration was to think otherwise, a mistake that has turned out be be tragic for the Iraqis and for the American soldiers killed there.
July 10th, 2006 at 8:38 am
I think Grumpy Old Man posted while I was still composing, and sort of beat me to certain points. To add something not quite obvious to some: Kurdistan is going to have to go to independence with Washington kicking and screaming about it — but possibly loving the entire process anyway. Better that cutting the Gordian Knot be left to the locals. Washington can’t be seen as supporting partition, not after Gulf War I had been sold as being about “the principle of national sovereignty”. That said, where it gets bloody is over Kirkuk, surround by about a third of the oil wealth of Iraq. The Kurds claim it for Kurdistan, but I suspect they can’t go for it unless under cover of some greater bloodbath between the Arab Sunnis and the Shi’ites, with some ostensible rationale of stabilizing a buffer zone in order to get U.S. support for the move. They’ve got to do “stealth sovereignty.” But they are good at that — it’s a game they started even before Gulf War I, when they negotiated considerable autonomy with Saddam.
July 10th, 2006 at 9:05 am
“To add something not quite obvious to some: Kurdistan is going to have to go to independence with Washington kicking and screaming about it — but possibly loving the entire process anyway.”
Sorry to keep intruding on people’s fantasies, but “Kurdistan” refers to a large region that includes a big chunk of Turkey (and also pieces of Syria and Iran) as well as Iraq. The Kurdish region of Iraq is not Kurdistan, but only part of it. Turkey will never agree to give up any of its territory, so is Michael Turner talking about the Kurdish region of Iraq or is he talking about Kurdistan? I’m having a real problem with people here deciding the fate of the Iraqis as if they were pieces on a chessboard or imaginary figures in a computer game–the US is already trying to do that without success. Let’s get real, shall we, and understand that just because you think it in your head does not mean it has any validity in the geophysical world.
July 10th, 2006 at 9:31 am
“Hussein did have WMD’s and used them”
Completely out of context. He had them in 1984. The WMD was gone in 1991. How about a cost benefit analysis for these adventures? We’ve lost big time.
July 10th, 2006 at 9:55 am
Marc, the Shiite daylight killings reminded me of a scaled-up kind of event that did happen in broad daylight with regularity in El Salvador in the late 1970s and early 1980s: National Guard and Treasury Police officers would stop buses, take off anyone they deemed suspicious, and later those people’s bodies would be found by the side of the road.
The same phenomenon is at work: the police _are_ the death squads, and/or in league with them.
What’s your take on Michael B’s comment: “There is nothing, NOTHING, that the USA can do to solve this situation, and whatever solutions are possible will need a US withdrawal before they have any chance.”
July 10th, 2006 at 10:06 am
I wasn’t talking about Turkish, Syrian, or Iranian Kurdistan. That’s not in the cards. Nor was I talking about imposing a solution. I was suggesting that the Iraqi Kurds might at some point opt for independence, which then might precipitate a partition of the rest of the country. The mixed areas of Kirkuk and the areas around and including Baghdad would be the flashpoints if this happened.
And I’m not convinced this is the right way to go. I am convinced that a simple withdrawal would be a disaster, and I doubt the next President will have the patience of Bush.
July 10th, 2006 at 10:28 am
All future paths include Iraqis supporting the murder of other Iraqis, with some additional murders of US & coalition soldiers.
I’ve long held that if Bush gets democracy in Iraq with less than 2500 US casualties, he gets an “A” — he’s working on “B” now. I doubt he’ll drop to 5000 “C”. I’ve yet to see Marc, or Balter or Turner, quantify any measure of success or failure.
The US needed to stay for at least 15 years more in S. Vietnam to create another S. Korea type Asian country — with some elected strong-man the US would support. 15 years is a long time; but a LOT less then that we could “never win.”
I totally agree that Bush made mistakes — proportional representation (party list voting) being one of those which I claimed would lead to a bloodbath.
Sorry, Marc; 200 murders a week of Iraqis is not yet a bloodbath — more than 2000 a week have been dying in Darfur, and the UN (& Marc Cooper & Amnesty & Human Rights Watch) does almost nothing. I call 1000/week for over 4 weeks a bloodbath, half a single-day Srebrenica massacre.
Did 0, zero, Americans die? I think the US armed services/ public opinion can handle that level of casualty for many years. Even 10/week; not sure 100/week.
M. Balter — “ultimately it is up to the people of a particular nation whether they want to live under a dictatorship or not. This is the point that Vaclav Havel made after the fall of Communism,”
Yep, I’ve also long said only IRAQIS can win in Iraq. The US sticks around until the Sunnis surrender and turn in the Sunni terrorists, and then the US helps pro-Iraq Sunnies stop the ever-growing Shia death squads (who murder against the will of Al-Sistani, but the lack of justice is intolerable).
I came to Czecho-Slovakia in 1991; but we in Slovakia split with the Czechs because we didn’t want to live under Czech domination; and Havel pardoned all the commies (that the Czechs had voted for post WW II, the Slovaks not); Havel had shut down the arms trade (Tanks from Slovakia, not planes or pistols from Czechs); but mostly because of the Proportional Representation system and only Czech or Slovak parties.
Once the party lists include an ethnic element, the most radical “pro-us / anti-them” seem attractive and gain more votes. [Meciar is back in gov't; but as a junior to his prior ally Nationalist Slota; plus new Social Democrat populist Robert Fico as PM (Meciar junior?)]
Bush is NOT in control in Iraq — that’s why the death squads are in operation. Liberation, not occupation. When will the Iraqis decide how to take control? It’s up to the Iraqis. (I think Leftists hate that Bush and the US are NOT in control.)
But let’s be honest — the deaths are due to Iraqis not wanting peace enough to turn in the killers; not willing to risk becoming a target enough. The police are corrupt and infiltrated (no surprise — where was the Dem plan to avoid that outcome), but the Iraqi Army is more ready to protect civilians.
M. Turner, I was amused by your “pleasant nightmare” of Iran’s nuclear umbrella — but don’t believe it at all. More likely is that the violence will get greater, until it becomes more clear to the Sunnis that they really have lost. They haven’t surrendered, and they need to.
Up to 100 000 MORE Iraqi deaths in the next two years is a huge cost, to Iraqis, for the Sunni failure to surrender, and Sunni failure to work for peace instead of for violence. (Marc, can you tell me how many is “too many” — and tell me when you’re going to be calling for war in Darfur after that number has been passed?)
Much of this Iraq violence is likely a response against Al-Maliki’s offer of amnesty to Sunni insurgent groups to join, rather than fight. As Sunnis who act are killed, more will be pushed to give up rather than fight and die.
If the violence continues, look for central Iraq power with Al-Maliki to keep growing so as to stop the murders.
July 10th, 2006 at 11:16 am
“Up to 100 000 MORE Iraqi deaths in the next two years is a huge cost, to Iraqis” … but one Liberty Dad, a courageous man, is willing to pay. Unlike that chickenshit Cooper who’s done nothing to save Darfur.
Our friend Woody, who’s coy about what “victory” might mean but believes, stoically, in continuing to make sacrfices so that all of the sacrifice he’s participated in to date is not in vain, deserves some sort of prize – let’s call it the “Mrs. Miniver Medal” – for defining the foundational argument of those who persist in defending the war : “Why we went to Iraq and what is true depends upon what you want to believe.”
(Cue Twilight Zone Theme Music)
July 10th, 2006 at 11:33 am
Yes, Liberty Dad is so torn between volunteering for Iraq or for Darfur that he has not been able to get out of Bratislava yet.
July 10th, 2006 at 11:49 am
I’m not sure how to define victory in Iraq, which is why I rely on our representative form of government; but, I know that we aren’t there and I expect that I’ll know it when I see it–unlike the left that defines victory as something just beyond whatever we achieve and condemns the Republican leadership to the same fate as Sisyphus.
The left has made claims that everything in Iraq will fail; yet, what has failed are their own predictions of defeat: not winning a military victory, not finding Hussein, not forming a government, not being able to have electons, etc., etc. Just when you counter one of their claims of failure, they make up new ones. So, the definition of victory to the left is “something that you haven’t done, yet.”
There are multiple reasons that we went to war, but those on the left choose to believe what they read in “Mother Jones” rather than what they hear from President Bush–which is what I meant by defining your own truth. The left has an amazing ability to lie to itself to suit its purposes.
July 10th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
reg, the claim that you insinuate that one must make a personal sacrifice in Iraq to have the opinion that we should stay there flies in the face of our system and logic. Maybe you want us to return to a system that you can only vote if you’re a white male land owner.
July 10th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Bush never deployed enough troops to win. What is going on In Iraq is an international disaster. I was never for the war. But damn it, either have the guts to have enough boots on the ground to get the job done or get the hell out. Iraqis are dying by the thousands and our brave troops are caught in the middle of a Civil War. The death and destruction is unimaginable. Bush our Commander In Chief, who never saw any combat experience, dodged the Vietnam War by getting his Daddy to get him into the Nation Guard, and then fell short of his duties there, is thinking more about his legacy, or lack of it, then what is best for our brave troops and the war. Deploy enough troops to win or get the hell out!
July 10th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
Woody wrote;
I’m not sure how to define victory in Iraq, which is why I rely on our representative form of government; but, I know that we aren’t there and I expect that I’ll know it when I see it
————————–
Wasn’t that Patton’s battle cry, “We don’t know what victory is, but we’ll know it when we see it!!”
July 10th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
No wait, this was Patton’s battle cry, “We don’t know what victory is, but we’ll know it when our elected officials tell us what it is!!â€
July 10th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
I don’t suggest that one must sacrifice in order to have an opinion, only that one must sacrifice at least a wee little bit if they invoke – 1st person plural – “our sacrifice”. Spending inordinate amounts of time cranking out crap on the internet doesn’t count. Granted the reference should probably be the grand, national “our” – as in “our nation’s” – but the glibness with which these keyboard commandoes are willing to deploy other people, while taking no responsibility for any of the consequences and seeking to blame the press or war critics when their fearless leader has proven uttely incompetent and dishonest, at best, just astounds me.
And they’re fabulists – which is a fancy name for a liar. Woody claims that people who voiced serious doubts about the war believed such things as (1) the United States couldn’t mount a successful invasion of Iraq and topple the
Baghdad regime, (2) that we didn’t believe Saddam could be capture, (3) that a regime of sorts couldn’t be cobbled together post-invasion or (4) that elections couldn’t be held. This is pure horseshit and shows how these clowns have spiraled into the realm of babble. Meanwhile, I could fill a couple of pages with completely wrongheaded predictions from the “representative government” that Woody trusts – starting with Saddam’s WMD arsenal, through the stuff Rice routinely spouted about “a handful of deadenders” causing all of our problems, to denials of civil war, up to Cheney’s “last throes” and, more than likely, whatever spin these scumbags have to Snowjob to release this morning.
The actual concerns of war critics were these – and anyone who didn’t know this or falsely asserts otherwise should just excuse themselves from any commentary on Iraq, even of the modest sort that appears in Marc’s threads:
(1) the United States could fairly easily topple Saddam, but there was a prospect of some sort of chaos or continuing insurgency, possibly stretching over years – particularly since BushCo decided on a stategy of “invasion-lite” without overwhelming force that could maintain something approximating order in the wake of the initial assault;
(2) that Saddam’s capture wasn’t likely to mean the “last throes” of the insurgency;
(3) ditto, that piecing together a governing body in the Green Zone couldn’t smooth over deeply rooted problems or growing danger of civil war;
(4) that the results of the elections were more a signal that these divisive problems were still rampant and that Islamic fundamentalism and ethnic strive – with the potential for disastrous civil war – was on the ascendency WITHIN the political framework the U.S. was trying to impose.
Woody, I don’t know why I persist in responding to your crap. Must be a character flaw.
Okay, enough is enough.
July 10th, 2006 at 1:23 pm
bad spelliing and some dropped words, sorry. Good enough for thread wars.
July 10th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
” that Saddam’s capture wasn’t likely to mean the “last throes†of the insurgency”
Incidentally, remember all of the abuse and ridicule and just plain shit that Howard Dean was subjected to when he made that point…which has proven deadly accurate. I can barely measure my contempt these days for the Keyboard Kommandos who’ve been raining garbage on the discourse over Iraq lo these many years. Really bad people. Rotten to the core. Not because they’ve been so full of shit – I’ve been there and done that – but because they’re keep running the same crap into the ground, blaming everyone but themselves for failure. The mark not just of intellectual dishonesty, but of a coward.
