Writing in The Guardian, Simon Jenkins wonders whether anyone still reads Barbara Tuchman on the folly of war. It seems that the only remaining argument - in Australia and the UK (in the US the Bush administration doesn’t proceed by way of argument) - for staying in Iraq is that things would get worse if occupying forces left. We no longer hear about spreading freedom and democracy. We’re not told Iraq will be a shining beacon for peace and civilisation in the Middle East. No one can remember Iraqis showering troops with flowers. And no politician dares mention the fact that the only clauses in the Iraqi constitution that are respected are those that enshrine Sharia Law in the South, and that the effective authorities there are Shi’ite theocrats. And that the invasion has massively improved Iran’s strategic position. And that women don’t dare go out on the streets. And the massacres of Christians and Jews. And the fact that the oil isn’t flowing. And that the US is paying $186 million a day to stay there. And that almost 3 years on, water and electricity in Baghdad haven’t been properly restored. And that millions in reconstruction money is embezzled and siphoned off by cronies of the Interim Government into Swiss bank accounts. There are so many dead since the mission was proclaimed accomplished. Even “cutting and running” is no longer mentioned as a cardinal sin.
Jenkins writes:
Signalling withdrawal would, it is said, give a green light to the gangs and private militias, to revenge attacks, ethnic cleansing and even partition. That threat is no longer meaningful since these are all happening anyway. The militias have reportedly infiltrated at least half the police and internal security forces in each area. Barely a tenth of the army is considered loyal to the central authority. That a Basra police station should be vulnerable to al-Sadr irregulars is appalling.
The 150,000 foreign troops on Iraqi soil are overwhelmingly committed to self-protection. They do not do law and order any more. Power is finding its new locus, in the mafias, sheikhdoms, militias and warlords that flourish amid anarchy. Where there is no security, the gunman is always king.
The alleged reason for occupying Iraq was to build security and democracy. We have dismantled the first and failed to construct the second. Iraq is a fiasco without parallel in recent British policy. Now we are told that we must “stay the course” or worse will befall. This is code for ministers refusing to admit a mistake and hoping someone else will after they are gone. By then the Kurds will be more detached, the Sunnis more enraged and the Shias more fundamentalist.
You can sniff the changes in the rhetoric on the winds blowing in from the desert. Tony Blair will soon depart into history. The British will leave. And - if Australia doesn’t cut and run first, we won’t be far behind.
And the sound of scurrying, and the silence of forgetting, will be ramped up to top volume to try to obscure the responsibility of those who ruined Iraq and the lives of ordinary Iraqis. And who heightened the real and present danger of political Islamist terrorism blowing up in our faces. But some of us will be watching and waiting, and those who are responsible will not escape that responsibility. And nor should they.
Wishful thinking, Mark.
The Left really, really wants us to lose in Iraq, but it just isn’t happening.
Only the partisan bias of the media allows you to pretend it is.
You’ve said it all there, Mark.
I wonder where I can go to find the unbiased information EP is relying on for his view that we are winning in Iraq.
Plus, the Turks are now explicitly threatening to enter Iraqi Kurdistan if/ when the COW pulls out.
LE,
Right from the start the Turks were threatening a 12mile incursion into north Iraq to create a buffer zone between them and whatever the Kurds did, to prevent a potential Kurdish uprising in Turkey. Bush had to assure the Turks that there would be no independant Kurdistan after the restructure of Iraq or else the Americans couldn’t use Turkish airspace (or even bases?). The intended land invasion from the North by the COW didn’t happen because the Turks didn’t like the US assurances.
“I wonder where I can go to find the unbiased information EP is relying on for his view that we are winning in Iraq.”
I think it must be at the bottom of whatever sand-pit EP is sticking his head into.
It’s so depressing. What a mess.
I can’t see how its all going to end soon.
In the March of Folly the cases Tuchman discusses are were folly is perpetuated across political generations, and I think that it likely again here. The time when there was an obvious better option was before the war began. Now we are left with the option of either leaving and letting anarchy and civil war descend or staying and hoping we can outlast the insurgents, and dragging it on for years with possibly the same result in the end.
