Bloodbath
Monday's Washington Post carries a story from Baghdad that makes the blood run cold. Indeed, it's rather numbing to see how many hair-raising lines of info can be crammed into just one report.
"Militias allied with Iraq's Shiite-led government roamed roads north of Baghdad, seeking out and attacking Sunni Arab targets Sunday, police and hospital officials said. The violence raised to at least 80 the number of people killed in retaliatory strikes between a Shiite city and a Sunni town separated only by the Tigris River..." "The wave of killings around the Shiite city of Balad was the bloodiest in a surge of violence that has claimed at least 110 lives in Iraq since Saturday..." "The violence around Balad, a Shiite enclave in a largely Sunni region, began Friday with the kidnapping and beheading of 17 Shiite farmworkers from Duluiyah, a predominantly Sunni town..." "By Sunday afternoon, 80 bodies were stacked in the morgue of the Balad hospital... Most of the victims had been shot in the head... Other hospital officials said some of the bodies had holes from electric drills and showed other signs of torture..." "The hospital received calls from residents who said more bodies were lying in the streets, but workers were unable to pick them up..." "In tiny Sunni towns throughout the area, Sunni men and boys as young as 10 took up arms to defend against any Shiite militias entering..." "Further demonstrating the growing fragmentation in Iraq, a bloc of Sunni insurgent groups marked the anniversary by declaring a separate Islamic republic in Iraq, stretching from the western province of Anbar to Baghdad, Kirkuk and other parts of the north..." "A report released by the U.S. Department of Defense in late August said there were 10 times as many sectarian attacks in July as there were in January in Iraq..." "In Washington, Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said by telephone: "If you total up the number of people that are being killed, that are being wounded, that are being displaced and are being forced to leave the country, and the zones in which there is major civil conflict . . . trying to declare there isn't a civil war borders on the absurd..."Other than that. Oh, yes, this ---> Another near record number of U.S. casualties. Two related anecdotes: over the weekend I heard maverick conservative talk show host and former U.S. congressman Joe Scarborough offer a model stump speech for what Democrats should be saying about the war. I didn't make notes and can't find the transcript. But it was amazing how crisp and to the point Scarborough's suggestion was. Something like: "I supported our effort to remove Saddam Hussein but the intelligence I was shown at the time turned out to be wrong. The Iraqis have been given three years, three thousand American lives, and a billion and a half dollars per week to build a new democracy. We can't do this forever. We've reached our limits. Time has come to turn this over to the Iraqis and not sacrifice any more American lives." I had to laugh because a few hours later I heard John Kerry on C-Span speaking in New Hampshire. Kerry got quite emotional in denouncing the "lies" of the Bush administration as well as denouncing the bloodshed in Iraq. And what was his stirring conclusion? We need to elect Democrats to set a "new course" in Iraq. A new course? Redeployment? Repositioning over-the-horizon? What can this possibly mean to anybody in the context of the current carnage?
October 15th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
Hasn’t Kerry already said that we should set a date to exit? Wouldn’t that be the new course he’s referring to? What about that makes you laugh, except that anything uttered by Kerry must in all cases be deemed laughable. I’m aware of Kerry’s flaws (and aware that you’re quite aware of them) — just don’t see what was so objectionable in this case.
October 15th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
What made me laugh was how much more direct and to the point was Scarborough. Yes, Kerry has voted for a phased withdrawal plan. Next time ur out on the street and stop 5 people at random to ask them what Kerry’s position is on the war.
October 15th, 2006 at 9:49 pm
Coincidentally, just before reading this entry I had stumbled upon Kerry’s recent “announcement” that he deserves a second chance at a presidential nomination:
“Americans give people a second chance. And if you learn something and prove you’ve learned something, maybe even more so. Now, I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. We’ll make that decision down the road.”
Christ, this guy is now officially a parody of himself–the master of saying nothing. What the hell did he learn? To speak even more tortuously and with less substance? God help the Democrats if they let this twit run again.
October 15th, 2006 at 10:00 pm
Leslie Gelb, “Would Defeat in Iraq Be So Bad?”, Time Magazine, hot off the press.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1546366,00.html
Interesting stuff like this:
“We have allies at the ready (the Kurds, the Saudis, the Turks, the Jordanians, etc.) who fear the jihadis as much as we do and potential allies (the Baathists and the Sunni tribal leaders) who want to rule their own piece of Iraq and also fear and despise the jihadis. As we gradually withdraw, we and others could provide Baathists the wherewithal to crush the terrorists. Without a large U.S. military presence, they probably would do a better job of it.”