July 10th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
If this situation was not so critical I’d laugh for all those who are trying to use Darfur as some sort of measuring stick for the Iraqi War is disgusting.
Where were you last year? Sudan has been a hotbed of Al Queda activity for years, not only did they provide sanctuary for Bin Laden, but has multiple training grounds for terrorists. Yet as a country we do nothing and certain bloggers use the tragedy not because they care about the lives that are being lost every minute but because they want they want to win an argument instead of affect change. Your insincerity reeks.
Where were you two months ago when activists rallied in DC to lobby our government to acknowledge there is a genocide going on in Sudan and to provide the UN and AU with more tactical support? More people have died in the Congo conflict than were murdered by Saddam and let’s not forget the child soldiers in Uganda, or the meltdown that is Somalia.
WMD (North Korea anyone?) com’mon even the current government has admited that their was intelligence was bad on that one, I can’t believe someone trotted out that dead horse, but then again I can because when I read some of these comments it’s not honnest debate and sound solutions, but “I’m right, your wrong”. The last time I checked the 1st (as in the first one) ammendment protects everyones right to free speech and because you disagree with the goverment does not make you a traitor, or is this communist China we live in where no one shall speak ill of government. Think of all of the “traitors” who helped make this country better – Lincoln, Roosevelt, King…
As far as the defintion of victory in Iraq, I don’t think it can based upon American body count – the amount of deadly casualities has always been estimated to be low in comparsion to previous conflicts. Iraqi deaths? The fact that there are people on this site are debating the numbers when none have been there, once again proves how much American’s care about the people they are trying to liberate that they would attempt to quantify suffering.
I agree with the point made earlier about the Kurds. I think they’re just biding their time until they can say “look we tried, but now it’s about us”. The Iraq that Britan drew cannot sustain itself, we’re talking about thousands of years of discord between the Shia and Sunni. Ultimately, the state will fragment, into smaller nation states which may be easier in some ways stabilize and to promote democracy. We have to stay (speaking as someone who has 14 relatives serving active duty) until the new territories and governments get mapped out, there’s little evidence that a coaltion government can survive with out an occupying force and we the US simply do not have the money to subsidze it.
July 10th, 2006 at 1:55 pm
Quite right. Woody, can you site even one FRINGE liberal who claimed Saddam couldn’t be taken, and some sort of (shakey) goverment couldn’t be cobbed out? The whole fiasco matches up perfectly with what critics on the left (and a few on the right) warned would happen. Lay off the Limbaugh, for God’s sake. It really shows how that Dale Carnigie aspect, you must fill yourself with silly rightousness to make an arguement. Why not retreat to Hitchen’s (pathetic) “it all would have happened anyway” stuff?
It’s ugly, but at least it’s not compleatly fantastic, and you don’t have to make up stuff about people (except the Iraqis maybe), everyone in the room knows is crap. To be fair, I would say some Cockburnish leftists predicted it would take longer. On the other hand, it all turned to shit faster once Rummy’s boys were in place. And quite the opposite of the healthy effects it was supposed to have of the region are all coming down fast as well.
“This will be no war-there will be a fairly brief and ruthless
military intervention… The President will give an order.
The attack will be rapid, accurate and dazzling. It will be
greated by the majority of the Iraqi people as an
emancipation. And I say, bring it on.”
-Christopher Hitchens, 1, 28, 2006
July 10th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
By Orson Scott Card January 15, 2006
Iraq — Quit or Stay?
I keep wondering why I’m getting flashbacks to the 1960s. I never took any hallucinogenic drugs. And yet I keep hearing people on TV saying we need to bring the troops home now.
Of course, back in the 60s, the people saying that were all wearing long hair and, if they were of the guy persuasion, beards; now it’s people in suits.
So it occurred to me that maybe they’re the ones having the flashbacks. They really think this war is Vietnam. Having romanticized the anti-war movement of the 1960s, they think they’re wrapping themselves in the mantle of heroes.
I remember that peace movement. It’s the one that disappeared when the draft was abolished.
But what is this peace movement about?
What Withdrawal Would Mean
Let’s suppose we do what they’re suggesting, and either pull the troops out immediately or announce a firm timetable for withdrawal of our troops. What will happen?
Here are some of the results (in order of probability, starting with dead certain):
1. Osama and his cronies in Iraq and elsewhere will not just seem but be completely vindicated. Osama always said that America has no spine. If you just kill enough Americans, we’ll give up and go home. Everyone in the Muslim world will see that Osama was right, and people who doubted him were wrong.
2. Terrorists around the world will be encouraged. Terrorism works! The noble heroes who gave their lives in suicide bombings — and the cleverer ones who simply left roadside explosive devices and detonated them remotely when Americans were passing — will find many more recruits, for they are in a winning cause.
3. The Iraqi people will realize that despite how it appeared for the past couple of years, we’re still the same Americans who abandoned them when they rebelled against Saddam after the Gulf War. You just can’t believe anything Americans promise. And what the Iraqis learn firsthand, all other people who might have been tempted to trust us will learn vicariously. Who will believe an American promise now?
4. Our own military will be profoundly demoralized. What was all that sacrifice about? The years they gave up to service in Iraq, the lives of their friends and comrades who were killed or maimed, all of it meant nothing because their leaders didn’t have even a fraction of the courage they had to show every day.
5. All that terrorist money and all those explosives that were flowing into Iraq … where will they go now?
6. Without American troops in Iraq, the fledgling democracy there will be hard-pressed to survive. Their troops, not yet forged into a coherent army, will run a grave risk of fragmenting along partisan lines, with separate Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni armies. The result? Civil war.
7. If such a civil war happens, there is little chance that Turkey and Iran will keep their hands off. Turkey will try to suppress the Kurds, Iran to promote the Shiites. The only good thing: In such an effort, Iran and Syria will have radically different goals, as Syria supports the Sunnis. There is even risk of the war spreading to involve Turkey, a NATO member, directly.
8. Even in countries that now talk against the war and rail against American aggression, if we actually do what they claim to want, and bring our troops home right away, the governments will panic as the newly emboldened Islamists within their own borders give them far more to worry about. Soon they’ll be cursing us for our cowardly withdrawal.
But when you lose a war, you lose a war, and you just have to live with the consequences.
Still, shouldn’t we make sure we’re actually losing before we withdraw?
July 10th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
Warmongers were wrong about going into Iraq…and they will be wrong about pulling out.
When will people stop listening to them?
July 10th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
Permanent War?
Dealing with Realities in Iraq and Washington
By Robert Dreyfuss
One of the most unfortunate myths pervading American culture, the American psyche, and the whole American weltanschauung — and it’s one for which we might as well go ahead and blame movie director Frank Capra — is that in most situations the good guys win. Morality triumphs. The greedy and self-interested, the cruel and mean-spirited are defeated. Ultimately, or so the myth goes, the bad guys win some of the battles, but in the end the good guys win the wars.
Sadly, in the real world, good doesn’t always win. Sometimes, good isn’t even there. When it comes to Iraq, the left, the liberals, the progressives (for the sake of argument, the good guys) sometimes seem to have their heads in the clouds. That’s true in regard to the crucial question of whether President Bush’s stay-the-course strategy can succeed. The answer, unfortunately, is: Yes, it can.
The Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq today, as in the invasion of 2003, is: Use military force to destroy the political infrastructure of the Iraqi state; shatter the old Iraqi armed forces; eliminate Iraq as a determined foe of U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf; build on the wreckage of the old Iraq a new state beholden to the U.S.; create a new political class willing to be subservient to our interests in the region; and use that new Iraq as a base for further expansion.
To achieve all that, the President is determined to keep as much military power as he can in Iraq for as long as it takes, while recruiting, training, funding, and supervising a ruthless Iraqi police and security force that will gradually allow the American military to reduce their “footprint” in the country without entirely leaving. The endgame, as he and his advisors imagine it, would result in a permanent U.S. military presence in the country, including permanent bases and basing rights, and a predominant position for U.S. business and oil interests.
Marshaling the Bad News
Many progressives scoff at such a scenario. They argue, with persuasiveness, that the American project in Iraq is doomed. To prove their point, they cite (what else?) the bad news. And there certainly is a lot of it.
First of all, the Sunni-led insurgency, metastasizing continually, is a hydra-headed army of armies representing former Baathist military, security, and intelligence officers, assorted nationalists and Islamists, tribal and clan leaders, and city and neighborhood militias. It has shown remarkable resilience. The elimination of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is not likely to put much of a dent in the Sunni resistance and may only strengthen it.
Second, Iraq’s Shiites are restive, at best, and bitterly divided among themselves. The two most powerful blocs, with the two most important militias — the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq with its Badr Brigade and Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army — are to varying degrees unhappy with the American presence. The up-and-coming Fadhila bloc, one of whose leaders was just arrested in Najaf (allegedly for planning IED attacks against U.S. forces), is brooding. Throughout Iraq’s mostly Shiite southern regions, Shiite parties and armies are battling among themselves for the control of important cities, including Basra, and of Iraq’s Southern Oil Company, which produces the vast bulk of Iraqi oil and has provided a valuable stream of corrupt cash for Shiite party leaders. Some of them — possibly all of them — are turning to various factions in Iran for support.
Third, the Kurds, ensconced in the Alamo-like Kurdish region in the north, are happily waxing pro-American even as they quietly prepare for a unilateral grab of the key oil city of Kirkuk, of Iraq’s Northern Oil Company, and of other territory contiguous to the Kurdish region — thus threatening to set in motion an almost unavoidable clash with Iraq’s Arabs, both Sunni and Shiite, and possibly nearby states as well.
Fourth, the American project to create an Iraqi army and police force is going badly. So far, at least, the main army and police units have been reconstituted from the Badr Brigade and Kurdish pesh merga militiamen, none of whom are loyal to the concept of a unitary, nonsectarian Iraq, nor have they been unable to grasp basic notions of human rights. The Shiites, in particular, are engaged in a bloody campaign of death-squad killings and kidnappings, along with targeted assassinations aimed at Baathists. It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to use war-hardened, embittered, and power-hungry Shiite and Kurdish forces to keep peace in Sunni areas, including western Baghdad.
Fifth, of course, the economic reconstruction of Iraq is, shall we say, not going swimmingly.
Not surprisingly, many politicians and generals and most progressives have adopted a worst-case outlook. With bad news mounting, they argue that the American project in Iraq is lost. In truth, I’ve made the same argument, at various points over the past three years. Last November, in an article entitled Getting Out of Iraq for Rolling Stone, I wrote: “George Bush is just about the only person in Washington these days who doesn’t know that the United States has lost the war in Iraq.” I quoted former Georgia Senator Max Cleland, who told a congressional hearing organized by House progressives that the United States had better get out of Iraq before the resistance overruns the Green Zone. “We need an exit strategy that we choose — or it will certainly be chosen for us,” said the grievously wounded Vietnam veteran. “I’ve seen this movie before. I know how it ends.”
Last week, writing for the Nation, Nicholas von Hoffman echoed this theme, suggesting that it’s too late to worry about exit strategies:
“We could be moving toward an American Dunkirk. In 1940 the defeated British Army in Belgium was driven back by the Germans to the French seacoast city of Dunkirk, where it had to abandon its equipment and escape across the English Channel on a fleet of civilian vessels, fishing smacks, yachts, small boats, anything and everything that could float and carry the defeated and wounded army to safety… [In Iraq,] there is no seaport troops could get to, so the only way out of Iraq would be that same desert highway to Kuwait where fifteen years ago the American Air Force destroyed Saddam Hussein’s army.”
What Staying the Course Means
Let me now admit to having second thoughts on this matter. I no longer am convinced that the U.S. adventure in Iraq is lost. There is no guarantee that the Bush administration cannot succeed in its goals there. The only certain thing is that success — what the president calls “victory in Iraq” — will come at the expense of thousands more American deaths, tens of thousands more Iraqi deaths, and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.
Indeed, this war would have to be sustained not only by this administration, but by the next one and probably the one after that as well. For over three years, the United States has supported a massive military presence on the ground in Iraq, while taking steady casualties. It may be no less capable of doing so for the next two-and-a-half years, until the end of Bush’s second term — and during the next administration’s reign, too, whether the president is named John McCain or Hillary Clinton. At least theoretically, a force of more than 100,000 U.S. soldiers could wage a brutal war of attrition against the resistance in Iraq for years to come. Last week, in a leak to the New York Times, the White House announced its intention to leave at least 50,000 troops in Iraq for many years to come. Last week, too, the son of the president of Iraq (a Kurd) revealed that representatives of the Kurdish region are in negotiations with the United States to create a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq’s north.
