Michael, you also asked:
I would also like you to take a shot at my post about iraq. Can you say we won and the surge worked at least in some military sense and the troops are coming home. Can you say this even if it implies bush did one thing right????????
I'm totally comfortable saying that our military did the job they were asked to do, and that they did it well. That means I will say that to the extent the surge was a tactic to settle down the overt violence in Iraq, and particularly in Baghdad, it did tamp down that violence. (At a cost in additional American lives, of course.)
I'm not comfortable saying that the import of that is that we "won." I say that because "we" can't win anything in Iraq. It's the Iraqis who control whether anything is "won" or "lost" and our military cannot control their decisions.
The irrefutable fact is that our nation will never have control over an end whose success is contingent upon the actions of another people who have free will. Remember "hearts and minds?" Remember that the surge was only a tool to "give the Iraqis some breathing space to reach agreement on reconciliation, splitting oil revenues and other critical issues?" Remember that the breathing space was created but the underlying issues are no closer to resolution than they were before the surge? No, "we" didn't "win" with the surge.
But we are finally getting it right in terms of how we're conducting ourselves in Iraq. Our current military leaders have been able to step beyond the "bring em on," "we don't negotiate with (your choice here)" blindly arrogant Bush.Cheney policy and beyond the childish notion that if you don't like it you'll just have to accept it because "we're the toughest cowboys in Dodge City."
We're now negotiating with "terrorists" and insurgents at every level and we're finding that at certain levels we have common ground with them. Iraq is a place of many complexities and we've been able to uncover common interests with respect to common enemies and common goals.
The money we can throw around, the arms we can provide and our common interests have given us leverage to allow us get some of those committed, deadly foes off our backs and to understand and use their aims to try to forge new alliances that may help us create a more realistic view of an Iraq that may work. In the end it's possible that we'll be less of the problem and more helpful in deriving a potential solution that could help result in a grossly imperfect but more stable Iraq.
And if that happens, contrary to the spin of Nadine, it will not be because the Sunni insurgency was defeated and a unified Iraq was created under the democratic rule of the Shiite majority; it will be because we stopped fighting the Sunni insurgency and the Sunni insurgency prevailed so that Iraq was either partitioned or the Sunnis were otherwise excepted from "democratic" Shiite rule.
And, no matter how politically expedient it is at that time, I'll never say that we "won." The one thing I've learned well from life is that reality doesn't change just because you can spin it differently. When we step in shit we need to clean it up ourselves and that means we can't redefine it and ignore it. We'll need to swallow our national pride and learn the hard lessons that we never fully accepted with the defeat of our "goals" in the Vietnam war.
We need to learn those humiliating lessons well so that our future clueless leaders' arrogance will not so readily get us into another wasteful, unnecessary war that sends our grandsons and granddaughters out and brings them home lifeless and torn. Ed |