And if they engage in a little ethnic cleansing along the way, we wouldn’t be there to notice it, would we? Out of sight, out of mind. We’re clearly already out of our minds, so let’s see what we can push out of sight.
I think this strategy might be called “run, but don’t cut.” (No, let others do the cutting. Git yer Death Squad License raht heah!)
The whole adventure stunk of inevitabilities like these, well before it started.
October 16th, 2006 at 7:21 am
This is like a dugout that doesn’t want to jink the no-hitter by mentioning one is going on….. Hmm…. and WHO brought us this “inevitability?” Joe Scarborough made his political and show bidness bones expousing a political philosophy that led stright to the catastrophe of Iraq. He’s always been an easy man to grasp… i.e. the liberals offer appeasment, the eggheads lost our noble effort in Vietnam, etc. etc, right down the drain.
Stuff about Kerry is too lame to dignify. Pure “progressive” republican enabling. That guy who you said would give us a presidency no diferent than Kerry, his name was BUSH.
There goes the no-hitter.
October 16th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
The Democrats have been clear on this Marc, even David (“Dean”) Broder acknowleges that they favor withdrawal with the argument being over how fast to do this without making the situation worse. Really, for one who argued that Bush and Gore were two peas in a pod in 2000 and hectored Dean in 2004, this is becoming a tired, worn-out record.
October 16th, 2006 at 1:13 pm
Why can’t people understand Kerry’s positions? They’re public for chrissake. Too stupd to read or lazy to look?
October 16th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
“We know what the Republicans will do. They’ll wrap our strategy in slogans. They’ll try to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men — or women. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their faces with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their lies.”
John Kerry in New Hampshire
October 16th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
Scarborough has been making more sense than just about any commentator on cable news the last month or so…maybe longer. The Republicans tend to see this Iraq mess more clearly than many of the rest of us do. Given the polls demonstrating a clear rejection of the war, the strongest position is the simplest one…let’s get out the soonest we can possibly do so…calling it redeployment or R&R or Wing Attack Plan R, it doesn’t really matter.
Democrats and progressives who opposed this war ab initio have been fearful, for reasons both political and humanitarian, to abandon Iraq to the civil chaos that would undoubtedly ensue. But now things are so bad that we can legitimately say that chances are greater than 50% that our leaving will not make things worse.
October 16th, 2006 at 4:52 pm
Abandon Iraq to chaos?
Death squads roam the streets and, reportedly, the halls of the Interior Ministry. Suicide bombers hit mosques. Mass graves turn up on virtually a daily basis. And that’s the stuff that leaks through the wall of U.S. military PR.
What makes you think a U.S. withdrawal makes all this worse?
The only honest way out starts with the impeachment of George W. Bush. Only then would the regional and global allies that will be needed to displace U.S. forces even consider getting involved. It would be benchmark of U.S. political seriousness and maturity. Without it, the Chinese, the Russians, the French, the Saudis and so on will go on looking at Uncle Sam’s two favorite political parties as big fat macho-insecure suckers.
And I suppose we should give up on waiting for Marc to explain how he came to support the speculative aggression against Iraq in the first place and now, drifting with the fatal political wind, opposes it.
But if he’s going to cheerlead for the position that the war was good, at first, then turned bad, he should at least tell us why on earth we should expect leadership from the people who enabled this war in the first place.
October 16th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
If the Democrats fail to take over both houses of Congress–and they need to take both to fully repudiate Bushism politically and set the stage for a new agenda–it will be precisely because they have failed to hammer hard enough on Iraq and come up with a concrete alternative plan. In other words, for the same reasons that Kerry lost the 2004 election. Those who get so touchy whenever their favorite Democrat is criticized need to come up with their own analysis of why the Democrats are so hopeless if they don’t like the analysis that Marc and others of us put forward.
October 16th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Well Michael since it’s a cabal of you anti-Democrats just what is it that you would do? I think they’re pissed off they went along with it, but why is it worse for them than for Warner and Hagel? When have out and out peaceniks ever been elected to anything?
October 16th, 2006 at 8:52 pm
Um, does Kerry have any friends? Isn’t somebody gonna tell him that his chance came and went? Why would he ever think that he has a chance at getting the nomination again?
