Irq: Endgame

The question is: What is the endgame in Iraq? The way I see it there are only two possible endgames in Iraq – the administrations and total withdrawal.

The Administration’s Endgame

Unfortunately I do not know what this really entails. The administration has given us surprisingly little guidance on this issue. (Or, maybe not surprisingly). We hear from George W. that we must “stay the course” or “When the Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down.” But, the administration has not laid out a clear course to an endgame, or even what goals we are trying to truly achieve in Iraq. So, let’s look to both the rhetoric and the actions to try to piece together the possible endgame.
I guess we must start with why we went to war in the first place. I know you may not remember this since nobody has mentioned it in several years, but we did get in there for a reason – Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). The intelligence community told us they had 100 to 500 tons of chemical and biological weapons and were trying to get nuclear weapons (you know yellow cake from Niger).
As a corollary to the main reason for war the administration mentioned regime change and the removal of Saddam Hussein. He was a brutal dictator and threatened the entire region. He used chemical weapons against both the Kurds and the Iranians. He had attacked both Iran and Kuwait at various times in the 1980s and 1990s. Therefore, we needed to get rid of him and his WMD.
These were the reasons to go to war. Therefore, according to cause and effect once the US military achieved those two goals they could go home. The military did a fantastic job removing Saddam Hussein from office: We can check that one off the list. And, apparently Bill Clinton’s bombing of 1998, the Iraqi military and IEAE and UN weapons inspectors had long since achieved the first goal. On May 1, 2003, George Bush stood on the USS Abraham Lincoln in front of a sign that said “Mission Accomplished” and declared major combat offensive over. Therefore, the military’s job is done – time to go home.
So, were WMD ever involved? Now, I only question the validity of the original argument. Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair that WMD was chosen because it was the only thing that everyone involved could agree on as a good reason to go to war.
The only reason every one could agree on? Now, the idea behind war – at least in the modern liberal democratic age – is that you have a clear and present danger and must kill people into guaranteeing the survival of your nation-state and its people. World War II had Pearl Harbor, Viet Nam had the Gulf of Tonkin (which at least according to Adm. Stockdale never happened). If you have to have discussions regarding a valid reason to go to war – that’s called an excuse.
So the excuse to go to war was made. The US military achieved its goals quickly and decisively. If it weren’t more than an excuse, we would theoretically be home now.
Now we get to phase two. Phase two is what the administration has told us since we’ve been there. From this perhaps we can glean the possible endgame. As I see it there have now been three major reasons to stay that the administration has used since “Mission Accomplished” and the reasons for going to war were removed.
First, we have been told that we are now fighting al-Qaeda there. This is a completely valid reason to stay as it was al-Qaeda who were behind the 9/11 attacks. But, if this is the case should we not also send troops into Pakistan’s North-West Frontier? I mean we know that that is where the leadership of al-Qaeda is. The bulk of its operatives are there and in Afghanistan, yet, the vast majority of our forward deployed troops are in Iraq.
Isn’t this putting most of our troops in Kenya during the Cold War? I mean there were many Soviets in Ethiopia. We could have easy crushed the Soviet clients there. But, no, we aimed the missiles and put troops in Europe and Korea – near from where the main threat came. But apparently in the War on Terror we will not do that, let them live peacefully in Pakistan, supporting the president of the country that lets them stay there. (I’m sorry is he with us or against us?) And, instead, we will mass our forward troops in a place where a comparatively small number of the enemy is.
Second, we have been told that Iraq needs a stable government that is democratically elected before we leave. This is because the Administration holds democracy in such high esteem. Our major allies in the region include: Saudi Arabia, an autocratic kingdom; Kuwait, a emirate with democratically elected legislature (only 15% of all males can vote); Pakistan, a military dictatorship; Egypt, a single party state with small bits of democracy; and, Israel, a reasonably democratic nation if you are not Muslim. That cannot be it, because why do we not talk to these allies about democratizing. If the Administration wants to see democracy in Arab Muslim countries, why did they not deal with Hamas – the democratically elected government of the Palestinian Authority?
The third reason we cannot just leave is that the Iraqi government must pass the oil revenue sharing plan. This on the surface seems like an excellent idea. The nation gets to stay together and regardless of whether your region has oil or not, you get a share of the oil revenues.
Yet, this is the administration that has tried to get Serbia to privatize its industry, privatize Social Security, nip every socialized medicine plan in the head by calling it “Communist,” and rejected the Common Agricultural Policy of Europe since it is nothing more than socialist subsidies. Shared oil revenue is socialism. I would mean that the government would be in charge of large amounts of money and provincial governments would determine how and where money should be placed.
That’s not “ownership” that’s socialist welfare. The oil revenue plan however also requires that private industry drill for oil. Private industry would pay “user fees” (i.e. a tax that does not increase when profits go up) to the Iraqi government. Wow that’s great all those private Iraqi oil companies will be able to profit from this. Wait a minute! There are no private Iraqi Oil companies!
So, the fact of the matter is we do not know the Administration’s end game because there is not one. They plan to get access to the oil for their cronies – then find a new reason to stay. There was no exit strategy because they never planned to exit. The bases will be like the Philippines, Japan or Germany – American oases to maintain geo-political standing.

