(a) marvel at the utter chaos and worsening violence which our invasion has spawned;
(b) find the notion absurd that we are anywhere even remotely near being able to turn over Iraq to Iraqis;
(c) wonder about how Iraq is ever going to be sufficiently peaceful and stable for us to leave without it looking like retreat and defeat; or,
(d) all of the above.
I choose (d). A country with places of active killing referred as the "Triangle of Death" and "Highway of Death," and plagued with sectarian violence that is increasing in hatred, intensity and slaughter, doesn't sound like a place on its way to stability and prosperity.A suicide car bomb exploded Thursday near an American convoy at the entrance to the main hospital in the volatile town of Mahmudiya, killing at least 30 Iraqis and wounding dozens of others in a burst of fire and shrapnel.
At least 15 other Iraqis died Thursday, including the police commander of Mahmudiya, while 5 American soldiers were reported killed in three separate incidents over the last two days.
Even by the violent standards of this war, the bombing in Mahmudiya was particularly vicious, taking place outside a hospital as visitors and the sick were coming and going. The blast flung bystanders and body parts through the air and shattered the facades of buildings for blocks around. Policemen and Iraqi Army soldiers quickly sealed off the town's main streets while American helicopters circled the scene of carnage. . . .
Mahmudiya lies in a restive part of the Euphrates River valley south of Baghdad that is commonly called the Triangle of Death, because of the frequency of ambushes by guerrillas and bandits there. The American military has often tried sweeps of towns and villages there, only to find that the residents had cleared out well before the operations began.
Some of the worst sectarian violence of the post-Saddam Hussein era has taken place in the area, as Sunni Arabs and Shiites struggle for control of the towns and of the major arteries leading south from the capital to the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. Shiite pilgrims traveling to those cities have often turned up dead alongside the main road, known as the Highway of Death. The executions have incited so much fury that Shiites in the south have announced the creation of vengeance-seeking militias in response to the slayings.
The sectarian nature of Iraq's low-level civil war is evident in virtually every major attack that takes place now. A surge in such assaults has roiled the country in the last week and tested the limits of Shiite patience.
Last Friday, a pair of suicide bombers attacked two Shiite mosques in the Kurdish town of Khanaqin, killing at least 70. A car bombing at a Shiite funeral the next day killed at least 30. By the end of the weekend, at least 155 Iraqis and 8 American and British soldiers had been killed over a three-day period.
In violence elsewhere on Thursday, a car bombing in the southern town of Hilla killed at least 3 people and wounded at least 14, the Interior Ministry official said. Gunmen in southern Baghdad opened fire on a convoy carrying the minister of industry, killing at least three guards and wounding a civilian, and an adviser to Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister and a candidate for Parliament, was shot dead in his car in the evening.
An Iraqi Army major, a police officer and an Iraqi commando were gunned down in separate incidents in Baghdad. A roadside bomb explosion in the Baghdad suburb of Doura killed one policeman and wounded two, while a police colonel and his son were killed when guerrillas sprayed their house with gunfire. A girl was killed when "unknown explosive ordnance" detonated near an engineering convoy in Diwaniya, the American military said.
The American military said a soldier died Wednesday of a gunshot wound in central Baghdad, and two died the same day of gunshot wounds southwest of the capital. Two other soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb explosion on Thursday, also southwest of Baghdad. At least 2,104 American troops have died in the war.
The recent spate of suicide bombings has called into question the American military's assertions that it has effectively clamped down on such attacks. The American command says suicide bombings dipped somewhat from early summer to late summer, and officers attribute the decline to operations in the desert regions of western Anbar Province, near the Syrian border. These operations were aimed at disrupting the flow of foreign fighters and munitions, the officers say.
Exit strategy = Nov. 2006 elections
ReplyDeletee) The media is so biased always reporting the negative ...
ReplyDeleteSo there are more newsworthy stories today in Iraq than the suicide bomber who slaughtered 20 people, including 5 more U.S. soliders and/or the ongoing civil war between Sunnis and Shiites? Like what? What stories should the Times have run with instead?
Did a Marine give a lollipop to a little girl in Basra today who was really happy because she never experienced the grape flavor before? Did a new shipment of pencils finally arrive in a Kurdish school?
Trying to pretend that the utter chaos and low-grade (for now) civil war in Iraq is the media's fault isn't really going to help matters.
I believe the referrence was to the fact that
ReplyDeletea) Terrorist attacks have been going on a lot longer than we've been in Iraq. I believe America suffered one several years ago on the 11th of September. You may have forgotten.
b) Iraq doesn't have to be peaceful for US troops to leave. America is far from peaceful herself. As long as Iraq has a trained army and police force, and can resist attempts at hostile takeover, we can leave secure in the knowledge that Iraq is far, far better than it was when we came.
c) same as B, just like yours.
d) yeah.
e) Saddam killed people numbering in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. America set up a democracy, and gave access to water and electricity and freedom to millions of Iraqi people. We helped them set up schools and we closed down the rape rooms. There's nowhere in the world that doesn't have violence. There's no plan so good that someone can't point to something and claim it was "just what they were afraid would happen."