October 16th, 2006 at 9:27 pm
Oh golly, I hate Kerry, Joe Scar was real clear on Iraq, like the night on NBC when he ganged up with the rest of Chris Matthews panel to explain his sensable take on the Cheney/Edwards debate. The whole pannel seemed to think Dick really turned the tide back to the Republicans (after Bush’s performance in debate one)
when Cheney CLEARLY TROUNCED Edwards. Why did you see how brillent Dick was with that opening “I’ve never met you” comment? Joe just had to laugh at poor Edwards, and Matthews speculated that it really called into question Kerry’s fitness for office, you know, in that he would pick such a terrible VP.
So you can really see how Marc Cooper can’t help be impressed by stright talkin, class acts like Joe in the face of such clowns as Kerry. Did you know he made up his whole Vietnam war record?
The fake progressive’s triangulation: Everybody’s guilty: Nobodys guilty. Should be a great party at Horowitz’s this year.
October 16th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
Disclaimer to commenters: I firmly deny all rumors that I am the author of the comments from \”Wall.\” If I were to take the time to invent straw-men antagonists, I assure you they would be of a much more resilient stuff.
By the way, here\’s the link to Scarborough\’s piece in, um, The Washington Monthly on why he thinks it would be great if the GOP lost next month\’s election —> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.scarborough.html
October 17th, 2006 at 3:22 am
“What makes you think a U.S. withdrawal makes all this worse?”
I’m not going to quote odds blithely, but there is one reason why it could get worse. You catalogue retail violence. But it’s nothing compared to wholesale violence. Whichever side gets its hands on serious weaponry (which is mainly in the hands of the U.S. military right now, and probably because our government doesn’t really trust Iraq’s government just yet) could wreak serious havoc. Not a dozen here, a dozen there, day to day, but hundreds or thousands, even tens of thousands, within the space of a few weeks. Not just here and there, but maybe eventually almost everywhere, including points outside Iraq. Civil wars tend to be the bloodiest kind. And (as we’re seeing with Sudan) they can metastasize regionally. Iraq has already has some fairly bloody civil wars even when there was Saddam as a locus of control. What if there’s no such locus? There might be no limits.
I’d prefer to think that, without the irritant of U.S. forces, and the pretext it provides for attacking factional and sectarian enemies as “collaborators” (real or imagined), the overall level of violence would decline, and the Iraqis would deal among themselves pragmatically. It would be nice to be sure of that. I’d convert to “out now” in a heartbeat if I was sure. But it’s still hard for me to be sure. Fond hopes glitter in the morning sunlight. Harsh realities lurk in the shadows. Until we have a full inventory of those harsh realities, nobody should be quoting odds. After all, it was a bunch of gamblers who got us into this. Are we going to gamble our way out of it as well?
October 17th, 2006 at 7:41 am
Joe’s wanting the Dems to win can fairly be put down to TRUE political opportunism: he wants them stuck with hellish mess his President has made. To which anyone but a dolt can fairly reply: Big deal.
Still, I will be fair enough to point out; some of the old Get Clinton gang hang on, ever so sadly:
http://www.slate.com/id/2151607/
October 17th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Scarborough is approvingly quoted :
“The Iraqis have been given three years, three thousand American lives, and a billion and a half dollars per week to build a new democracy.”
That is such a vapid analysis of the problem at hand. How in the world could Iraqis construct democracy under an illegal occupation? Or under forcefully imposed privatization of the economy? Only a naive dilletante would think that such conditions could even begin to move a nation toward sovereignty, much less democracy.
October 17th, 2006 at 5:26 pm
Well in that vein they couldn’t get one under Hussein either could they? There’s a reason they’ve never been anything but separate tribes. It’s the desert way since ancient times.
October 17th, 2006 at 8:02 pm
Gibson, part of the excuse making will be, “Golly, we did ALL we could for these people, they just didn’t respond to our fine efforts.” It’s sickening, but get used to it.
October 17th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
I note here that another part of the PJ Media Forest has Victor Davis Hansen poo-pooing it all and advising the Iraqis to get over it. Somehow the fact that a majority of Democrats voted against the war resolution get lost here but the genial host of this blog takes no responsibility for the fact that the majority of his fellow PJers are gung-ho keyboard commandos! I know Marc, that’s not fair. But neither is the disdain for anything that might, just might, make things better.
March 1st, 2009 at 11:55 pm
Given the polls demonstrating a clear rejection of the war, the strongest position is the simplest one…let’s get out the soonest we can possibly do so…calling it redeployment or R&R or Wing Attack Plan R, it doesn’t really matter.