Active duty, 19 years, and many of my co-workers are in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The conduct of US military and foreign policy have had little or nothing to do with the evolution of Argentina, Chile, China, Egypt or Jordan. We leave them alone because we rightly fear the consequences of a more activist policy, or because US business would not stand for it.
Your moral crusading has failed every time it ran counter to nationalist sentiment and greater will.
As for a middle class and democracy, you cannot have the latter without the former, at least as an elite influence group (India comes to mind). China had a booming economy for a two decades and a rising middle class before legal reforms established firm property rights. Property rights, rule of law and the rise of a middle class can be mutually reinforcing; one is not necessarily a precondition for another.
And now you say that because we created an existential crisis in Iraq, it is now imperitive to commit ourselves to the continuance of this travesty "for as long as it takes." No. The architects of this disaster should resign, or be fired--if not by Bush, than by the voters in November. We must hold these ideologues accountable and ensure that this absurd set of actions is repudiated.
Here's how our will looks right now in Iraq:
washingtonpost.com
"The decision to turn to former Iraqi army generals to help regain control of Fallujah, for instance, took place under confusing circumstances, with military officials in Iraq announcing terms that officials in Washington had yet to review. It also came against the backdrop of rising Iraqi anger at the U.S.-led occupation and televised images of possible psychological and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers.
To some analysts, the administration left the impression it was grasping at alternatives, with little sense of how this new tactic fit into the larger strategy or of its possible pitfalls. In much of the world, in fact, the agreement was first described as a retreat by Americans in the face of stubborn resistance by insurgent forces.
"But other experts said the arrangement has huge risks, in part because it appears to suggest that there is a reward for determined resistance to the U.S. occupation. "We are flirting with disaster," said Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who until earlier this year was a political adviser to the U.S.-led occupation authority. "It represents a triumph of short-term thinking over the long-term good."
The agreement spared the Marines, at least for now, from attempting a full-scale assault on the city to root out insurgents -- a move that would certainly have cost more U.S. lives and inflamed public opinion in Iraq and the rest of the Muslim world. But it brought no guarantee of success and left U.S. officials struggling to counter the impression they were surrendering and handing the insurgents a public relations victory.
Kenneth Pollack, research director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, said the agreement does not deal with the long-term problem of Fallujah, "where there are 250,000 to 300,000 people who hate our guts." "It's not much more than a face-saving agreement," he added.
He said the standoff in Fallujah is the result of a failure to deal with the anger and resentment growing in the city in the past year because of a lack of military resources. By contrast, he said, an entire brigade -- roughly 5,000 troops -- was dispatched to Saddam Hussein's home town of Tikrit, and civil reconstruction was directed there as well. Now that city "is doing pretty well," he said.
U.S. officials have acknowledged the failure of many members of Iraq's reconstituted police and military ranks to confront insurgents in Fallujah and other parts of the country since the surge in violence a month ago. In some cases, security officers joined the militants.
Any interpretation of the new arrangement remained complicated yesterday by conflicting accounts of what it entailed. One senior Pentagon military officer, who was briefed on the plan, said it was his understanding that, in the near-term at least, it involved "a handful of checkpoints being turned over" to the new Iraqi brigade. But journalists in Fallujah reported large contingents of Marines withdrawing from positions in the southern part of the city and moving several miles away. "
washingtonpost.com |