The next set of leaders (after Bush and Blair) are going to be faced this choice and I expect rather than be seen to lose a war are going to hang on and hope they can turn it around.
As for EP’s line, What would you take as an objective measure?
Casualties inflicted would seem to be the best one unbiased one, and while coalition casualties are lower/per day than last year, they are higher than the first year including the invasion. However that doesn’t include Iraqi military casualties which have increased a lot in the last year. Thus it seems that little impact is being made on the insurgencies capabilities despite 2.5 years of fighting. That is a worry.
Indeed. And once again , lets not forget Pape’s studies sugggesting 95% of suicide bombing is motivated by foreign occupation not religion. Its not “Islamic” terrorism. Its nationalist / territorial.
Look at our latest laws: What an own goal.
I note again:
- Withdraw Western military forces from the Middle East.
- Pressure Israel to allow the creation of viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
Terrorism will decline to near meaningless levels. This is the difference we saw in Northern Ireland between the Provos (with legitimately aggrieved mainstream nationalist community support behing htem for shelter and recruitment - they were a militarily unbeatable menace); and the ‘Real IRA’ (once nationalist grievances were being addressed, this was a fruitloop rump/remnant capable of an irregular atrocity, yes, but just as likely to blow themselves up, with no real support and nowhere to hide).
But anarchy and civil war are alread effectively here, Steve.
What really struck me about the Jenkins column was this:
If so, what’s the point?
There is no point. They’ll be gone within 18 months. The only hope then is a UN sponsored, Muslim-nation peacekeeping force.
Neo-Conservatism has failed. As they quietly boast in Brussels, the soft power of the EU has ultimately had more consequential impact (in eg Turkey) than the hard power of 150,000 COW troops.
They won’t be gone. They’ve invested too much in this to let it all go now. This thing has bipartisan support in the US.
I’m not even sure a peacekeeping force would be that effective, in the absence of a settlement - or even with a settlement. Can’t remember his name off hand and I’m at uni so can’t refer to the book but there’s a French international relations theorist who talks about “frozen peace” in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan - because the settlement doesn’t emerge out of a conclusion to the conflict between people with a stake in it but is instead imposed by the West continuing military intervention is required to keep the peace and this in turn prevents any real settlement of the issues. Not to mention the ethnic cleansing these settlements by the West often entail - as in Bosnia.
That’s in the softer sense of the concept - not killing but forced relocation - and homogenising of the ethnic composition of parts of the territory.
I’m still struck by Tariq Ali’s argument comparing Iraq and Indonesia - Indonesian democracy is far from perfect but it emerged largely organically from the rule of a dictator (Suharto) and has real roots. In time, he argues, Iraqis would have got rid of Saddam and put something in place that had a shot at working.
Jenkins’ argument is comparable. The solution might be to just leave and let the Iraqis sort it out. There’s a fair chance they could. But on the other hand, so much damage has been done and the effects of the occupation have been to make both enmity and civil strife intensify - in part because the Iraqis have been collectively deprived of responsibility for their own fate. And I think the Brits will leave (and so will we) but the Yanks will be there for a reasonably long time yet - or maybe not - next year’s midterm elections will be crucial. But the Democrats aren’t really anti-war either - so we’ll see.
How many COW countries still have troops in Iraq? Norway announced its withdrawal just after a Labour led coalition won elections the week before the German/NZ polls.
“This thing has bipartisan support in the US.”
For how much longer, wbb? Each poll shows support lower than the last…
EP,
I think it’s clear where we can lay the blame for the failure of Iraq: Dubbya’s Underpants Gnome advisors.
I’m thinking it’s about time he dropped those guys.
Sure they are great at getting the ball of an idea rolling, and they share the same goals as Dubbya and his friends, but they really need someone to outsource the fine details to.
For instance, their Iraq policy was this:
Stpe 1: Invade Iraq
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!
Admittedly this was a vast improvement on what they initially proposed. I have it on good authority that the above is actually the second version of the Iraq policy. The first one never got to Dubbya thanks to the double
checking of Ari Flieshman. Condeleeza Rice had already put her stamp on it and was on the way to personally give it to the president when Ari, just on spec, asked to see it again.