Meanwhile, President Bush and his Rasputin, Karl Rove, took the occasion of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to reiterate their unalterable commitment to victory in Iraq, whatever the cost. There is no reason not to take Bush at his word. And there is no reason not to believe that Rove will orchestrate a withering offensive against Democrats who question the president’s goal of victory.
The frightening thing about last week’s House and Senate debates over Iraq was that the mainstream opposition to the Bush administration — ranging from moderate Democrats to realist, if pro-military, moderate Republicans — never challenges the goal of victory in Iraq. Yes, a hardy band of antiwar members of Congress (including Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, Lynn Woolsey and Barbara Lee of California, and others, joined by John Murtha of Pennsylvania) support the unconditional withdrawal of American troops. But the bulk of the Democrats, including the 42 Democrats who last week voted in favor of the bloodthirsty Republican war resolution, don’t question the importance of victory in Iraq. They just question the Bush administration’s tactics.
There are only two ways to thwart Bush’s war. The first is for the Iraqi resistance to defeat the U.S. occupation. The second is for domestic public opinion to coalesce around a demand for unilateral withdrawal. So far, neither the Iraqi resistance, nor the antiwar movement have the upper hand; and sadly, so far they are loathe to make common cause with each other.
Where the Vietnamese resistance had a state, North Vietnam, and the support of the other superpower, the Soviet Union, as well as Mao’s China, the resistance in Iraq is nothing but a grassroots insurgency. It neither controls a state, nor has the support of any state. (Contrary to the idiotic assertions of the neoconservatives and the Bush administration, Iran is not assisting the Sunni Iraqi resistance, and that fractured, fractious movement is getting only the most minuscule support from its Sunni Arab neighbors.)
Needless to say, there is no love lost between Iraq’s Baathists and the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The resistance in Iraq would benefit mightily if elements of the Shiite bloc hived off to join the insurgency; if, say, Muqtada Sadr’s ragtag forces abandoned the government to join the resistance, as they toyed with doing during the destruction of Fallujah in 2004. That’s unlikely, though.
So who believes that the Iraqi resistance can fight on indefinitely against the combined might of the U.S. armed forces and American-supported Shiite and Kurdish armies as well as militias, especially with ongoing American divide-and-conquer efforts that involve blandishments offered to the less militant wings of the insurgency? Still, it’s not impossible that the resistance can hold on long enough to effect at least a stalemate. But their ability to do so might depend, in part, on the ability of the American antiwar movement to undermine the administration’s commitment to staying the course in Iraq.
Was Iraq a “Mistake”?
Until now, truly antiwar Democrats have represented a minority force within the party. In opposition, they have largely been eclipsed by moderate Democrats and realist Republicans, both seemingly content to argue that the war in Iraq was merely a “mistake” and an inefficiently prosecuted “failure” without confronting the war itself. In fact, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic minority leader who (half-heartedly) supports Rep. Murtha’s get-out-now position, used both of those words over and over during last week’s debate. Both words are deadly — and probably wrong as well.
The war in Iraq was not a “mistake.” It was a deliberately calculated exercise of U.S. power with a specific end in mind — namely, control of Iraq and the Persian Gulf region. It was illegal and remains so. It was a war crime and remains so. Its perpetrators were war criminals and remain so. Its goals were unworthy and remain so.
Few Democrats, and almost no Republicans, have been willing to challenge Bush’s war on these terms, however. Neither have most of the Bush administration’s so-called mistakes truly been errors: the brutal dismantling of the Baath party and the dissolution of the Iraqi armed forces, widely castigated now as “mistakes” by many Bush critics, were meant. They were thought out. They were planned with purpose. They, too, were deliberate actions aiming at U.S. hegemony in Iraq.
Nor is the war simply, or even largely, a “failure.” As cruel and brutish as it is, it is grinding its way toward its goal. Victory for the United States in Iraq, as evidenced by the recitation of bad news I cited earlier, is by no means certain. But it is far too early to call it a failure either. To do so at this stage is Capra-esque. It assumes that bad guys don’t win. But sometimes they do. And on Iraq, the jury remains out.
The danger of emphasizing the supposed “mistakes” and “failures” of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy is that it plays into a notion held by an increasingly large component of centrists in both parties — that, although the war itself was a “mistake,” the only rational option for the United States now is to win it anyway. There are countless variations on this theme emanating from both Democratic and Republican centrists.
You hear it in the argument that, although the war was wrong, we now have a moral obligation to stay and prevent civil war. You hear it in the argument that the United States must be strong against the threat of global “Islamofascism,” and that by leaving Iraq we will hand Al Qaeda and its allies a victory. There are other variations of the same, but all of those who make such arguments (while criticizing Bush for his alleged incompetence and mismanagement) end up arguing that the United States has no choice other than to stay.
In my discussions with them in recent weeks, several have brought up Colin Powell’s absurd argument about the Pottery Barn rule: if you break it, you own it. Well, yes, we broke Iraq, but we don’t own it. (In fact, the Pottery Barn itself has no such rule. If you mistakenly break a piece of pottery in one of its stores, you aren’t actually liable.) We have absolutely no moral imperative to stay in Iraq. We have a moral imperative to leave — and to apologize.
Just as the antiwar movement in the United States can strengthen the resistance in Iraq, the Iraqi resistance can aid the antiwar movement. The cold reality of the war in Iraq is that, had it not been for the Iraqi resistance, there would be no U.S. antiwar movement. Had Iraq’s Sunnis collapsed in disarray and meekly ceded power to the Shiite-Kurdish coalition empowered by the U.S. invasion, President Bush’s illegal war in Iraq might have succeeded far more effortlessly. But here’s the truth of the matter: Led by Iraq’s Baath party and by Iraqi military officers and their tribal and clan allies, a thriving insurgency did develop within months of the March 2003 invasion. Some of the resistance is, of course, still made up of Iraqis passionately loyal to the person of Saddam Hussein. But studies of the insurgency show that most of its fighters are loyal to the Baath party, whose origins were among left-leaning Arab nationalists, or they are loyal to a more specific version of Iraqi nationalism, or they simply oppose the foreign occupation of their country.
Back to Capra Country
The antiwar movement in the United States developed not out of intellectual and moral opposition to the war itself, although that is at its core. It grew because mainstream Americans became increasingly disturbed by the prolonged war that followed the 2003 invasion. Many Americans grew outraged over U.S. casualties. But the fact that a prolonged insurgency followed the invasion and that U.S. casualties mounted is the result of the Iraqi people’s unwillingness to submit to an American diktat.
Viewed from that standpoint, it’s at least worth asking: Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in Iraq? Are the good guys the U.S. troops fighting to impose American hegemony in the Gulf? Are the good guys the American forces who have installed a murderous Shiite theocracy in Baghdad? Are the good guys the Marines who murdered children and babies in Haditha in cold blood? Are the good guys the U.S. officers who brought us Abu Ghraib, or the generals who signed off on their methods, or the administration that set them on such a path in the first place? Who was it, after all, who pulverized the institutions of the Iraqi state and society?
So if the U.S. “cavalry” aren’t the good guys, who then can we cast in that role? If Frank Capra went to Iraq, how would he divide the place neatly into good guys and bad guys and assemble his feel-good morality play? Certainly, most Americans still believe that the Americans are the good guys, even if 62% (according to one recent poll) no longer believe that the war in Iraq was “worth fighting.” But my argument here is: Capra could make a plausible argument that, in the hell that Iraq has become in 2006, with resistance fighters killing U.S. soldiers and vice versa, there’s at least as much good on their side as on ours, if not more.
That raises, once again, the question of a dialogue with the Iraqi insurgents. For the past year, off and on, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has conducted secret talks with the resistance and has openly made a distinction between Zarqawi-style jihadists and former Baathists and military men. Since the creation of the new, allegedly permanent government under Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Iraqi government officials once again have raised the idea of talking to the resistance. An aide to Maliki even suggested an amnesty for armed fighters who have killed U.S. troops. That’s a good idea, and it’s been raised more than once since 2003. In this case, though, an ignorant Sen. Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and Senate minority leader, expressed outrage at the idea of an amnesty. According to the Washington Post, which first reported the amnesty idea, the Maliki aide who suggested it was fired.
Personally I’m suspicious of Khalilzad’s dialogue offers. By dangling the idea, Khalilzad is more than likely using a divide-and-conquer tactic, enticing some insurgent leaders to join the new Iraqi regime. How else to interpret the offer at a moment when President Bush is insisting on an unconditional U.S. victory in Iraq? People knowledgeable about the resistance know that the only basis for serious talks with the insurgents is the offer of an American withdrawal from Iraq in exchange for an accord.
Still, whether one thinks the resistance fighters are good guys, or bad guys that we need to talk to, the left, the antiwar movement, and progressives don’t have to wait for Zal Khalilzad. The time for talking to Iraq’s Baath, former military leaders, and Sunni resistance forces is here. And now that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead, the nature of the Iraqi insurgency is partly clarified. It’s a lot harder for supporters of the war to argue that extremist, head-severing Islamist extremists are its dominant face. In fact, of course, they never were.
Some of the antiwar movement’s more perceptive leaders have already started the dialogue. Tom Hayden, the former California state senator and activist, has been talking to the Iraqi resistance in London, Amman, and elsewhere. Some members of Congress, such as Rep. Jim McDermott, have traveled to Amman, Jordan to do the same thing. The Bush administration might not be ready to do it openly — yet. But wars end either with the utter defeat of one side or the other, or with a negotiated settlement. I’ll take that settlement.
Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The American Prospect, Mother Jones, and the Nation. He is also a regular contributor to TomPaine.com, the Huffington Post, and other sites, and writes the blog, The Dreyfuss Report.
July 10th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
reg, your concerns of the war are “Monday Morning Quarterbacking” and weren’t generally expressed by anyone that I know.
Why, even Kerry voted for the war, before he voted against it; he voted for funding, before he voted against it; and, he voted to commit our troops before he voted to cut and run. It seems to me that your glowing report of warnings and predictions from the left are just a compilation of complaints that they discovered AFTER we got there. (The Democrats and press didn’t claim that elections wouldn’t be held? What are YOUR souces of news?)
BTW, I’ll still use the right to express my opinions on supporting the administration just as you express your opinions on abandoning the Iraqi citizens to terrorist butchers–personal commitments or none by either of us.
July 10th, 2006 at 2:41 pm
“Of course, back in the 60s, the people saying that were all wearing long hair and, if they were of the guy persuasion, beards; now it’s people in suits.”
A favorite but not terribly real characterization of the antiwar movement in the 1960′s and 70′s. In fact much of the movement consisted of pretty mainstream looking characters including lots of soldiers who returned from the war and joined in the protests. No different from today of course.
http://home.sandiego.edu/~hbarns/1969-1.jpg
http://home.sandiego.edu/~hbarns/1969-2.jpg
http://home.sandiego.edu/~hbarns/Moratorium4.jpg
http://home.sandiego.edu/~hbarns/Moratorium5.jpg
http://www.museumca.org/picturethis/5_4.html#
July 10th, 2006 at 2:43 pm
“Why, even Kerry voted for the war, before he voted against it; he voted for funding, before he voted against it; and, he voted to commit our troops before he voted to cut and run.”
Hold it, I thought Kerry was so different from Bush ? Sounds like he’s a pretty mainstream supporter of US empire from how you describe him Woody. Different strategies to defend empire, but basically the same defense of US goals to create a privatized Iraq that does as US corporate interests expect, no?
July 10th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
This photo shows an interracial crowd of 10,000 people marching from U.C. Berkeley to deFremery Park in Oakland in the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC) March on November 21, 1965, the first protest march against the war in California. Showing their connection with previous Civil Rights marches, protesters’ songs ranged from “We Shall Overcome” to “Down By The Riverside.” The VDC became responsible for planning the anti-war protests in Berkeley during the 1960s.
The anti-war movement held protest marches all over the country from 1965 through 1972. Draft card burnings, begun in Boston protests in 1964, gained national prominence by 1967 as popular forms of protests. In 1965 there were 380 prosecutions for draft resisters. By 1968 the number reached 3,305.
Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, for the first time “linked the civil rights movement to the anti-war movement and Johnson’s war on poverty to his war against Vietnam,” according to Marilyn Young in The Vietnam Wars 1945-1990.
In California, Stop the Draft Week organizers led 3000 marchers to the Oakland Induction Center on October 16, 1967. When marchers refused police orders to leave, police attacked them with nightsticks, injuring 20. On the second day, demonstrators returned to the Induction Center, and this time 97 were arrested. On the third day, 10,000 protesters arrived, this time retreating in orderly fashion but also successfully blocking streets as they departed.
Alternative media, like California’s The Los Angeles Free Press and The Berkeley Barb, supported opposition to the war by announcing demonstrations, reporting on them, and becoming forums for lively political debate.
The Chicano Moratorium, the largest anti-war protest in southern California reflected a growing involvement of ethnic minorities, influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, to protest the war. The Black Panthers, founded in Oakland in 1966, had a large membership of returning Black Vietnam Vets, who were angry at having fought for Vietnamese civil rights while being denied their own back home. Additionally, they knew that a disproportionate number of their Black brothers were being drafted and dying in an unjust war.
July 10th, 2006 at 2:48 pm
“The Democrats and press didn’t claim that elections wouldn’t be held?”
WHat is the point of elections when the economy, military, and politicians are in the control of an outside occupation force? So much for real sovereignty, elections or no elections.
July 10th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
I fear that this is becoming Vietnam Redux. No not the war but the arguments about it. Someone said that we needed to stay in S Vietnam another 15 years and, voila’, another S Korea. Sorry but we would still be there fighting and dying while the ARVN stood around picking its collective nose and its officer corps prepared fancy villas in the South of France. The S Koreans didn,t want to be run by the glorious leader and THEY fought. Still do which is why Kim doesn’t invade like pappy.
Michael Balter points out a simple fact. Kurdistan in any form would alarm the Turks who would probably do something about it. And do you think Iraq’s Sunni neighbors would stand still for a Shia state that would be all but in name an Iranian Sattelite? Partition sounds good just as would be nice to get in the wayback machine and go back 80 years and prevent messers Sykes and Picot from meeting. But I doubt that will happen.
So we will leave in the next few years and people like Woody will complain of being “stabbed in the back” once more. As Marc – or Bill Bennett – might say, you can make book on it.
July 10th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
Well, now that Woody has abandoned his false contention that the left claimed we couldn’t take Saddam, we can go a little further (some of the Left DID fear it would be a lot more dicey, but that was based to a large degree on the right’s fearmongering about how strong Saddam was).
So let’s accept Woody’s claim that he was against the war; but must now be for it due to the changed situation. At the very LEAST, he might conceade that his President should not have sought a second term, that his extrodonary blunder, based on a utter lack of experience suited to the job; should have forced him to walk away in humility.
Not a chance, because Woody is the new; post Gingritch conservative, that is, a traitor to our country who loves only his party. His kind sold America down the river long ago, and even if he’s not in on the real payoff, he’s happy with whites only policy (all tokens aside).
Halberstam said correctly “Vietnam and Iraq are Apples and Oranges, but the Apples start to look like Oranges after awhile.”Indeed.” The rehabilitation of Vietnam was never a question to draft dodging families like the Bushes. We are locked in a post 66 mindset, good lives must be thrown out to justify those already wasted. Except there’s not even a glimmer of hope we can bomb our way out.
H.W. Bush, speaking about Iraq in his Son’s campaign, said “I was driving up here tonight, and there were some potholes as we went down the road. I expected John Kerry to come screaming out “Pot holes! Pot holes!’
That’s what the 2,500 plus dead are to the likes of the Bushes and Woody. Pot holes. The Iraqi dead? Losses too acceptable to mention. Another 500 or so Americans will fall before the election time pull out of 2008. After that, it’s somebody else’s mess to clean up. The high comedy of Bush being consulted for his expertice in the situation is the sort of thing that keeps one going.
July 10th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
While I agree with many of your points Wall, let’s, whether you left, right, red, blue, polka dotted, hypoallergenic or just slightly warm refrain from bashing others over their patriotism, it stinks no matter who’s wearing it.
The point of Marc’s blog today was about the escallating violence happening to the Iraqi people, yet somehow we manage to turn it around and make it about us and winning.
Sure the sectarian violence is solidifiying old hatreds, but it is also being blamed on the US for dismantling one of the few secularly ruled countries in the Arab world. Certainly, if someone hit your car, totalling it, and although they are fully insured, stating “you fix it” it would be unnacceptable. To me the level of Iraqi deaths is the second biggest failure of this illegal enterprise. We send troops to protect property and oil, but not people I’m curious to hear what other’s think about what the Iraqi people are going through and if they think we’re just building a better terrorist.
I’m also a little dissapointed, but surprised that no one has mentioned Hadditha or horrendous pre-meditated rape-massacre and how that may be affecting the Iraqi people.
And if we’re to stay for what I heard could be up to 8 years we will need to increase troop levels – which I doubt can be achieved without a draft.
July 10th, 2006 at 5:17 pm
Wall, I didn’t abandon any claim that I made, and I stated some of those that I heard. Unfortunately, I don’t keep transcripts of all the shows where the wacko leftists called in and, at one point, were gleeful in pointing out that we had not found Hussein yet. These were the same people who were very disappointed when he actually did, and that’s very easy to document. Are you actually saying that NO ONE from the left commented on Hussein slipping from us at some point?
Since you didn’t address my other points of false predictions from the left, then you are indicating that you accept those by your silence.
I didn’t say that I was against the war and then for it. I said that I didn’t support going in but once we were there I supported our adminstration and our troops–unlike the left that supports neither. If Bush was wrong, America had a chance to toss him out, but they re-elected him over your “3 and out war hero.”
Of course, when you say that I’m for “whites only,” you show your total ignorance and desparation to score points. Bush is Hitler, too…right?
I hate war and deaths in war. What I hate more is the the left’s failure to oppose those who commit crimes against humanity, kill thousands of innocent people, and steal freedom. The absence of war against tyrants is worse than war itself.
Just who protects your rights? Did they just appear out of no where or did others fight for them? It’s a moral responsibility to help those who cannot stand up for themselves, but politics is so much more important to the left that they would abandon that responsiblity.
If I was ever in a battle for freedom, you’re the last person that I would want fighting besides me.
July 10th, 2006 at 5:27 pm
The Right is incredibly prone to denying reality a priori, during and post debacle.
July 10th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
Has anyone on this entire Blog ever written that Bush is Hitler besides Woody who has probably written it a hundred times. What a troll.
July 10th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Mavis, I have been compared to Hitler by a commenter on this site. Ann Coulter has been called Hitler. Bush has been called Hitler. In fact, I think that Bush has been called Hitler more than Hitler was. You might be interested in a post by G.M. Roper on this–with good pictures. http://gmroper.mu.nu/archives/185450.php
July 10th, 2006 at 6:08 pm
“Liberals Love Stalin” Woody has a lot of goddam nerve. And that’s about all.
July 10th, 2006 at 6:18 pm
Woody, what about the people of Iraq that was the point of this blog. Why will no one talk about what they are going through what these deaths mean to them and whether we”re doing enough to protect why must it be about attacking your fellow Americans and as someone who has fam in “The Rack” I never was for this war and support them by trying to encourage our leaders to devise better military plans to bring them home. Maybe it’s because of my family history also having served in Vietnam – disproportinately I may add, like we are now.
This left/right ranting is getting tiresome – and I don’t even believe in it, there are very few people who are purely left or right most of it’s spin the sitting prez uses to divide us as Americans.
Woody, Mavis, Wall, Publius, Liberty Dad whoever WHAT ABOUT THE PEOPLE OF IRAQ
July 10th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
What about the people of Iraq?
The people of Iraq just voted in free elections for their leaders for the first time because of our actions there. Would you tell them them that freedom and democracy isn’t worth a price? It has been 230 years since someone paid the price for my freedoms and rights. Today, I am still glad that they did. Future generations of the Iraqi people will be glad that someone fought for their freedom, also.
I agree about the left-right rants and wish that there was less of it. But, I believe that the left opposes Iraq because they despise Bush rather than caring about the Iraqi people. If everyone had the same goal of doing what’s best for Iraq rather than what’s best for the next election, these left-right divisions wouldn’t arise.
Does RssrrX have any meaning?
July 10th, 2006 at 6:38 pm
@ judgealito: Your own comments are appreciated. But when you want to cite someone else, please use a link rather than posting the whole thing. (Above link from TomDispatch, where Robt Dreyfuss’ article originally appeared on June 18. I recommend his most recent two columns at TomPaine.com as well. Go there and search on ‘Dreyfuss’.)
@marc: I’m genuinely curious about what your current opinion is on next steps wrt the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
In the past, you’ve more than once assumed that my questions in comments here are antagonistic or in bad faith (‘sniping’, ‘ankle-biting’, etc.), so I don’t know what to do to assure you that this one is not the prelude to an attack. I’m not asking in an effort to say “see? aha!”
It seems that sometime between last summer and now your position has shifted considerably. That’s not a bad thing! I’m just trying to understand what your thinking is now on what can be done. I imagine I’m not the only reader of your blog with the same question.
July 10th, 2006 at 6:44 pm
The sixty-some-odd Iraqis murdered overnight are no less dead than if they had been killed by Saddam.
Very true Mark. The difference is now the remaining Iraqis have a chance (not a gaurantee) to end the killing, to build a better future.
Before Saddam and his murderous sons were removed from power, they had none.
July 10th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
Excellent question, Rssrrx.
I, like Woody, tried to put the best face on an incredibly stupid policy once the invasion was launched and hoped – in fact, believe – that some good would come of it. But it’s hard to see how our presence or policies have been “good” at this point.
There was suffering before…there’s unbelieveable suffering now. Two successive Republican Presidents before Bush made things in Iraq worse – Reagan by aiding Saddam when he was comitting war crimes that the neo-cons now use as evidence that an invasion two decades later was necessary to stop him, and Bush1 by signalling, with our troops on the border and an enormous amount of potential logistical support immediately available, that the Iraqis should rise up and then not only abandoning them but actually ordering that our soldiers seal the border when they fled. (At least one courageous U.S. officer refused to comply.) Then we get the current outrageous situation – the litany of willful dishonesty and incompetence doesn’t need repetition, because anyone who doesn’t get it by now never will.
So I agree that “what about the Iraqis?” is an immediate and essential question. I don’t have an answer that’s neat. My best assumption is somewhere in the terrain outlined by Jack Murtha, but there’s no certainty of anything regarding outcomes when you’re in the middle of a pig fuck. Despite the urgency of that problem, another essential issue for Americans is to sort out some responsibility for what looks to be one of the worst examples of willful dishonesty and terminal incompetence in our history.
It’s been clear to me for years that the Iranians are far more likely to gain from this mess than we are, for several reasons that don’t require much genius to discern – one, is the consolidation of Shiite control of the Gulf (which, frankly, is simply demographics taking their course, no matter how much we may disdain the spread of Islamic fundamentalism) and second, because it’s damned obvious that if we can’t “control” Iraq after an invasion, we aren’t about to try “regime change” against Tehran at any level beyond the charade of Dick Cheney’s daughter (!) getting some tens of millions of dollars to pass out to Iranian Chalabis. (Presumably there’s some lunch money in that pot for Michael Ledeen as well.) I’m not saying that invading Iran rather than Iraq would have been any less of a fools errand – legal, moral and political objections aside – but it would have made a bit more rough sense within the frenzied rhetorical posture of the NeoCon nuts and the Keyboard Kommandos and our threats would, at the least, not have been totally and transparently empty.
The idea that the Reaganites, Bushniks and Neo-Cons shoud get a pass because we’re “all in this together” is a mite too convenient and, frankly, without any accountability our democracy is in trouble. And even if you or I can come up with a plan – be it “Murtha-like” or “send in another hundred thousand troops for 7, 8, 10 or 15 years”, it’s obvious the current crowd are capable of nothing more than pressing the pedal while their wheels spin in the mud.
I’ve got a kid who recently joined the military too, although he’s not on the ground in Iraq, so what happens with Baghdad, Tehran and Pyongyang isn’t some idle debating issue that allows me to feel good by slapping babblers like Woody around. Still, some people deserve to be slapped for this one – hard – and Woody is the least among them.
