You speak as if this happened by itself, without the efforts of the Americans or the Iraqi Army. Faced with nobody but those lunatics - those well armed and well financed and highly murderous lunatics - the Sunnis of al Anbar would have had no choice but to knuckle under to them or be killed.
No, I don't speak like that. It was the Bush people who acted back in 2003-04 as if democracy would simply happen all by itself once Saddam was deposed. Or once his loony sons were killed. Or once Saddam was captured. Or... Or... Or... My belief is that the Sunnis of Iraq are, by and large, not a fundamentalist group. Not a group to tolerate the Wahhabi nonsense unless there was some clear overriding reason to do so (like American occupiers), but even that marriage of convenience would, as it has, be short-lived, because, really, not that many people can really stand the Wahhabists fanaticism for long. My opinion is that the Americans would hvae gotten nowhere until the Sunni tribes who lived there swung against them. That was the decisive force. I don't think that the Sunnis were helpless without American help. I think Americans in Anbar were helpless without Sunni help, unless they wanted to indiscriminately kill a large number of people. Which, to their (our) credit, they didn't.
Once again you speak as if balance of forces doesn't come into play, as if some law of nature runs the war in Iraq. A most convenient proposition when one is counseling surrender.
I'm counseling realism, recognizing what the violence is really about. If you call that "surrender," so be it. I call pretending that the violence in Iraq is primarily about Al Qaeda a mischaracterization of the situation at best, a willfully stupid lie/fantasy at worst.
I certainly understand the main point, which you consider yourself too civilized to recall: winning brings important benefits, but losing is very very costly. Ah, but it's mostly Iraqis who will die, and they can be blamed on George Bush, so who minds really? The NYT has just forseen carnage up to the level of genocide, and it's the course they prefer.
This is crap. I understand full well that "winning brings important benefits." The problem is you can't expect to step in the middle of civil war of a people foreign in virtually every important way and "win" anything. And it isn't me who has killed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqs, or set off forces to do so, not to mention millions of refugees. I mind your cavalier attitude that pretends to be all-knowing a la Cheney when you (the Bush admin, that is) haven't, as Biden said on the Senate floor the other day, made one correct decision on Iraq yet. "Not one," he boomed, asking Bush, Cheney and all the Senators on the floor to come up with one. Least of all the decision to go to war to begin with.
There have been many tipping points in this war, in both directions. It has morphed many times, and is morphing again. The outcome was not and is not predetermined, but is shaped by the choices and the willpower of all the players.
It isn't simply "willpower." It is location. It is culture. It is financing. It is strategy and tactics.
The US's chief mistake was in not forseeinng the marriage of Baathist cash and al Qaeda jihadis, and being too slow to react with a counter-insurgency strategy that works. The Sunni Arabs' chief mistake (like many other Arabs) was to believe so firmly in their delusions of grandeur that they based their political decisions on the fantasy that they were a majority, when they were really a small minority.
What nonsense again. The US's chief mistakes were going in at all rather than focusing on Afghanistan and the real Al Qaeda, and going it essentially alone (I don't really count our "big cousins" across the pond, or, frankly, most of the rest of the Coalition of the Bribed, I mean Willing) instead of capitalizing on the fundamental good will towards us that the rest of the world felt after 9.11. The Taliban and Osama should have been isolated, belittled and destroyed by 2004-05 at the latest. Instead, our attitude and actions not only allowed them to survive but enabled them to grow and to become a kind of poster child for anti-US loonies around the world. This would not have happened if there had been a sane US foreign policy. And the other Big Mistake was, if they had to go in at all, they played with fire by going in lite, but not heeding the scholarship and experience about insurgencies that Shinseki based his original estimates of necessary numbers of troops on. The Bush admin likes to compare Saddam to Hitler and this war to WWII. But there were a number of fundamental differences that they simply ignored--one of those differences was that we could consider the entire populations of Germany and Japan as the "enemy," and thus had few compunctions about who or how many of them we killed. We couldn't do that with Iraq. If we did, then yes, the real war would have been over in a matter of months. We aren't the Romans. And we aren't Nazis--not even the Bush admin. But neither have they been very thoughtful or intelligent or mindful of history how they've acted over the past 5 years. |