Condi protested that
“Step 1: Invade Iraq.
Step 2: Steal Underpants.
Step 3: ?”
was a good policy that would be wholeheartedly supported by the American public, but Ari disagreed and he sent it back for more development.
Ok, to be fair, you guys say that it should be:
Step 3: Democracy! or Defeat Terrorism! or Find Weapons of Mass Destruction! or any of the others.
And it would be churlish of me to ignore that as a result of this policy more terrorists haven’t died since the policy was implemented than before, but again the Underpants Gnomes have done the sums and reasoned that the best way to kill more terrorists is to MAKE THEM YOURSELF and then kill them!
So, we get:
Step 1: Invade Iraq
Step 2: Make Terrorists
Step 3: Defeat Terrorism!
Brilliant.
But, again I gotta hand it to them because this has been good cover for the Find WMD! plan which used to look like this:
Step 1: Invade Iraq.
Step 2: Find WMD
Step 3: ?
But since there have been no WMD it was changed to:
Step 1: Invade Iraq
Step 2: ?
Step 3: ?
…which is uncharacteristically vague even for Underpants Gnomes.
Look. Not that I really like knocking the little fellows, you must admit that although the Underpants Gnomes’ ideas are easily embraced because they are bold and easy to remember, they do fall down on closer inspection.
And that whole ‘?’-iness of Step 2 in all of their plans is a bit of a sticking point and will remain so until the very end.
(I have it on another good authority that the ‘Think Unhappy Thoughts’ program of THE LEFT has been shelved because it was far less effective at changing how the situation in Iraq was being reported than having National Guardsmen getting the crap blown out of them repeatedly.)
Even Mark Steyn admitted that the situation in Iraq is not perfect by any means.
So don’t be saying “I told you so” now, otherwise Christopher Hitchens will accuse you of hoping openly or secretly to leverage difficulty in Iraq in order to defeat George Bush., or John Howard as the case may be.
And there was someone, way back then who was speaking the real truth.
President Bush and his coterie keep talking about the inevitability of “victory”, but even if Saddam is killed tomorrow there will be no victory, fast or slow, in the conventional sense. At what point is someone in this inner circle going to tell Bush that even if the US wins, it loses?
I’m going to have to reassess my view of him.
Harry, by bipartisan support, I was thinking of the people’s elected representatives rather than the voters themselves. Democrats don’t argue for withdrawal. They just say we coulda done it better.
As if.
Yes and no. Yes there is anarchy and fighting but its still constrained. It could be orders of magnitude worse if Sunni and Shite militias actually go for each other completely unrestrained. In an ethnic and religious based civil war there will be no respecting civilian life, infact I imagine they will be targeted.
Jenkins essentially argues this is inevitable and we might as well get it over and done with. I doubt anyone is going to want to have that on their hands.
Hmm maybe I shouldn’t mess with HTML.
The debate is rather academic. The interaction of logistical and political factors, rather than strategic or moral concerns, will dictate the US’s Iraq policy.
THe US military will have to leave Iraq in main force within the next two years or the US military will begin to collapse as an organized and motivated force. Or, if the US military is to be conserved as an effective force, the draft will have to be re-instated.
The GOP is the national security party of the US. Its political base will not tolerate the collapse of the US military, no matter what Bush wants. The DEMs are the civil liberty party of the US. Its political base will not stand by and support a reintroduction of the draft, no matter what Clinton says.
I predict that the US will begin large scale draw-downs of its troop committment in Iraq some time during the second half of this Presidents term. This US withdrawal may end in chaos and civil war. Or it may end in a peace settlement and the gradual establishment of civil society.
But it will end.
While GWB and the Republicans might ultimately get punished in the US, the direct cost to Australia of involvement in the Iraq folly has been a relatively small financial one. The only way Howard will be politically punished for its Iraq policy is if Australian troops start coming home in body bags in significant quantities, or if there is a domestic terror attack.
If there’s one thing that the current government has demonstrated, it’s that voters don’t hold governments accountable to abstract principles; they hold them accountable for concrete things, particularly ones that directly affect them.
My guess for the punterland view, for those that bother to think about such issues at all, is this: if a withdrawal happens with no (or even relatively few) Australian casualties, no matter what a rathole Iraq ends up as, Johnny will come up smelling OK. As far as the punters are concerned, he’ll have done enough to keep our Great and Powerful Friends who keep us safe from the Indonesians happy, and done little enough to avoid getting any Australians actually killed in the process.
I would like to believe my fellow citizens give a toss what happens to the Iraqi people, but our collective compassion extends only to cases where the morality is fairly unambiguous, like the tsunami. Once there’s moral complexities involved, and the distance increases, it all gets too hard and we stick our heads in the sand.
“Once there‚Äôs moral complexities involved, and the distance increases, it all gets too hard and we stick our heads in the sand. ”
As good a description of the anti-war movement that I’ve seen.
James Hamilton, the moral complexity in the antiwar case was that it necessarily left Saddam Hussein in power, at least for the short term. However, the antiwar movement was smart enough to recognise that war was a worse option than doing so, on balance. And they were completely right.
Now who’s the moral simpleton?
I’m a moral simpleton, Robert. Just because something is hard & messy doesn’t make it not worth doing. Realpolitik gives us Saddam’s. Confrontation of evil demolishes the Berlin Wall. Iraq will take time & effort & money and probably more lives, but the result will be better, for Iraq, the Middle East and the world.
Well I wasn’t expecting to convert you or anything.
You thought I’d gone back to the tomb, didn’t you?????
I predict that it’s likely that Britain may well begin to pull out sometime next year. However, even if they do, it’s unlikely that the Howard Government will do the same. In the US the support for the war is at an all-time-low but as long as GWB and the cronies in charge there, they ain’t going anywhere. And our beloved Wizard of Oz is content to play Toto to Dubya as much as he wants and needs. That is, until perhaps mid-2007, when he can deliberately withdraw some troops to get electoral leverage out of it, and sinking us to another three or four years of reactionary doom and gloom.
Nostra, you ol’ pain in the butt you. How they hangin’ buddy? Good, sort of, to hear from you. Gawd, Paxton’ll be excited.
I agree with Jack, at least that the debate here is academic. We don’t have the information that the government will be using to make its strategic decisions. We don’t know if the war really is, or is not, going badly. All we have are the media reports. For the media, bad news is a good story and good news is not a story at all. Ergo, all things are going to shite, in Iraq as everywhere else.
Wars are difficult to prosecute, especially asymmetrically. This one is made more difficult by the baying media chorus that battens on every mistake, mis-step or failure by the coalition, and ignores, glosses over or even justifies or excuses every atrocity of the enemy. And the enemy, very media savvy, knows exactly how to play that game.
What may happen - and it would be the worst possible outcome - is that the relevant governments will decide, as they did in the case of Vietnam, that a few (hundred) thousand yellowies or brownies are not really worth a few score whiteys (and African-Americans), in the eyes of their own electorates - and from their own self-preserving point of view, certainly not worth the the media’s unending condemnatory cacophony. For we know well enough that journalists with their 3-year media studies courses have no difficulty presenting themselves in the eyes of the public as better judges of the conduct of war than the soldiers who are trained to prosecute them.
The reality of the situation on the ground won’t matter. The only reality will be the politics. They therefore shrug their shoulders, say, ‘Well, it was the best we could do’, and pull out. They will know as well as anyone that the mayhem that would follow would attract only the passing attention of the media, once the west were out of the mix. And the defeatists and appeasers would look calmly past the carnage, as they’ve done so many times before.
But it’s what will probably happen. Perhaps we shoudl be grateful that 2005 is not 1939. We could wish for governments of similar intestinal fortitude. Maybe we’ve got them, maybe we haven’t.
Forgot to change my name back.
While Chestnut awaits moderation, the shorter she: another people betrayed, another army shafted.
Robert Fisk is currently in the country to give the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Adelaide University tomorrow. This afternoon he was interviewed by Mark Colvin on PM. Last night he was on with Phillip Adams.
