Steven needs to swallow hard and realize that between now and January 2005 Bush will be president and that between now and January the decisions that are made will determine the outcome of iraqi effort which is essential to american lt interests.
Steven expects Bush to be President after January 2005. Neither does he think that changing Presidents will make any significant difference to the course of events in Iraq.
Yesterday Joe Biden freaked out after the Bush speech as if he hadnt known the content. Maybe steven did too
No. It was entirely as he expected it to be. Brave face, nothing new to say.
I think it would be instructive if you two could work on something privately and present it to the thread.
I have other things on my plate right now, but I will paste below something I wrote to a friend a few weeks ago that has some relevance:
:...there are plenty of ideas about what should have been done floating around. The hardcore neocons on the Perle/Frum wing think we should have formed an Iraqi government in exile before the invasion, led by the INC and their boy Chalabi. I don’t think this would have worked. The only constituents of the INC that ever had any support in Iraq were the KDP, the PUK, and SCIRI, and they split off as soon as the US was committed to invade. I don’t think the INC was ever intended to rule Iraq. It was a device to gain American support. That’s why Chalabi was selected to run it. He wasn’t there because Iraqis like him, he was there because he knows how to get on with Americans. I don’t think any INC-based government would have been more effective than the current IGC.
The idea that the US should have kept more of the Baath structure (particularly the army) intact, and tried to use it to stabilize the country, is a bit more credible. There were solid reasons against it, though, most notably the reaction that Kurds and Shiites would have had to seeing their old oppressors back in different uniforms. It seems fairly optimistic to me to think that you can change the orientation of an army simply by removing the top leaders.
Even in the unlikely event that a reconstituted Baath military could have operated effectively against Sunni militants and gained acceptance in the rest of the country, it would have been as much a threat as a prop to a fledgling Iraqi democracy. If an Iraqi democracy proved cumbersome and ineffective, as it almost certainly would in its early stages, the natural Baath reaction would be to take over, which would put us right back where we started. Of course if we cultivated the top military leaders carefully, we could probably make sure that the new dictator was one we liked. I don’t think that would help us much in the long run. There are few things Osama & Co. would enjoy more than the opportunity to rally the masses against a US-backed puppet dictator.
Once we decided to invade, I’m not sure there was anything we could have done that would have taken things in a direction dramatically different than the one we’ve seen. Post-invasion management did have its share of weak spots, but I don’t see those as being at the core of the trouble. The core of the trouble is simply that the US administration drastically underestimated the difficulty of stabilizing Iraq and developing a functional government. Cost/benefit analysis is ineffective without accurate estimates of costs and benefits. The people who planned this operation built their premises on ideology, not reality, and ideology presented a fundamentally skewed view of cost and benefit. The reality was not hidden. It was there for anyone to see, if anyone cared to look. The people who made the decisions didn’t care to look. It is hardly surprising that things have not worked out as they expected.
I do not think we should be pulling out, though, or even thinking about it. The easy way out would certainly be to install a pliable dictator or a half-baked excuse for a democracy, and bail. I can’t see either of those surviving, and there is little chance that either would be succeeded by a regime friendly to the US.
The only option I see, and it’s an awful one, is to put more force in. Not only enough to suppress insurgents and chase terrorists, but enough to guarantee the safety and security of ordinary Iraqis. They need an army, yes, but they need a police force even more, and they haven’t got one. Until we come up with an Iraqi police force that works, basic security is our responsibility. It would have been nice to have significant forces from other countries, but I think we’ve blown that chance already: I doubt that anybody would be interested at this point.
We have to be prepared to keep this force deployed for a long, long time, and to do our damnedest, against all odds, to develop something resembling a democracy and a functioning economy. That will require a large deployment of civilian experts, all of whom will be at risk. It will not be pleasant. We will take casualties, probably lots of them. Not all will be soldiers. We will spend staggering amounts of money. We will get no thanks or appreciation from anyone, including the Iraqis, and we will take a good deal of abuse. In the end, it probably won’t even work: at best, and with maximum commitment, I’d give us less than a 50:50 chance of leaving anything resembling an enduring democracy behind us.
This is not an appealing prospect. These are calculations, though, that should have been made before we started the war. It’s a little late to be fussing over them now.
If nothing else, perhaps we will learn to consider whether we have the capacity and the will to chew and swallow what we propose to bite off, and to do this before biting, instead of after. That would be a small consolation, but it would be something." |
