Lucky, re: I will have to disagree with you on whether Hagel is a "realist". Today, he talks about Iraq being another VN; that we are losing the war and that we don't have an exit plan. He doesn't talk about what needs to be done to win; what he believes would be the correct exit plan (since he disagrees with Bush)or whether winning this war in Iraq will help to stabilize IRAQ.
I'm stuck on your statements; "what needs to be done to win," and "whether winning this war in Iraq will help to stabilize {the middle east?" Those statements assume that we have the POWER to create those ends.
But that's the problem; all the reality of the last few years points more and more clearly to one conclusion----the "war in Iraq" is NOT WINNABLE.
Chuck Hagel has been to war and faced an insurgency. He understands the spin the military leaders, (not the men,) put on things to make their "mission" seem successful and themselves look competent, he knows that you can't kill enemy men you can't identify, he knows that once an insurgency becomes entrenched it doesn't get better and that the longer it goes on, the worse it gets. He's not a magical thinking, "it will turn around when..." dreamer or faithful who's willing to send other men to do a job he didn't try himself and doesn't understand. I think you should trust the wisdom of men like Hagel.
Iraq is not like Germany and Japan and it is like Vietnam. It's such a mess that the best Iraqis we can find to assume leadership, with the best help we can reasonably give them, are unable to derail a growing insurgency, are unable to stop a steep slide into civil war and, for damn sure, are unable to create a government in Iraq that would be a shining example of an enlightened democracy for the middle east.
We need to leave, and better sooner than later.
If you want to find out what kind of population you're placing so much faith in and sending our young to die for, please read the following series of articles concerning what is actually being done by those we're empowering. I think it's pretty indicative of how successful the democracy you dream of will be when run by the "people," whether shiite or Kurd or some combination:
msnbc.msn.com
Excerpt:
Militias wrest control across Iraq’s north, south
Newly empowered Shiite, Kurdish forces hold mixed allegiances
Updated: 12:49 a.m. ET Aug. 21, 2005
BASRA, Iraq - Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country's divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials.
While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, forces represented by the militias and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said. In Basra in the south, dominated by the Shiites, and Mosul in the north, ruled by the Kurds, as well as cities and villages around them, many residents say they are powerless before the growing sway of the militias, which instill a climate of fear that many see as redolent of the era of former president Saddam Hussein.
Militias gain power, but authority unclear
The parties and their armed wings are sometimes operating independently, and other times as part of Iraqi army and police units trained and equipped by the United States and Britain and controlled by the central government. Their growing authority has enabled them to seize territory, confront their perceived enemies and provide patronage to their followers. Their rise has come because of a power vacuum in Baghdad and their own success in the January elections.
Since the formation of a government this spring, Basra, Iraq's second-largest city, has witnessed dozens of assassinations, claiming members of the former ruling Baath Party, Sunni political leaders and officials of competing Shiite parties. Many have been carried out by uniformed men in police vehicles, according to political leaders and families of the victims, with some of the bullet-riddled bodies dumped at night in a trash-strewn parcel known as The Lot. The province's governor said in an interview that Shiite militias have penetrated the police force; an Iraqi official estimated that as many as 90 percent of officers were loyal to religious parties.
Across northern Iraq, Kurdish parties have employed a previously undisclosed network of at least five detention facilities to incarcerate hundreds of Sunni Arabs, Turkmens and other minorities abducted and secretly transferred from Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, and from territories stretching to the Iranian border, according to political leaders and detainees' families. Nominally under the authority of the U.S.-backed Iraqi army, the militias have beaten up and threatened government officials and political leaders deemed to be working against Kurdish interests; one bloodied official was paraded through a town in a pickup truck, witnesses said.
Violence a black mark on U.S.?
"I don't see any difference between Saddam and the way the Kurds are running things here," said Nahrain Toma, who heads a human rights organization, Betnahrain, with offices in northern Iraq and has faced several death threats.
Toma said the tactics were eroding what remained of U.S. credibility as the militias operate under what many Iraqis view as the blessing of American and British forces. "Nobody wants anything to do with the Americans anymore," she said. "Why? Because they gave the power to the Kurds and to the Shiites. No one else has any rights."
• More Iraq news
"Here's the problem," said Majid Sari, an adviser in the Iraqi Defense Ministry in Basra, who travels with a security detail of 25 handpicked Iraqi soldiers. "They're taking money from the state, they're taking clothes from the state, they're taking vehicles from the state, but their loyalty is to the parties." Whoever disagrees, he said, "the next day you'll find them dead in the street."
British officials, whose authority runs through Basra and parts of southern Iraq, have called the killings "totally unacceptable."
"We are aware of allegations that men in police uniforms, whether they are genuine policemen or not, are carrying out serious crimes in Basra," said Karen McLuskie, a British spokeswoman. "We are raising our concerns with the Iraqi authorities at the highest level."
‘There is no law, there is no order’
The Badr Organization, one of the most powerful militias in southern Iraq and blamed for many of the assassinations, denied any role in the killings. The head of the group in Basra, Ghanim Mayahi, said his organization was only providing "support and assistance" to the police through lightly armed militiamen. "There is no law, there is no order, and the police are scared of the tribes. Badr is not afraid, and it can face those threats."
In the north, Kurdish officials acknowledged that terrorism suspects from across the region have been taken to several Kurdish-run detention facilities, but they said the practice was initiated by the Iraqi government with the blessing of the U.S. military. "It's a question of space; they have no place to put them and here it is safe," said Karim Sinjari, the minister of interior for the Kurdistan Regional Government and a senior official in the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
In June, however, U.S. officials denied any role and called for an end to the "extra-judicial detentions." A State Department memo at the time warned that abductions in the contested northern city of Kirkuk had "greatly exacerbated tensions along purely ethnic lines" and threatened U.S. standing..........cont'd. Ed |