His line is that the notion of a civil war is an American concoction, the residual reason for being there. He says that the Iraqis don’t expect one if the COW go. While some people clearly want one, he thinks there would be an accommodation between the Shiites and the Sunnis in a form of government that we may not like. The Kurds will try to do their own thing as they have in the past.
He says he’s not sure he’s willing to go back to Iraq as in the end you have to think about your personal safety. When he was last there he did get around a bit and he said the insurgents were in control outside Baghdad in the central region and to some extent within it. Most journos assigned there stay in their hotels.
As to casualties, he said he talked to the guy at the morgue in Baghdad and there were about 1000 bodies a month coming through the door. If you make a countrywide guesstimate and multiply by 12 you get very large numbers indeed.
Fisk said the Americans “must leave, they will leave, but they can’t…and that’s the equation that turns sand into blood”
It seems to me that the only way out is to get the Iraqis to ask them to go, but they really do want to control the oil and they really don’t want to lose face. OTOH conscription to maintain their armed forces strength wouldn’t go down well.
Rob - What makes this war difficult to win is Sunni insurgents trying to start a civil war with the Shias - with car bombs. Insurgents with local support at that. I doubt our media has much of a say either way - your average insurgent doesn’t sit around reading Guardian op-eds for encouragement in their spare time.
Do you know, Leinad, I seriously think that they do - or at least the people that control them. They were savvy enough to release John Martinkus when they’d Googled him long enough to convince themselves he was on their side, and so did not deserve death by decapitation like the others they captured.
A couple of things about that:
‘The people that control them’ You’re implying here that the average insurgent doesn’t have their own individual motivations for blowing up US soldiers and the Dawa/SCIRI-United Kurdish government.
I think its more likely that people join the insurgency for a whole lot of different reasons and that writing insurgents off as being under the control of the Dastardly Zarqawi, Chief Leiutenant of Dr. Claw is a critical mistake.
For one thing, ‘the insurgency’ is a whole lot of different groups with differing motives. That we know of, most are Sunnis, either Baathist, tribal leaders out for revenge, ex-cons (Saddam gave a general amnesty for violent thugs before the war and during it the entire Iraqi prison system collapsed) as well as adherents of Salafist fundamentalism and Zarqawi’s mob. Only a few are foreigners and in normal circumstances most of these guys would be shooting each other. Some are. This is Iraq, not Vietnam, there is no unified Insurgent Command HQ - these guys aren’t the NLF.
Finally, the journalists. Martinkus is on the side of the car-bombers because he was critical of the way the occupation was running? Jeez Rob, I don’t know what to say to that… Except that as of last month 63 journalists were killed in Iraq, more than Vietnam, Bosnia or Algeria and another 22 are still hostage. The first killed was the ABC’s Paul Moran, by an insurgent car bomb, which, using your logic would be because of his pro-US camerawork.
Obviously I did not make myself clear on the Martinkus case. I didn’t say he was on their side. I said his captors satisfied themselves by dint of a Google search that he was, at the least, not on the side of their enemies, ie. the COW. Even that journalist’s employer, as I recall, described his claim that ‘they had no reason to kill me, like the others’, as unwise, or some such word. Indeed it was.
For the rest, I think you underestimate these guys. They understand far better than the Americans the power of media images. That’s why they may well, in the end, win their particular war. The horrors they visit on their victims will go largely unphotographed, for the mdeia, as I said before, will have lost interst. the story will have no ‘hook’. So they will win that war also - unless stronger stomachs prevail.
And Brian - so even Leinad’s quite reasonable civil war argument (agree with it or not) is an American plot? For the Lord’s sake.
Well I’ll go to bed while I’m moderated. I still think Mark is feeding my name into the Spaminator.
…
“Once there‚Äôs moral complexities involved, and the distance increases, it all gets too hard and we stick our heads in the sand. ”
As good a description of the anti-war movement that I’ve seen.
…
Well I wasn’t expecting to convert you or anything.
…
So was there any point to your interaction here James beyond trying to feel good by being sarky about something you support that’s gone really bad?
And hey, Nostrodamus has risen from the grave! Tres cool!
For those of you unwitting of the backstory, Nostrils was a very sardonic and incisive number cruncher who enjoyed spreading gloom and doom for Laborites at cs’s Back Pages in the run up to last year’s Aus federal election. Then, as the fit hit the shan, he (or she) revealed his (or her) true colours. Think wwb’s nasty but smart young sibling. Not someone you afford to turn your back on.
Glad yer back Nostrils. I certainly hope you’re have a ball here, doing that voodoo that you do so well.
Rob, I don’t have an opinion. Fisk was saying that his reading of the situation was that the Sunnis and the Shiites would not take the conflict to the point of civil war if the COW left. Fisk said:
He says there are various elements who want various things, but the bottom line is:
Rob, do you not watch the news? I see the horrors the insurgency inflicts on its victims every time I switch on the telly. The Nick Berg video and it’s sequels all got airtime and the newspapers cover especially grisly days (i.e. more than the average dozen or so killed). If it bleeds it leads, there’s your hook.
’sides, most righties are complaining that there’s too much coverage of the insurgencies’ atrocities. In fact didn’t you say a few comments ago that the media don’t report the good news?
Fisk is nuts if (per Brian’s post) he thinks the civil war is an American concoction. It’s going on, its just that only one side has declared it.
Most of the insurgent attacks are now directed on the Shia-Kurd government and just plain Shia’s in general. This in part because they’re ’softer’ targets than the Yanks but also the Yanks themselves are becoming sidelined in this whole process, which is less and less about ending the Occupation per se than who has the best position when the Occupation ends.
Shia religious and political (spot the difference
authorities are holding back despite strings of atrocities because they’re trying to get the Americans to leave as quickly as possible and a full blown civil war might have the opposite effect.
*Cue Anti-Boomer Rant*
Yeesh! Alla you! This isn’t 1939. This isn’t 1969. This is a brand new 21st century truck-up and easy answers and slogans from ageing (ex/post/anti)hippy memories -
’stay the course this is their finest our we shall fight on their beaches, we shall fight in their burning oilfields’
and
‘Troops out now! Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam!!! Give peace a chance!’
are more than useless when it comes to examining and understanding what the hell is going on in Iraq.
These chicks and dudes (mainly the dudes, esp if the constitution gets passed) have their own politics, their own feuds, factions, faiths, grudges and dress sense and the eyeglasses of Jane Fonda or Henry Kissinger are not going to help in understanding them.
Honestly!
Rob, you are majorly giving me the shits. Nabs, or Lefty E, don’t assume because they have comments moderated that they’re being deliberately silenced.
You can take your conspiracy theories and make them come true. If you don’t apologise to me within 24 hours for your repeated false and solipsistic and vexatious allegations that you’re being censored, I will fucking well feed your name into the Spaminator. I’m sick of hearing it from you, buddy, you know how bloody frustrated I am by the whole spam problem.
So you can now make up your mind whether you never want to comment here again because of your sly insinuations or just fuck off.
Not because of your politics but because of your bloody rudeness to your host.
I’ll here from you by Sunday or never again.
“Nabs, or Lefty E, don‚Äôt assume because they have comments moderated that they‚Äôre being deliberately silenced.”
Oh rilly? I thought I was being moderated ‘cos you can’t handle the truth!
Or maybey ‘cos perhaps the software can smell the booze on my breath.
“This is a brand new 21st century truck-up.”
Damn tootin’ And yet so many persist in framing their responses in such 20th century ways to any who dare point out it is becoming a colossal clusterfuck. I’m probably more right wing, or at least more high Tory or low Whig, than some that would call me leftist for being anti this war. I’m anti it cos’ it was fought for the wrong reasons by the wrong people in the wrong way. If I have any ideological leanings at all, it’s towards the “Ban Stupidity Now Party”.
Or as Newk once said to a much younger me, “Never change a winning game, but always change a losing one”.
I’ve just confirmed Rob’s conspiracy theory by putting his IP address in the spam words programme. Nothing frustrates me more than the spam problem and I’ve spent hours when I had better things to do over the last week moderating tons of crap from spammers. Rob ought to know better than to accuse me of targetting anyone for their politics. Because of his extreme rudeness and preparedness to make allegations which he knows to be false, he won’t be making an appearance again unless he apologises.