July 10th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
No one believes you anymore, Ugly American, you were full of shit going into this war and you are going to be chin-deep in shit on your way out.
You, and your kind, give democracy a bad name.
July 10th, 2006 at 7:01 pm
that should have been “believed” , not “believe” in the first paragraph.
July 10th, 2006 at 7:02 pm
Michael Balter writes: “The Kurdish region of Iraq is not Kurdistan, but only part of it. Turkey will never agree to give up any of its territory, so is Michael Turner talking about the Kurdish region of Iraq or is he talking about Kurdistan?”
Obviously (or so I assumed), I’m talking about the Kurdish region of Iraq, which is the only area that’s likely to be a virtually sovereign Kurdistan for the foreseeable future. Turkey? As far as I’m concerned, looking westward at eventual Turkish EU accession, and eastward to an eventual homeland in which they’ll have right-of-return, is the best of both worlds for Turkish Kurds. They’ll have no reason to struggle for any greater autonomy within Turkey — which is why you don’t see them struggling for it now, just when you’d think an increasingly-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan would be emboldening separatism in Kurdish Turkey.
Balter again: “I’m having a real problem with people here deciding the fate of the Iraqis as if they were pieces on a chessboard or imaginary figures in a computer game–the US is already trying to do that without success.”
I’m “deciding the fate” of these people?! Hah! I’m having a real problem seeing how what I wrote could be interpreted that way. No, I’m trying to figure out how the chess pieces will end up moving from square to square under their own power, with either the indirect help or feeble hindrance of the U.S.
The U.S. has weakly hegemonic power at best, in Iraq. To me it’s transparently obvious that Iraqis could have kicked us out long ago, were they unified around that goal. There is an average of one gun per household in Iraq — imagine if even 10% of those tens of millions of guns were turned against U.S. occupation forces. They haven’t kicked us out, because there is no unifying goal behind any such move yet. Our presence is an irritant, but it’s a politically tolerable, even useful, irritant to several parties in the conflict. We’ll be gone the day we’re no longer convenient for the process of sorting out what follows the post-Saddam power vacuum we created. And the people running this war know that. How can they not? They’ve made some mistakes, of course. But they aren’t stupid.
July 10th, 2006 at 7:18 pm
Notice how none of the defenders of this debacle can answer Marc’s question – what would a “Victory” in Iraq look like. That is answer with other than pieties about the Iraqis leading a better life or enjoying the fruits of Democracy, or maybe their own mini sectarian state. That is the problem. We all know that a withdrawal will cause problems but I don’t see how those problems will be worse than we have now. So, once again, let’s ask the Kerry Question (Mark 1971): How do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?
July 10th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
We unleashed the civil war that was suppressed for 30 years. That’s the best we could do and was totally predictable a priori. I said as much at the time.
July 10th, 2006 at 8:17 pm
“Very true Mark.”
Who is Mark? Besides one of the apostles?
July 10th, 2006 at 8:21 pm
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008992.php
July 10th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
Damn! Great minds think alike: http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=24150
Just beat me. Does sewing a dog’s head on a 15 year-old-girl after torturing and beheading mean freedom rings? This has been a great investment. Really.
July 10th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
I agree with the point of there is a price to be paid for democracy, however we’re talking about a culture with a history of monarchy’s that goes back further than the majority Western countries and is mistrustful at best of modern democracy.
What happened here, was a revolution in it’s purist sense. The colonists felt that they were being unfairly taxed and banded together to overthrow the imperialist influence. I think that’s what so ironic now. Is that what’s happening in Iraq is so ironic.
Iraqi were opressed by their government but they were in no way mentally or socially prepared for revolution. This is a culture where dissent is inherently frowned upon and there are too many peaceful monarchy’s surrounding them to prove to them otherwise. It may not be our ideal, but think about how our puritan forefathers still inlfuence us to this day and multiply it by twenty.
Our position as “world police” I think hurt any kind of grassroots movement, many Iraqi’s assumed that because we have one of the largest and most success armed forces today, that we would not only liberate them, but protect them as well. They simply had no time to prepare for a fight. So it’s easy to see how quickly this has descended in their minds into an invasion as opposed to Vietnam whereby there was already an organic opposition in the South that was armed and battling the North.
If there is to be any hope of salvaging this for the Iraqi people, we have to do more than sell them on principals that must seem now pretty empty to them and yes protect them. It means more American losses, which no one wants to hear, but if we’re going to stay that has to be a part of the plan, otherwise we should pull out.
We also need to have a transparent judicial system to deal with American military crimes against Iraqi citizens. While we can accept the closed nature of military trials in the US to those who have never experienced a fair judicial system it smacks of imperialism at it’s worst and builds resentment. I think it’s fine not to have our troops subjected to Iraqi trials, but in exchange we must provide more transparency, to show that the process can work.
RssrrX is a play upon name of Speed Racer’s secret brother in the cartoon. He was a mysterious and successful race car driver. No one knew his true identiy because he always wore a mask, but he always managed show up in time to save Speed when Speed really needed him. Throught my life I have sometime longed for that kind of annonyminity.
Yeah, I’m a geek
July 10th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
Woody writes:
“The people of Iraq just voted in free elections for their leaders for the first time because of our actions there. Would you tell them them that freedom and democracy isn’t worth a price?”
For some time now, Woody, a majority of Iraqis polled say that they’ll accept whatever costs may come with a U.S. exit ASAP. (About 80% if you leave out the Kurds.) We don’t have to tell them anything. We just have to ask them.
The people of Iraq voted in free elections to install some representatives into some hastily-rigged institutional apparatus. But are these elected officials the “leaders” of some unified Iraq? No. They don’t even have an effective national army. (The Pesh Merga hardly counts.) They have local militias, and police forces infiltrated heavily by those militias, to guarantee what little local peace they have.
In the long run, if post-Saddam “freedom” doesn’t mean the freedom to go out at night without taking their lives in their hands, they’ll settle for security. WE might fight to the death for a liberty and democracy that we’ve enjoyed for generations, but Iraqis can hardly be blamed for not assessing the fair price as being quite so high. How can they believe in what they haven’t really seen yet? If many Iraqis say that life is better with Saddam gone, it may mean that they are now under the protection of people they trust more–which would include certain people who fight U.S. troops.
You’re trying to make this mess much simpler than it really is. Give it up already. Or at least take up the challenge here: what defines victory for us? If it’s defined by our representative democracy, would you call it victory if our elected representatives voted to pull our troops out post-haste? If it’s defined by Iraq’s representative democracy, what if THEY voted U.S. troops out tomorrow? If they are truly representative, why haven’t they followed the will of what you call the Iraqi people, and sent us packing? One can only conclude that these representatives of the free, democratic national government of Iraq either don’t really have the power to do so (in which case they aren’t really the government), or that they are not really representative (in which case it’s not really a democracy). With those two hypotheses in hand, Woody, (and no others that make any sense), you may now go ask Iraqis what price they would put on that Iraqi national “freedom”, that Iraqi national “democracy”. A dime and a cuppa coffee, if you ask me.
July 10th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
“You’re trying to make this mess much simpler than it really is. Give it up already. Or at least take up the challenge here: what defines victory for us?”
The Woodys of this world won’t do that because ALL they are concerned about is protecting the Bush administration from criticism–it is all ideology to them. Iraqis, American soldiers, the truth of the situation, reality, none of this really matters to them.
btw the only serious attempt to grapple with Iraq’s future I saw here was the post to the Dreyfuss article. While I would normally agree that a link is sufficient the full post made me read it right away which I appreciate.
July 11th, 2006 at 1:05 am
What about Iraq’s future? — in a democracy, it’s up to the voters. I’d expect them to vote in greater and greater power for the police, and harsher police state actions, as long as the “insurgents” keep murdering Iraqis with bombs and killings.
http://www.strategypage.com/qnd/iraq/articles/20060710.aspx
Some Sunnis are ready to give up and go for some kind of peace, rather than dueling death squads. The central Iraq gov’t has started to go after Shia death squads, a bit. Maliki’s police powers will keep increasing until most insurgency stops, and it becomes comparable to Lebanon (or Israel?).
What about the Iraqi people? see Iraq Body count: http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
between 39 000 & 44 000 killed so far. How many before the Iraqis decide killing others is not worth it? — it is up to the Iraqis, not Bush or the US. That’s what “Iraqi sovereignty” means. Yes, with leaders influenced by Bush; influence is not control.
I think it will be far less than 100 000 more Iraqis killed, before they “stop” killing each other more than 10/week in bombs/kidnappings. Naturally, Leftist intellectual cowards refuse to offer their own numbers, either in prediction or in alternative valuations. (Let me know if I missed any, I skimmed a lot of the usual BS).
Thanks for the (too long?) Dreyfuss article; it was interesting to see Leftist steps towards recognizing that Bush is continue to act as if he’s going to win, and thus increase the likelihood of functioning democracy in Iraq.
I find Bush hate criticism based on Iraqis killed, as written by Leftists, particularly hypocritical and galling: compare Darfur (no US action) and Iraq (liberation) — looks like US Liberation is a better option. For the local people, over the long term.
Let’s remember: 600 000 murders by victorious N. Viet commies after the anti-war policy was followed in Vietnam. Where is the moral accountability for actively supporting this result? Where was the Leftist outrage against the N. Viets they accepted as victors when their cut and run policy was enacted? What a disgusting joke — to Leftists, dead foreigners are merely useful as sticks to beat on America, or else essentially ignored.
I waste my time here because I’m so angry at NOT fighting evil in Vietnam & Cambodia; and I see the same delusions by anti-war Dems today. Also the same lack of real concern for dead foreigners, which I point out in Darfur – Iraq comparisons.
Naturally anti-Americans try to place Darfur blame on the US, but in fact had the US Dems been more supportive of Bush & Iraq liberation, there might be more support for US liberation in Darfur. Yeah, I blame the Dems, and Amnesty & HRW — who talk human rights but refuse to support imperfect human armies trying to stop evil human rights violators. (See Totten/ Callimachus on Hungary 1956) I certainly think those who support “human rights” are hypocrites if they oppose enforcement against regimes who violate the rights.
Also, next door Iran and the nukes of the Mullahs. Which is worse: a) let the mullahs get nukes, or b) bomb the Iranian nuke making targets?
Keeping US troops in Iraq is huge military advantage in negotiations with Iran against them getting a nuke. Cato unbound, Libertarians quite anti-war; fairly anti-Bush, plus pro-Bush folk in good discussions.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/
Finally, from Iraq the Model, optimism:
http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com
“But what really makes me feel optimistic about this new Iraqi way of thinking is that it shows how Iraqis are beginning to distinguish between terrorism and rightful acts of resistance not only in Iraq but also on a global level and are showing decreasing tolerance for extremism and this in my opinion is what builds peace in the region or any given region of this world.”
July 11th, 2006 at 1:35 am
“As far as I’m concerned, looking westward at eventual Turkish EU accession, and eastward to an eventual homeland in which they’ll have right-of-return, is the best of both worlds for Turkish Kurds. They’ll have no reason to struggle for any greater autonomy within Turkey — which is why you don’t see them struggling for it now, just when you’d think an increasingly-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan would be emboldening separatism in Kurdish Turkey.”
Michael Turner, I often agree with what you say here, or at least find it interesting, despite my taking issue with you often on other things. Again, sorry, but this statement betrays a lack of knowledge. The Kurdish movement in SE Turkey is as active as ever, and is emboldened by events in northern Iraq, which is partly why Turkey has recently amassed 250,000 troops on its border with Iraq–or did you miss that? And the notion, if I understand you right, that Turkish Kurds would see northern Iraq as a place to which they want the “right to return,” when they live in a huge area of Turkey where they have major cities and an entrenched culture, is again based on serious ignorance. But then you recently told us Srebrenica did not happen, so no surprise perhaps.
Everyone needs to tread very carefully where the Kurdish card is concerned. Kurds, Turks, and Arabs native to northern Iraq all have legitimate concerns that should not be ignored.
July 11th, 2006 at 1:56 am
I should also mention the Christians of this region, sorry about that.
July 11th, 2006 at 2:12 am
Not to beat this to death, but very annoying when Turner makes statements off the top of his head without any factual basis. This is from a very well respected reporter, but no one will have problems finding evidence of a resurgence in PKK and other separatist activity if they just search for it.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wopkk0625,0,5189073.story?coll=ny-leadworldnews-headlines
July 11th, 2006 at 6:21 am
I’m just not going to have any time today, so you guys rant on.
