Hi cnyndwllr; Re: "More importantly, the window of opportunity to get in and get out cleanly was one that opened and shut in a heartbeat. Bush missed it when his people wiped out the infrastructure of Iraqi security and proclaimed that the democratization of Iraq would be "generations long" project with, of course, the mighty hand of America guiding the process throughout that time. Even today there are alarming proclamations from the Bush people to the effect that we will leave when the Iraqis are "ready to assume control of a truly democratic country.""
I think that this is a good point to discuss, in regards to my desire to keep Bush instead of Kerry in charge of foreign policy.
Even you, who are realistic about what the situation in Iraq is now, believe in the fantasy that it was possible to "get in and get out cleanly". I have little doubt that Kerry shares your belief. That's why I'm worried that he will get us involved in an attempted pacification of Saudi Arabia.
First, you should be willing to admit that Bush's original plan was to get our troops quickly out of Iraq. In fact, the troops were TOLD that they would be going home in the summer of 2003. There is nothing different between what they were told by Bush in March 2003, and what you are now saying should have been done. The difference is that the plan was not carried out.
Why wasn't the plan carried out? Why weren't the troops pulled out when that was what was planned for? Hell, the President probably didn't even have a plan for what to do if it turned out to be necessary to keep the troops in. His advisers TOLD HIM that if we kept troops in Iraq, they'd end up in a guerilla war. It was obvious, and was the subject of several studies by the administration before the war. So why wasn't the plan carried out?
The problem was that it suddenly became clear that in terms of eliminating Baathism, the war, as of May 1, 2003, had not achieved its objective. With that fact, pulling out the troops early would have simply allowed Saddam (or anarchy) to take over the country. This was unacceptable to Bush (and would have been unacceptable to Kerry, if Kerry had been in charge at that moment).
At the same time, the strong human tendency to be hopeful about hopeless military situations caused many people to opine that the insurrection would end real soon now (when Saddam or the deck of 52 was captured, or when electricity was running again, or when the population got tired of being car bombed, or etc.)
Just as there was a lot of BS written about how we lost Vietnam (and would have won if only the author's advice had been listened to), there is now BS being written about how Iraq would have been won if only Bush had done one thing or another different.
I disagree. I say the war was hopeless no matter what Bush did. The error was in starting the war, not in the prosecution of the war.
People say that we should have pulled out before the insurrection had a chance to build up. If we'd done that, we'd have ended up facing Saddam again, or a radicalized Islamic government, or some socialist, militaristic dictatorship, and the fatal error of the war would now be said to be "Bush pulled out too quickly).
People say that we shouldn't have fired the Iraqi army. If we'd done that, the insurgents would simply have had better access to guns. The people who think that the Iraqis are shooting at us because we aren't paying them are simpletons who think that money can be used to make Iraqis abandon what they believe is patriotism.
People say that we should have kept our soldiers with a lower profile, but that would have let the insurgents build up areas which were "liberated" that much faster. Like Falloujah, those areas would be sending out ambushing patrols and the critics would be saying that Bush wasn't aggressive enough in using our forces.
People say that we should have used our soldiers to more directly combat the insurgents, and that a good show of force on the ground would have quashed the insurgency early on. Military history, however, provides methods of estimating numbers required for this sort of pacification campaign, and it was never possible for the US to do this. Iraq had to be fought as a "liberation", not as a "pacification" or "occupation". If we'd tried this, it would have failed in a rather bloody way, and now people would be saying that Bush's big error was in not pushing "Iraqification" of the conflict.
People say that Bush hasn't given the Iraqis enough opportunity to fight for their freedom, that he hasn't "Iraqified" the conflict enough. But this flies in the face of the fact that the Iraqi forces that we have managed to put together (presumably the cream of the crop), refused to shoot at their countrymen.
No, the pacification of Iraq was hopeless from the beginning. The best that could have been achieved would have been to severely punish Saddam's regime. The fact is that we didn't even catch him until very late in 2003, so there was no way that we could end the campaign before then with a claim that we'd ousted Saddam.
If Kerry is voted in, the same Saturday morning quaterbacking will be applied to his decisions. And since it is generally believed by the American public that we should "stay in Iraq until we fixed it", Kerry will probably keep us there long after it should be clear that Kerry isn't actually much smarter than Bush, at least as far as running a pacification campaign against Islamic guerilla forces in their homeland.
-- Carl |