Total Withdrawal

The fact of the matter is that anything the administration does to attempt to achieve its dubious ill-defined goals will not work. If the privates and sergeants on the ground do not know their goals they will probably not achieve them. If the Iraqi people feel that they are occupied – they won’t like it.
Bob Woodward alluded to the image of the fall of Saigon. The Seventh Fleet’s helicopters and brave Marine pilots flew sortie after sortie getting hundreds of Marines, embassy workers and citizens of Saigon – whom we had guaranteed peace and freedom to years earlier – out of the city before the NVA conquered the city.
The fact is we will withdraw en masse from Iraq in retreat. And, many members of the Marine Corps will be proud to be involved in such a retreat to save their compatriots from a Baghdad Embassy. But, we do not have to do that. Instead we can withdraw today, like the French out of Algiers. Or we can kill more and more Americans and Iraqis and have the last minute airlifts out five years from now.
Which Endgame would you prefer?

The War in Iraq: Who is really to Blame?

This week’s McLaughlin Group reported a new poll showing that 62 percent of Americans think the War in Iraq was a mistake. That’s right – 62 percent! This week’s poll is a complete turn from the October 2002 Pew Research Center report. In that report 62 percent of Americans supported going to war. Apparently, as the war drags on, more people are paying attention to the errors and lies of both the administration and the press.
Now let’s do some quick math. I will first make an assumption: “Nobody who did not support the war in 2002, suddenly does now.” While, I guess it is possible that my assumption is wrong, I guarantee that if I am the numbers will not change outside of the margin of error, and therefore, is still statistically – if not universally – correct. Thus if 62% supported the war in 2002, 38% did not. Now 38% support the war and 62% do not. That means 24% of Americans have changed their mind. It is to you 24% that I speak.
While normally I am glad that people have turned around to my way of thinking. Today I am angry. Why did it take the 3700 American deaths and 73,000 Iraqi deaths for 24% of Americans to do their job as members of a democracy? That is 72,000,000 of you who completely disregarded rational thought or any semblance of duty to your country and the world.
The decision to go to war was made in the court of public opinion. The administration was the prosecutors. The witnesses were drawn from the intelligence community and the media. I and my ilk (you know “surrender monkeys,” “Saddam lovers” and “People who forgot about September 11”) were the defense counsel. And, the American public was the jury. And, it was you 24% of Americans who pushed the vote over to conviction.
For purposes of this piece I will ignore evidence that has come out since the war started. I will not discuss yellow cake and Valerie Plame, or the fact that not one ounce of the supposed 100-500 TONS of WMD has been recovered. Nor shall I discuss the findings that the aluminum tube controversy was a farce. Instead, I shall look to the evidence and counter eveidence that was readily available in March 2003. There are four key factors that you ignored when convicting.
The first is the definitiveness of WMD. In October 2002, the CIA released a declassified report to make the case for the War in Iraq. In the report there were so many “probablys” and “likelys” that made it seem that we did not know enough. Since then George Tenet has said intelligence is not meant to stand up in a court of law. Well, fine but if you are going to use it as a causi bellum and send in 150,000 American troops to kill 70,000 Iraqis it had better!
So, did you even bother to look at this report? A friend of mine said that not everybody is as politically interested as me and wouldn’t read the CIA report. Instead you took a politicians word for it? Oh yeah, that’s a famously trustworthy source of information. You sat there and told me that Saddam Hussein was the biggest threat to the United States. You also told me that we should blindly support the president in times of war. Isn’t that how the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” happened?
The second one is that 66 percent of Americans in 2002 believed that Saddam had some involved with September 11th. On December 9, 2001 Vice President Cheney declared that an al-Qaeda operative and a member of the Iraqi intelligence in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Now, let us ignore the fact that Czechoslovakia had not existed for almost 9 years. I want to know if you even attempted to think for yourself here.
There are two reasons I would refute this idea. First, Al-Qaeda is an Islamist terrorist organization seeking to bring back the Caliph; Iraq is a secular Arab socialist country that does not want to be controlled by the religious right of Islam. If you think about it for one second: IT DOES NOT MAKE ANY SENSE THAT THEY WOULD WORK TOGETHER.
So, that may be just the political savvy in me that makes that leap. But the second reason is more obvious. How many times have you taken one meeting with somebody and realized it wouldn’t work. Have you have had a job interview and then said “Well, that’s just not enough money?” Or, have you met up for coffee for a first date and then said to your friends, “He/she is fucking crazy?” One occurrence of a meeting does more to prove no connection – because they decided not to have a second!
The third piece of information: George Bush and Dick Cheney are oilmen. And, what they wanted to do was invade an oil rich country. That, in and of itself, should have set off alarm bells! I mean, do you trust the crack-dealer who wants to give you a free vacation to Colombia?
Lastly is Secretary of State, Colin Powell’s speech before the UN. Within two days it was shown that a lot of the “facts” in it were based upon plagiarized information from a six-year-old grad school paper. So a major piece of intelligence to sell you on the war is from six years ago and available to any Tom Dick or Harry getting his Master’s in Political Science? But, no, that seemed quite logical to you (and the press and administration had been hiding it all this time?)
George Bush may be a warmonger. The media and Senators may not have done their job in questioning the intelligence leading up to the war. But, in the court of public opinion, 62% of Americans refused to do their duty to make sure that politicians weren’t lying to them. Instead of finding irrefutable evidence of guilt, you ignored your duty as a citizen in a democracy. Would you have convicted your son or daughter on such evidence? Because, you not only convicted but you sentenced 3628 American sons and daughters and 73,611 Iraqi sons and daughters to death! THEIR BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS!