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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (248370)	11/14/2007 11:39:26 AM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Michael, let me take a shot at answering some of your questions. How can two guys with very similar history be so diametrically opposed on that war, this war and the honor of some of the men who fought it? I think you'd be amazed at similarly UW and I see the war in Vietnam and the war in Iraq. But let's just address the Iraq war. I know that he's much more circumspect in his criticisms of the Iraq war and the way it was handled but then he has the ears of some of those hawks who can actually affect policy and he has to be very careful with how much truth he feeds them at one time. Too much truth and they spit it out, so it's a little at a time and hope some of it feeds into their brains. For that reason don't expect him to say that the invasion and occupation was a mistake, but I'd be surprised if he wasn't very skeptical about the basic idea of nation building. I'd be surprised if he wasn't dismayed at the notion of using American military forces to try to hand's-on police the people of a middle eastern nation. And I'd be shocked if he agreed with many of the heavy handed tactics that have been employed by generals who have, before Petraeous, been nodding heads to Bush/Cheney "tough guy" meddling in Iraq. With respect to just the question of tactics, as opposed to strategy; I suspect he would agree that it was a mistake to use blunt military force in a futile attempt to crush the resistance of those who were violently opposed to "our vision" of a unified, democratic Iraq. I suspect he would agree that it was a years' long mistake to try to criminalize Al Sadr and other opposition leaders and to steadfastly and totally refuse to "negotiate" with the "terrorists" who were, in reality, for the most part simply politically motivated insurgents. I would suspect that he would agree that years' long actions like those we took to reduce Fallujah to rubble, to bomb buildings and neighborhoods in order to kill a few insurgents and to generally shoot first and ask questions later did a lot more harm than good in terms of winning the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people and therefor crippled our efforts to enlist their aid in identifying and countering insurgents. And I'd suspect that he'd agree that if the writing is on the wall that the Iraqis are incapable of reaching a national reconciliation because of ancient animosities, religious differences or recent events, we'd better accept that there's nothing we can do to change that militarily, accept the fact that partition will occur either violently or by agreement and get our troops the hell out of there as soon as possible. Now, I may not be 100% right but I'd guess I'm pretty close to the mark. Why do I think this? As I said, we share many of the same images, we've walked the same trails, we've each paid a personal price and we've had a lot of years to let things settle into wisdom. Read some of his posts carefully, including those that highlight those who roundly criticize the "go along to get along" officer corp who are supposedly running the war in Iraq and you'll see that I'm probably right. Ed

To: michael97123 who wrote (248370)	11/14/2007 12:22:23 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

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