If you read reports of American cops being killed every day, American women being raped every day, and American children being murdered every day (all of which does, in fact, happen every day), you'd probably feel that America is a quagmire too, instead of the bastion of freedom and liberty we are.
a) Terrorist attacks have been going on a lot longer than we've been in Iraq. I believe America suffered one several years ago on the 11th of September. You may have forgotten.
ReplyDeleteI didn't say that our invasion caused terrorist attacks. Of course terrorist attacks against the U.S., as well as anti-U.S. hatred on the part of Muslim extremists, pre-date our invasion.
What I said was that our invasion has spawned extreme amounts of chaos and instability inside of Iraq. That's just a fact.
b) Iraq doesn't have to be peaceful for US troops to leave. America is far from peaceful herself. As long as Iraq has a trained army and police force, and can resist attempts at hostile takeover, we can leave secure in the knowledge that Iraq is far, far better than it was when we came.
The conditions you describe for our leaving seem a long, long, long way off, and far from certain.
Moreover, if we have a stable Iraq that is run by Shiite theorcrats beholden to Iran and in the mold of the Iranian mullahs, I hardly think anyone can make a compelling case that we made Iraq "better off" in any sense that would have been worth the endeavor, given its costs. And that's true no matter how many schools we build or how much stability exists when we leave.
e) Saddam killed people numbering in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. America set up a democracy, and gave access to water and electricity and freedom to millions of Iraqi people. We helped them set up schools and we closed down the rape rooms. There's nowhere in the world that doesn't have violence. There's no plan so good that someone can't point to something and claim it was "just what they were afraid would happen."
We all know about the things you just mentioned happening in Iraq. How do we know about them? Because the "mainstream media" reported them.
And while it's true that every place in the world has violence, very few places have the level of violence that Iraq has. Reporters and officials who visit there can't leave a tiny little confined area of Baghdad without real danger. Civil war is brewing and about to explode. The country's civic institutions can't function because of the violence.
Trying to compare it to a few muggings in Central Park isn't going to help much when the reality there is so patently different.
e) Take a deep breath and compare it to all other conflicts throughout history.
ReplyDeletea) Sorry, didn't realize you were referring to the removal of a mass-murdering tyrant as instability. I misunderstood. Yes, dethroning Saddam did create instability. Can't argue with you there.
ReplyDeleteb) I suppose time will tell, huh? But using this argument presupposes that you know something everyone else does not.
e) Ya, that's what we're there for, and why we didn't just stop at getting Saddam. I fail to see your point. If things were great there, we would be gone already. If things were great before we went, we'd have never left. It sounds kinda like you're complaining that bad things happen sometimes.
I place the blame for our need to invade squarely on the shoulders of Saddam. Saying that things are hard for our soldiers right now is true, but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't have done it.
"What I said was that our invasion has spawned extreme amounts of chaos and instability inside of Iraq. That's just a fact."
ReplyDeleteActually, I'm pretty sure that is an opinion.
You might want to keep in mind the fact that our formal occupations of Japan and Germany didn't end until 1952, well after the end of WWII. Japan didn't get its first post-war premier (Shigeru Yoshida) until 1948; Konrad Adenauer didn't become chancellor of West Germany until 1949. And we still have troops based in both countries (though not as occupiers-heh). From where I sit, it looks like we're actually running a bit ahead of schedule.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with the current occupation isn't simply its duration. It's the extreme violence and instability which characterizes the country we're occupying -- violence and instability which, to put it mildy, doesn't seem to be decreasing any.
In that regard, comparisons to a relatively peaceful and stable post-war Germany and Japan are plainly inapposite.
Having said that I'll be the first to admit that the post-war occupation of Iraq could have gone a lot more smoothly.
That, too, is a serious understatement. But you are right that the potency of the insurgency
and the intensity of Sunni opposition was not recognized in advance by our war planners. In light of that acknowledgment -- which really amounts to an admission that several of the most important premises on which the decision to wage war was based turned out to be erroneous -- isn't it appropriate and rational to re-consider the wisdom of our occupation in light of these changed premises?
Put another way, don't these inaccurate predictions about what would happen provide a rational, substantial ground for changing one's mind about the desirability of the occupation -- i.e., of converting from war supporter to war opponent without being a craven political opportunist eager to surrender to terrorists?
Your second mistake (unless you know something I don't) is in presuming that the Iraqi Shia are somehow beholden to the Iranian Shia. In what way? They may be members of the same sect, but that hardly makes them brothers. The Iraqi Shia are overwhelmingly Arab. The Iranian Shia are mostly Persian, with a sizable minority of ethnic Turks.
Isn't this similar to the widely reviled arugment that Al Qaeda and Iraq could never have cooperated because of their theological differences?
It certainly seems that the Iraqi Shiites and Iranians haven't found many impediments to their cooperation thus far. If a strongly theocratic Shia government ascends to power in Iraq, I think it's a lot more likely that they will be alinged with the mullahs in Iran than with, say, the U.S. or Israel.
It's well documented that even in Vietnam and expecially now, tactics include keeping appraised of your enemy's public opinion and using psychological operations against them. Our army does this, and you can bet that any enemy army does this too. Al-Qaeda has been demonstrated to watch and use media to manipulate world opinion.
ReplyDeleteI don't like posting the same thing twice, but really, defeating terrorists is what we want; OBL trained 80,000 of them, and at least 30,000 have been killed since 9-11: Why is the U.S. in Iraq?
ReplyDelete