MT, you downplay Iraqi elections but play up on Iraqi polls. Just how accurate are the polls over there and how were the questions worded and who asked them and did the respondents have any fear of giving a “wrong” answer?
I’ve defined “victory” as well as I can define it at this point. All you guys have defined is “defeat,” which is everything that has been done and exists in Iraq because of us. To you, there is never a victory, because you will always find something wrong in our mission because Bush is behind it. Now, that’s a platform fitting for Democrats.
Perhaps I’ll know that we have achieved victory when the left reaches the ultimate in anger and hate-filled attacks, similar to what they do with every success we have. The U.S. is a good country. You should join us.
July 11th, 2006 at 8:13 am
Tom Grey and Woody,
You have been so terribly wrong, what makes you think you can even come close to right now?
Your analysis is so bad, it’s not even close to wrong, anymore.
July 11th, 2006 at 8:40 am
“Perhaps I’ll know that we have achieved victory when the left reaches the ultimate in anger and hate-filled attacks, similar to what they do with every success we have.”
Oh right, the situation in Iraq is getting so close to “success” that I get more angry and hate-filled every day.
July 11th, 2006 at 10:24 am
Tom Grey is groping for something he can term victory. Since other conservatives have so far proposed nothing, we can at least appreciate the efforts of one Liberty Dad. I agree with you, Tom Grey, that casualties sustained by the volunteer American army haven’t been outrageous (though the way the right has played down those deaths when it’s convenient has been disgraceful). However, your 100,000 civilian Iraqi deaths number is unbelievable. How can you, some jerk at home with a computer, decide that some arbitrary but enormous number of lives is an acceptable cost? How can you sit there and say, you’ll all appreciate this democracy enough that it’s worth your son’s life, your cousin’s life, and your business? How can some one who has never even been to Iraq or lived among Iraqi’s sacrifice their lives for what you hope will one day benefit them? The arrogance!
To be more conciliatory for a moment, if Bush had managed to oust Hussain and bring some sort of stable democracy to Iraq with a loss of under 10,000 Iraqi civilian lives (still three times our losses on 9/11) I probably would have limited myself to under-my-breath grumbling. Despite the absence of WMD’s and this adventure’s ineffectiveness in the fight against terrorism, such a transformation would have had merit for the Iraqi people, albeit at a very austere cost. But the current state of chaotic violence and political impotence just demolishes any immediate benefit and the long term benefits remain unclear and, just as importantly, might have been accomplished by other means.
The cost to America is dollars, lives, and world prestige can hardly be overestimated. The cost to the Iraqi people is even harsher. And the benefits? At this point we’re shooting for a livable society for the Iraqi people that isn’t too dangerous or tyrannous. Not too lofty.
Rssrsxx nerdface wants a prescription for Iraq. I don’t know what to tell you. I believe it’s in the best interest of American to get the hell out of there. I’m not sure what’s in the best interest of the Iraqi people. If I were president and had to come up with something, I at least put together a exit strategy road map, something that had specific goals that would lead to specific phases of withdrawal and would make very clear that permanent US bases and endless occupation aren’t American goals. That’s all I got. I’m not very pleased with it either. On the other hand, a few years ago I was standing on a street corner yelling at the government not to fuck everything up in the first place.
July 11th, 2006 at 10:31 am
“It’s been clear to me for years that the Iranians are far more likely to gain from this mess than we are, for several reasons that don’t require much genius to discern…”
No kidding. But, willfully ignorant of history, cultural imperative and simple human nature, the neocons assumed we would simply domino our way through it all…
July 11th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Dear Liberity Dad,
I know the posts were long but here’s a clip from in case you missed it.
“If this situation was not so critical I’d laugh for all those who are trying to use Darfur as some sort of measuring stick for the Iraqi War is disgusting.
Where were you last year? Sudan has been a hotbed of Al Queda activity for years, not only did they provide sanctuary for Bin Laden, but has multiple training grounds for terrorists. Yet as a country we do nothing and certain bloggers use the tragedy not because they care about the lives that are being lost every minute but because they want they want to win an argument instead of affect change. Your insincerity reeks.
Where were you two months ago when activists rallied in DC to lobby our government to acknowledge there is a genocide going on in Sudan and to provide the UN and AU with more tactical support? More people have died in the Congo conflict than were murdered by Saddam and let’s not forget the child soldiers in Uganda, or the meltdown that is Somalia.”
I’m not buying a single word on your attempt to leverage guilt to win an argument. There’s one main reason why we’re not in Sudan and you know it and I know it. We’ll never go in just like we avoided Rawanda and sat on our hands while Israel sold weapons to the apartheid South African government.
First of all I don’t think there are any cowards on this blog, merely differences in opinion. Second, I don’t think that the numbers of deaths will force any kind of unification. For the discussion of numbers and US policiy, there’s been little discussuion about the cultural barriers to democracy when time and time again the majority of Arab nations when presented with the opportunity of soveriegn run democracy revert back to monarchy’s and dictatorships. As far as the democratically elected leaders, they won’t be able to stand without the US propping them up.
Both Fox and CNN have run reports on the Iraqi reaction to the violence and increasingly it is one of numbness and weariness not the two elements needed to unite a country as fractious as Iraq. Since they did not ask for us to come, a critical feature of this enterprise has been the selling of our presence and democracy, and democracy places very low on the list compared to food, shelter and security.
Security of the Iraqi people has been a dismal failure as corruption rots the police and we watch as they blow themselves to bits. Perhaps it will turn out to be a waiting game, but I doubt what will come out of it will resemble what the British named Iraq. To secure Iraq effectively will require more troops and to retain the type of troops that will serve and honor the US military will require a draft, which no American wants to hear.
July 11th, 2006 at 11:41 am
Excerpt from Ex Navy Sec. James Webb, giving the Democratic weekly radio address on 6/30, and running against Senate Repub George Allen in Virginia: “As the occupation of Iraq has continued to drag on…..I’m reminded of another time, with a leader who truly understood war. In 1952 General Dwight Eisenhower, who had led us to victory in Europe in World War Two, strongly condemned the conduct of the Korean War as “an appalling failure.” He claimed “the old Administration cannot be expected to repair what it failed to prevent.” And he gave his pledge to “review and examine every course of action open to us with one goal in view: to bring the Korean War to an early and honorable end.” And you know what? When he was elected President, he did that. We need this kind of leadership today.”
Let me see if I understand what he is saying; what the Dem’s need is a Republican style leader to get us out of an unpopular war started by a Truman style president with Truman style poll numbers by offering a Korean style solution?
Is his comparison such a good idea for the Dems? I mean putting Bush in Truman’s position (a very popular past president now for his steel nerves then btw) while that Korean style solution is now testing missiles to carry their nuclear warheads on our kids TVs and our generation wring our weary peace loving hands as to what to hell to do now?
July 11th, 2006 at 11:48 am
“what to do now about Korea, 50 years later”
Isn’t Webb inadvertently making the case to finish the job in Iraq? Just asking……
July 11th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Woody, you have a good corrupt, far right wing party posing as populists, and you can keep it. We true Americans will continue the good fight for real values based on the truth.
Maybe if someday you get tired of smearing war heroes (Murtha), and celebrating crazed hate mongers (Coulter); you might want to join the country you now work so hard to defame.
July 11th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Nothing’s happening on that Lakoff thread, so I’d be glad of a response to my earlier question for Marc:
I’m genuinely curious about what your current opinion is on next steps wrt the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
It seems that sometime between last summer and now your position has shifted considerably. That’s not a bad thing! I’m just trying to understand what your thinking is now on what can be done.
I imagine I’m not the only reader of this blog with the same question.
@Jim R: This is what Webb specifically says about Iraq on his campaign site:
“America is fighting the wrong war in Iraq. But while we entered this war recklessly, we must leave carefully. This can only be achieved when the administration clearly states that the United States has no long-term plan to
occupy Iraq. The Middle East nations in the region must then be engaged, along with our global allies, in finding the solution for the future of Iraq.”
You may also want to take a look at his appearance on This Week with Geo. Steph’los.
He’s for renouncing bases as an absolute necessary first step to give us any ability at all to manage a withdrawal.
He’s for holding the administration accountable on their wilful refusal to listen to warnings, be honest about the intelligence, or plan. Meaning, among other things, Congress retaking its war powers to stop another preventive war based on crap intel, against the warnings of the military, etc.
He’s also serious about holding the war profiteers to account, and that makes him a rare bird. He is unbought, so far, and determined to stay that way.
July 11th, 2006 at 3:26 pm
Good question. We hear a lot from Marc about what other people think about the war in Iraq, but no one knows whether he actually has a position on it.
July 11th, 2006 at 5:02 pm
First to Neodude. I didn’t post here before the Iraq war so I have no idea what you are talking about.
I will answer some of Michael Turners questions:
A free and democratic (a republican form of government where representatives are elected to conduct the business of the people such as ours) Iraq that is able to sustain and defend itself.
If it’s defined by our representative democracy, would you call it victory if our elected representatives voted to pull our troops out post-haste?
No.
If it’s defined by Iraq’s representative democracy, what if THEY voted U.S. troops out tomorrow?
first of all they are not having elections tomorrow. No doubt many Iraqis regret their votes. As my friends in Iraq have told me. However it is very important to note that most Iraqis are hopeful the new prime minister will continue to be a man of action and have new hope based on his brief time in office.
Again with the goal being a republic. If their elected representatives asked us to leave, we should leave.
If they are truly representative, why haven’t they followed the will of what you call the Iraqi people, and sent us packing?
I reject your claim that the Iraqi people want us to leave today. I do not believe your polls. I believe in the only polls that count elections. I also believe the people I know on the ground in Iraq who tell me those polls are bogus.
One can only conclude that these representatives of the free, democratic national government of Iraq either don’t really have the power to do so (in which case they aren’t really the government), or that they are not really representative (in which case it’s not really a democracy).
wrong. Just like our democracy the people elect representatives who then act in the peoples interest. If the people are unhappy with them they can vote them out come the next election.
It is important to note that when given the chance the American people re-elected GWB, and increased and re-afirmed republican majorities in the house and Senate. It is a 50/50 bet at least that they will again maintain a majority in the 06 elections. Once again proving opinion polls mean little to nothing.
July 11th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
And proving how naive and clueless a slight majority of Americans are. Intellectual laziness and false advertising can fool that many most of the time. It’s not a confidence builder or a feather in our cap either. And this from a bunch who criticized the idea of nation building in 2000. I guess they were against it before they were for it.
July 11th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
To add, I don’t think the majority wants us to leave either. They want us to keep fighting their civil religious war from the Middle Ages in perpetuity. Under the china closet doctrine we have to. What a bright move.
July 11th, 2006 at 6:55 pm
This level analysis seems to be beyond Marc COoper?
“Going to War with the Army You Have”
Why the U.S. Cannot Correct Its Military Blunders in Iraq
By Michael Schwartz
The Latest American Theory about the Iraqi Resistance
In early February, a Newsweek team led by Rod Nordland produced a detailed account of current theorizing among American and Iraqi officials about the structure of the Iraqi resistance.
Here, in brief, is what these officials told Newsweek: The initial American assault on Iraq was so successful that Saddam Hussein’s plan for systematic resistance fell apart almost immediately, leaving a dispersed, unruly guerrilla movement with little or no coherent leadership. In the two subsequent years, however, the Saddamists formed a wealthy and savvy leadership group in Syria. In the meantime Abu Massab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist with ties to Al Qaeda, asserted his domination over the on-the-ground resistance. Pressure from recent American offensives drove the two groupings into an increasingly comfortable alliance. Here is how Newsweek described developments since last summer, based on an interview with Barham Salih, the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister:
“According to Salih, ‘The Baathists regrouped and, in the last six or seven months, reorganized. Plus they had significant amounts of money, in Iraq and in Syria.’ Those contacts and networks that Saddam’s key cronies began developing months before the invasion now paid off. An understanding was found with the Islamic fanatics, and the well-funded Baathists appear to have made Syria a protected base of operations. ‘The Iraqi resistance is a monster with its head in Syria and its body in Iraq’ is the colorful description given by a top Iraqi police official…. Zarqawi’s people supply the bombers, the Baathists provide the money and strategy.”
The current situation was succinctly summarized for Newsweek by Brig. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, the Deputy Minister of the Interior: “Now between the Zarqawi group and the Baathists there is full cooperation and coordination.”
This portrait has been further fleshed out in other accounts, including a New York Times report in which U.S. Commanding General George W. Casey declared that the Baath Party in Syria was “providing direction and financing for the insurgency in Iraq.”
This new theory about the nature of the Iraqi resistance helps to illuminate the renewed saber-rattling against the Syrians, which began even before the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister. On January 25, for example, former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, writing together for the first time, made the connection explicit in a Washington Post op-ed. They asserted that the Bush administration must have a “strategy for eliminating the sanctuaries in Syria and Iran from which the enemy can be instructed, supplied, and given refuge in time to regroup.” The new theory may also help to explain why (according to such diverse sources as Newsweek and former U.S. weapons inspector Scott Ritter) the U.S. is considering using assassination squads to eliminate enemies. One whole category of targets for these squads (if formed) would certainly be the Syrian-based leadership of the resistance.
And then, at the end of February, came news of the first fruits of American operations based on this new insight, the capture in Syria of Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan, a half brother and political lieutenant of Saddam, and one of only 11 of the original “deck of cards” Saddamist leaders who still remained at large. The capture vindicated the saber-rattling as well, since high level Iraqi officials told reporters on February 28 that the “capture was a goodwill gesture by the Syrians to show that they are cooperating” with the new American campaign to decapitate the insurgency by removing its Syrian-based leadership.
The New Theory Is Probably Not Accurate
This new portrait of the Iraqi resistance may be an accurate description of one aspect of the ongoing war; and its key new element — a working alliance between Saddamist exiles and Zarqawi’s fighters inside Iraq — may be an important new development. But the foundation upon which these descriptions are built — that these forces now dominate the resistance, supply its leadership, or provide the bulk of its resources — is likely to prove profoundly inaccurate.
This is most easily seen by consulting — of all sources — the CIA, which issued a contrary report about the time the Newsweek article appeared. According to the CIA, the Zarqawi faction and his Saddamist allies were “lesser elements” in the resistance, which was increasingly dominated by “newly radicalized Sunni Iraqis, nationalists offended by the occupying force, and others disenchanted by the economic turmoil and destruction caused by the fighting.” There is, in fact, a vast body of publicly available evidence in support of the CIA’s perspective, including, for example, most first-hand accounts of the resistance in Falluja and other cities in the Sunni triangle.
In the short, dreary history of America’s Iraq war, our leaders have repeatedly acted on gross misconceptions about whom they were fighting — sometimes based on faulty intelligence, but sometimes in the face of perfectly accurate intelligence. This is, in all likelihood, another instance where they believe their own distortions, and it is worthwhile attempting to understand the underlying pattern that produces this almost predictable error.
One way to characterize this propensity to mis-analyze the resistance is to see that all the portraits thus far generated of the Iraqi resistance have been based on the assumption that it is organized into a familiar hierarchical form in which the leadership exercises strategic and day-to-day control over a pyramid shaped organization. Such a structure is described by both military strategists and organizational sociologists as a “Command and Control” structure. After the battle of Falluja, Air Force Lt. General Lance Smith even used this phrase to characterize Zarqawi’s operation: “Zarqawi… no doubt …is able to maintain some level of command and control over the disparate operations.”
This command-and-control image applies well to a large bureaucracy or a conventional army; but invariably provides a poor picture of a guerrilla army, which helps explain American military failures in Iraq. Whether or not Zarqawi maintains command and control over his forces (who are, as far as we can tell, not guerrillas) no one exercises such control over the forces that fought against the Americans in Falluja or Sadr City and those that are currently fighting a guerrilla war in Ramadi and other Sunni cities that boycotted the recent elections.
Guerrilla wars violate the command-and-control portrait in two important ways: local units must, by and large, supply themselves (since an occupation army would be likely to interdict any regular shipments of supplies); and they are likely to have substantial autonomy (since hit-and-melt tactics do not lend themselves well to central decision making).
This lack of command and control is a curse and a blessing. On the negative side, lack of central coordination means that guerrilla armies are normally doomed to small, disconnected actions — a severe limitation if the goal is to drive an enemy out of your country. On the positive side, they are less vulnerable to attacks on supply lines and to the targeting of commanding officers — two key strategies of conventional warfare.
The resistance in Iraq reflects this dialectic of guerrilla war. The mujaheddin in Falluja, for example, seem to have been notoriously decentralized; even local clerical leadership reportedly achieved only a tenuous discipline over the troops. This same lack of discipline, however, made it impossible for the U.S. to identify and eliminate key leaders. During the second battle for the city in November, their hit-and-run tactics allowed them to hold out for over a month against a force with overwhelming technological and numerical superiority.
The command and control portrait is not a useful tool when it comes to analyzing a large component of the Iraqi resistance, and it is of little use if it is applied to the movement as a whole.
The Drumbeat of Command and Control
Nevertheless, the U.S. military has assumed such a structure at every juncture in the war.
In the Fall of 2003, when the resistance first began to trouble the occupation, U.S. military strategy was based on the conviction that the resistance was led by Saddam Hussein and the “deck of cards” leadership. Here we see command-and-control logic applied for the first time.
By mid-December 2003, the occupation forces had arrested or killed the vast majority of the men on that deck of cards, while Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay Hussein had died in a spectacular gun battle, and Saddam himself had just been captured in a dirt dugout. Occupation authorities confidently predicted that the Baathist “bitter enders” were done for and the resistance would subside, since without its leaders, local fighters were expected to be rudderless and ineffective.
Instead the disparate parts of the resistance became stronger, and in April 2004 emerged with a victory in Falluja — after a siege of the city, the Marines pulled back without taking it — and a bloody standoff in Najaf. By then, American intelligence had discovered Abu Massab al Zarqawi and declared that he was actually the linchpin of the resistance.
Once again, a command-and-control portrait of the enemy remained dominant, and the second battle of Falluja was fought in good part on the basis of that theory: to disrupt or destroy the Zarqawi leadership group. But despite the expulsion of the guerrillas (and just about the entire population of Fallujans) from the city, the rebellion quickly spread to other cities and intensified, refuting the claim that the decapitation of the movement would be incapacitating.
The command-and-control theory has, in fact, turned out to be as resilient as the resistance itself. American commander Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, for instance, explained the post-Falluja battle of Mosul to the New York Times by saying that Zarqawi and/or his leadership team had moved to that city and fomented the uprising, ignoring the indigenous character of the mujaheddin who were fighting there. Later, it would be announced that Zarqawi had set up a new “nerve center” south of Baghdad and a major new search-and-destroy operation would be mounted there.
Even after these actions failed to quell the fighting, the occupation forces clung to command-and-control logic. General Kamal, for example, told Newsweek, “Even if Zarqawi continues to elude capture, nailing al-Kurdi [one of Zarqawi's lieutenants] was a critical score. It might — just might — -eventually help change the course of this war.” Similar statements were made a month later when Saddam’s half-brother, identified as a key leader and funder of the insurgency, was captured in Syria.
Evident in all of this is the faith that American military leaders have in a strategy of identifying and targeting the supposed leaders of the insurgency. Despite the direct evidence of an increasingly ferocious movement, the capture of a key leader, it has repeatedly been claimed, could “change the course of the war.”
Why the U.S. Military Can’t Abandon “Command and Control” Logic
So why does the U.S. military relentlessly build its anti-insurgency strategy around the idea of decapitating the leadership of the Iraqi resistance? The answer lies just beneath the surface of Donald Rumsfeld’s now infamous statement, “You go to war with the Army you have.”
This is a comment pregnant with meaning for organizational sociologists, because it illustrates a familiar pattern of organizational problem-solving. If a product is not selling well, for example, an engineering organization might conclude that better engineering of the product was in order; a manufacturing firm, that more efficient production technology was needed; and a marketing company, that better advertising would do the trick. This sort of organizational idée fixe has led to some truly horrendous failures in business — and military — history. For example, when a flood of automobile buyers began to demand fuel-efficient cars during the first oil crisis in the early 1970s, the American automobile industry did not have the capacity to produce such vehicles. Instead of investing vast resources in developing that capacity, it tried to use its superior marketing skills to win Americans back to luxurious gas guzzlers. That is, the Big Three “went to war with the army they had” and convinced themselves that they were facing a marketing problem. The results: a permanent crisis at General Motors (during which it lost world leadership in the industry), a fundamental restructuring of Ford, and the demise of Chrysler.
Or take the French in World War II. They knew about the new German tanks that had made World War I trench warfare obsolete, but the French army was only equipped to fight in the trenches. So they “went to war with the army they had,” devising a trench-war strategy that they managed to convince themselves would contain the German Panzer divisions. They lost the war in three weeks.
The American army is also fighting with the army it has. This army is the best equipped in the world for advanced conventional warfare — with tanks, artillery, air power, missile power, battlefield surveillance power, and satellite imaging to support highly mobile, well equipped, and superbly trained soldiers. No supply route is safe from its firepower, and no conventional army would be likely to hold its ground long against an American assault. But the most intractable part of the resistance in Iraq is fighting a guerrilla war: they do not have long supply lines and they rarely try to hold their ground.
Guerrilla armies hide by melting into the local population. (Everyone knows this, including, of course, American military men.) To defeat them, an occupying force must have the intelligence to identify guerrillas who can disappear into the civilian world; and it must station troops throughout resistance strongholds in order to pounce upon guerrillas when they emerge from hiding to mount an attack. American military strategists know this, too. But these lessons — painfully drawn from Vietnam — can’t be implemented by the army that Donald Rumsfeld sent to war.
The Americans, in fact, have neither of these resources. Anti-guerrilla intelligence, after all, requires the cooperation of the local population, which, at least in the Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq, the U.S. has definitively alienated, largely through its use of blunt-edged conventional army attacks on communities that harbor guerrillas. And it cannot station enough troops in key locations because too small an occupation force is spread far too thinly over contested parts of the country. Estimates for the size of an army needed to pacify Iraq range upward from General Eric Shinseki’s prewar call for “several hundred thousand” troops.
The American military simply lacks the tools it needs to fight the guerrillas, just as in the 1970s the Big Three automakers lacked the production system needed to produced fuel-efficient automobiles, and the French army lacked the technology it needed to defeat German tanks in 1940. In response, military leaders are doing exactly what their organizational forbears did: They continue to develop theories about how to win the war “with the army they have.” This backward logic leads inevitably to imagining an enemy that might be far more susceptible to defeat with the tools at hand; that is, an opponent with long supply lines (from Syria, for example) and a command-and-control leadership (Zarqawi and his Saddamist allies, for example) capable of being “decapitated.” This portrait of the enemy then justifies a military strategy that seeks, above all, to kill or capture the theorized leaders. Such tactics almost always fail (even when leaders are captured); and in the process of failing, only alienates further the Iraqi population, producing an ever larger, more resourceful enemy.
The newest portrait of the resistance as a Zarqawi-Saddamist led amalgam will sooner or later die a lonely death — in all likelihood to be replaced by yet another command-and-control portrait of the insurgency whose features are as yet unknown. As long as the U.S. continues to fight “with the army it has,” it will also continue to generate — and act on — distorted (sometimes ludicrous) descriptions of the nature of the rebellion it faces.
Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has written extensively on popular protest and insurgency, and on American business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq has appeared on the internet at numerous sites including TomDispatch, Asia Times, MotherJones, and ZNet; and in print at Contexts and Z magazine. His books include Radical Politics and Social Structure, The Power Structure of American Business (with Beth Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His email address is Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net
July 11th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
It’s the Wealth, Stupid
by Rick Perlstein, Village Voice
November 10, 2004 | Amid the left’s general dismay, a major anniversary just came and went without much notice. Thirty-five years ago last week Richard Nixon delivered his famous “Silent Majority” speech. In deep doo-doo after the biggest anti-war march in American history—a march in which middle-class squares far outnumbered wild-eyed hippies—Nixon went on TV before the largest audience ever for a presidential address. A treacherous minority wanted to get out of Vietnam at any cost, he explained (he mentioned a protest sign he saw in, of course, San Francisco: “Lose in Vietnam, Bring the Boys Home”). But the “great silent majority” knew better: that “the minority who hold that point of view and try to impose it on the nation by mounting demonstrations in the street” were not really moral.
We have “values,” they do not: The message was Nixon’s most enduring contribution to Republican politicking.
Something else happened that week. Telegrams of approval poured into the White House, glowing letters to the editor appeared in newspapers across the nation. Nixon proudly displayed them to reporters, who duly reported a grassroots outpouring of support for the president.
Only later, during the Watergate investigations, was it revealed that the White House ran a sophisticated operation to produce fake telegrams and letters to the editor after major presidential addresses. That’s the difference between then and now. Now, the media tell the stories the White House needs told without any external prompting.
The idea that last week’s election results show that there is a great silent majority of Americans who vote first and foremost on their moral values, which means that they vote for the Republicans, has become gospel on our nation’s airwaves by now. It is nonsense on stilts. Bush didn’t win this election on “moral values.” It turns out he didn’t do any better among strong churchgoers, or rural voters, than he did in 2000. What was it that actually put him over the top? It’s the wealth, stupid.
Pundits blow hot air. Political scientists crunch numbers. On his blog Polysigh, my favorite political scientist, Phil Klinkner, ran a simple exercise. Multiplying the turnout among a certain group by the percent who went for Bush yields a number electoral statisticians call “performance.” Among heavy churchgoers, Bush’s performance last time was 25 percent (turnout, 42 percent; percentage of vote, 59 percent). This time out it was also 25 percent—no change. Slightly lower turnout (41 percent), slightly higher rate of vote (61 percent).
Where did the lion’s share of the extra votes come from that gave George Bush his mighty, mighty mandate of 51 percent? “Two of those points,” Klinkner said when reached by phone, “came solely from people making over a 100 grand.” The people who won the election for him—his only significant improvement over his performance four years ago—were rich people, voting for more right-wing class warfare.
Their portion of the electorate went from 15 percent in 2000 to 18 percent this year. Support for Bush among them went from 54 percent to 58 percent. “It made me think about that scene in Fahrenheit 9/11,” says Klinkner, the one where Bush joked at a white-tie gala about the “haves” and the “have-mores”: “Some people call you the elite,” Bush said. “I call you my base.”
So they proved to be. The two issues he mentioned in his post-election press conference had nothing to do with succoring God-fearing folk; instead he mentioned only “reforming” the tax code, and “strengthening” Social Security—issues of particular concern for the haves and the have-mores.
What about gay marriage? Even here the results prove inconclusive. The Diebolds had hardly cooled before Clinton operatives leaked to Newsweek that if only the Democratic campaign had listened to the 42nd president—who urged Kerry to come out in favor of the 11 state anti-gay-marriage initiatives—the Democrats would have won. Tina Brown contributed the thought the morning after the election that advances in gay rights were “the trade-off for 45 million Americans without health care.” But Klinkner ran a regression analysis comparing his 2000 and 2004 totals by state, and it suggested that though the measures didn’t hurt Bush, they didn’t help him either. “If anything,” he writes, “Bush’s vote was a bit lower than expected in states that did have such a measure on the ballot.”
This is not what your TV has told you. Instead, the pundits have been plumping the exit poll finding that when voters were asked what issue they voted on, the biggest plurality cited “moral values.” So it was you got former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers confidently opining on MSNBC Wednesday night that for “most of the last 100 years, politics has been defined by economic interests. . . . That’s no longer true.”
Her mistake testifies to a truth: the truth of the dazzling skill of the Republican attack machine in getting its cockeyed view of the world—the Nixon “silent majority” view—accepted as common sense. In this view, values, by definition, are what Republicans have, and what Democrats most certainly do not.
How did the “people voted for the Republicans because of moral values” meme become the gospel truth about this election? The exit poll question, after all, signifies little: If a pollster went up to you and asked what was more important, your moral values or your economic well-being, what kind of cad would you be to tell a stranger that money meant more to you than morals?
All that the message about “moral values” dominating the proceedings last Tuesday means is that the Republicans have succeeded in their decades-long campaign to get what should plainly be called “conservative ideology” replaced, in our political language, by this word “morality.” They have reworked the political calculus so thoroughly that liberal definitions of what is or isn’t a moral value don’t count. It’s as if liberals didn’t have any morality at all.
It’s amazing how many people Republicans have been able to punk with this. Even Senator Charles Schumer, appearing Wednesday night on The Daily Show, said that Republicans won on “these values issues.”
Hey, Chuck: Don’t fall for their crap, it only encourages them. You have values too.
Around the time of the Democratic convention, John Kerry began making that very point. Using the word “values” more and more often, he argued (if obliquely) that morality did not come down merely to who you slept with, how often you mention God, or whether you oppose abortion and support any war the president decides to prosecute; that values also reside in being straight with the American people, in fighting for economic justice (“Faith without works is dead,” he said in the third debate, quoting James 2:20), in tolerance, in running the government transparently.
He must have been making headway, because that language became the occasion for a new presidential lie. “He calls himself the candidate of conservative values,” Bush would mock incredulously on the stump in one of his biggest applause lines. That Kerry had never said anything of the kind hardly mattered: All he had said was that he was a candidate with values. But the media bought George Bush’s version, which is that any values worthy of the name are conservative.
The die was cast. The Election Day reality was ready to get buried: that indeed many people would be voting for George Bush because they believed he shared their values, but that many people, too, would be voting for John Kerry because they believed he shared their values.
And that many people, too, would be voting for George Bush because they liked the fact that he lined their pockets, and that they were the ones who made up the crucial margin on Election Day.
Copyright © 2004 Village Voice Media, Inc.
| daily |
July 11th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
Published on Monday, July 10, 2006 by the Associated Press
U.S. War Resisters Gather at Reunion in Canadian Town
For Craig Wiester of Minneapolis, fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War meant losing a country, a way of life — and his father.
“He felt it was a man’s duty to go when his country called,” Wiester said Thursday at the opening of a four-day reunion and peace event to honor U.S. draft resisters who fled to Canada and the Canadians who assisted them.
A controversial statue commemorating the welcoming of U.S. military draft dodgers to Canada during the Vietnam War 35 years ago, sits on display after it was unveiled during a ceremony in Castlegar, British Columbia July 7, 2006. The ceremony was part of a weekend reunion of war resisters and peace activists from the Vietnam War years. REUTERS/Andy Clark (CANADA)
Organizers were expecting hundreds of draft resisters and their Canadian supporters to attend the gathering, which includes workshops and panel discussions at Selkirk College and the nearby Brilliant Cultural Center in this town about 120 miles north of Spokane.
Speakers and participants include former U.S. Sen. George McGovern, 83, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1972 who lost to Richard Nixon; former California state Sen. Tom Hayden, an anti-war student activist during the 1960s; and Arun Ghandi, grandson of Mahatma Ghandi.
Wiester, a native of Ohio, said his father, a World War II veteran, despised the Vietnam War but “wouldn’t admit to any of his conservative friends … that he hated it” and was even more upset when his son decided not to report for military service.
Learning that his father had called the FBI and his draft board, he fled north and lived for eight years in Montreal. Wiester said he had never before done anything to either meet or avoid people like himself.
“I decided this was important for me. This was a way of validating that experience,” he said. “The question is, why are we dishonored still in American society?”
Michael Klein and his wife, Barbara, parents of activist and author Naomi Klein, fled New York City in 1967 where he had been practicing family medicine for years.
Now living on the West Coast, they decided it was important to attend the reunion.
“For the resisters, you see some who lost their families, lost their friendships,” Klein said. “Many people disowned them.”
Hundreds of Vietnam war-era draft resisters settled in and around the Slocan Valley, about 370 miles east of Vancouver, British Columbia. They were among nearly 50,000 Americans of draft age who moved to Canada in the late 1960s and early ’70s.
After then-President Jimmy Carter granted an amnesty in 1977, about half returned and the rest remained in Canada.
Reunion organizers noted that the scenic West Kootenay region also welcomed thousands of Doukhobors, pacifists who emigrated to Canada to escape religious persecution in Russia at the end of the 19th century.
Planning for the reunion began nearly two years ago and engendered a heated controversy when organizers announced plans for a sculpture to honor the resisters.
City officials in nearby Nelson, B.C., initially welcomed the Welcoming Peace sculpture, a statue showing a Canadian with arms open to greet two Americans, but withdrew support in the ensuing flap.
In May, reunion organizers announced that the statue would be placed in the Doukhobor Village Museum in Castlegar, a half-hour drive from Nelson, but officials in Castlegar also said no.
The bronze statue now resides at a private art gallery in Nelson.
July 11th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Isn’t this abusing someone elses blog Deb?
July 12th, 2006 at 4:38 am
Deb, just print the link. Thanks.
July 12th, 2006 at 6:09 am
And this from a bunch who criticized the idea of nation building in 2000. I guess they were against it before they were for it.
First of all I certainly wasn’t in that bunch.
Second of all you should run for office. I am sure you will get far telling the American people how stupid they are.
July 12th, 2006 at 6:32 am
Balter writes:
“… but no one will have problems finding evidence of a resurgence in PKK and other separatist activity if they just search for it.”
I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a resurgence. What’s interesting is that this “esteemed journalist” doesn’t back up the more sweeping claims (“huge riots”, “spreading fast”) with facts. As it says in the very article you quote, the PKK’s political leadership has forsworn armed conflict, and the U.S. military leaves the militant’s camps in Iraqi Kurdistan unmolested. If this were some huge groundswell of renewed rebellion, a return to the days when military clashes killed tens of thousands, we’d be hearing about it all the time. Since we’re supposedly in a War on Terror, the fact that the U.S. military can’t find anything meaningful to do about the PKK in Iraq indicates that the problem is miniscule. We’re three years into the Iraq conflict, with increasing Kurdish autonomy in Iraq, and the problem is still miniscule? Then it will likely stay miniscule.
“The Kurdish movement in SE Turkey is as active as ever…”
Clearly not, because if it were, we would have seen thousands dead in fighting just this year. Instead, we have some scattered engagements and some terror attacks that are not likely to endear the PKK with anybody.
The Turks just recently massed 250,000 troops on the border with Iraq? Read again.
http://www.antiwar.com/glantz/?articleid=8905
Turkey added 40,000 troops to a contingent that’s been in Kurdish parts of Turkey for years, not all of them “massed on the border”. It’s been conducting spring offensives against the remnants of the PKK for years, since 1999. If there are around 4,000 active PKK fighters left in the area, the usual 10-to-1 ratio of conventional armed force against an active insurgency simply to contain it squares rather neatly with an addition of 40,000 Turkish troops.
Is there an upsurge of violence? Absolutely. Is it significant, with region-shattering potential? I doubt it. 50% of what Iraq imports and exports passes across the border with Turkey. It’s an economic lifeline, and allowing an insurgency to cut that lifeline only hurts Kurds on both sides. Kurds with their heads screwed on straight (which doesn’t include the Marxist-Leninist nationalist-no-hopers of the PKK) would agree.
The U.S. has recently asked the Kurdish regional government in Iraq to cooperate with Turkey in extinguishing the lastest PKK activities. And it won’t surprise me in the least if they eventually do cooperate, albeit grudgingly. What, you say, Kurds killing their fellow Kurds?! Or even being a party to it, passively? Happens often enough — in fact, Saddam was a genius at getting Kurds to do each other in.
Turkey has a Kurd problem, the Kurds have a Turkey problem, and that’s not going away any time soon. What’s different now is still the radically reduced scope of the violence, compared to the 90s. There are separatist Kurds in Turkey. But there have also been several Kurdish presidents of Turkey, Istanbul is 13% Kurdish (or, as younger ones are saying increasingly, “Turkish with Kurdish parents”) and Turkey’s closest approximation to some Turkey Uber Alles Nazi party somehow has Turkish members and even officials. Paint it not in black and white, but in some rather undramatic shades of grey, and you’ll have a more accurate picture.
July 12th, 2006 at 10:51 am
I’ll give up the effort to get a reply in this thread, and wait for the next one with an Iraq topic. Maybe Marc will do a main post on his thinking.
Meanwhile, a friend of Riverbend’s was one of the victims of the Shiite death squad attack in the Jihad neighborhood. She notes that Ministry of Interior police and U.S. troops were posted nearby but did nothing, either to prevent the entry of the masked men in black into the neighborhood, or to intervene once the shooting started.
July 12th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Thanks for that link, Nell.
Sorrow beyond expression.
July 12th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
I think they have to be stupid to vote for a bunch of scandalou idiots like these, because I sure didn’t. Poor people can’t run for office these days. At least not easily without a funding stream built in to the campaign. Thre Bushes come with their own like any familiy of King’s. They’re not regular folks by any stretch.
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