Tony, you said : “Iraq will take time & effort & money and probably more lives, but the result will be better, for Iraq, the Middle East and the world.”
But how much time, and how many more lives is acceptable? Is a timetable like the French/US in Vietnam (1945-1975) 10,000 days and 5 or so million dead OK? Following your logic would you like to see Australian conscription of our youth to go and help ‘finish’ the job?
The penny hasn’t dropped that occupations are counterproductive, that nationalist insurgencies have a habit of winning?
What’s your definition of ‘better’, is women’s rights included in that?
FFS
Seems like the Iraq situation merits only brief attention during the lefty scuffling for honour.
“- Withdraw Western military forces from the Middle East.
- Pressure Israel to allow the creation of viable, contiguous Palestinian state.”
That must be the greatest gutless capitulation to the medieval islamic state of terror I ever heard.
Rog, would you care to define ”medieval islamic state of terror…”
Of course, I suppose to follow your logic, the US had no part to play in any illegal wars, mass killings of civilians, torture, breakdown in law and order, infrastructure shambles, record Iraqi unemployment, US corporate corruption in Iraq, reduced oil exports; nor did it therefore have any part to play in creating your ‘medieval islamic state of terror’.
Iraq to you must sound like a great western triumph, so it must be ‘gutless’ to keep asking people to continue dying for a triumph. Or, if it’s not a triumph could it be they are dying for a mistake? Oh, sorry, the ‘cut and run’ delusion.
By the way, does RWDB ’scuffling for honour’ in Iraq include glossing over incompetence, humiliation and defeat or is that just the lying organs of a wicked, wilfully woeful traitorous capitalistic press spewing their hatred when you don’t like what they report?
(It’s difficult not to conclude that ‘wishfully hoping, begging, ducking for cover, blustering but often pleading to save face’ is now the real RWDB Iraqi doctrine.)
Hubris, as they say, is almost always inevitably followed by nemesis.
(After the Greeks, someone said there are none so blind as those who cannot see-that’s why one cartoonist does Ratty with one eye, one presumes.)
Rog, most evidence suggests the two things above are significant root factors behind the rise contemporary terrorism. You’re talking like they’re the ’solution’ to it. When, the evidence seems to be that these interventions are causing even more. Im afriad your position makes no sense to me. You see, I actually want to stop terrorism. Hence I advocate the above. You want to militarily “defeat” it. That will fail miserably, as we’re seeing now.
Moreover, IMO its the mindless backing up military bullying of civilians (eg Israel’s illegal occupation beyond their 1967 borders) thats is the ‘gutless’ position. Its weak and craven. Bowing down to the powerful, no matter whether their cause is just, or otherwise.
Everyone seems to be assuming that we all have the same clear definition of what consitutes “winning” the Iraq war.
I’d be interested to know what “winning” means to RWDBs and pinko commie lefties.
Iraq is not a great western triumph it is a hard thankless slog for those involved and those who choose to stand in relative safety and throw mud are gutless.
”those who choose to stand in relative safety and throw mud are gutless.”
But those who stand in ‘relative safety’ and don’t enlist to go over there and fight in support of their blustering convictions are not ‘gutless’ but paragons of RWDB warmongering virtue?
those who choose to stand in relative safety and cheer are probably gutless too Rog.
Not the point. The question is: Is it helping?
I think Mark is seriously over-reacting to what was obviously intended as a joke. Was I serious when I said mentioning Germaine Greer was enough to get me moderated?
However, I’ll take the fuck-off option.
Rob
If you feel I overreacted I apologise and I ought not to use language like that, so I’m sorry.
1. Irony is sometimes hard to read in text. Given constant annoyance from the spam thing and various other problems, not to mention the Tim Lambert vs anti-Tim Lambert stuff last weekend it was hard to read your comment as any other way than literally, particularly when it came on top of claims you made previously (and as recently as Friday) that your comments were being moderated and that you were being singled out.
I don’t take kindly to being accused of manipulating discourse or being partial in allowing comments. You might recall that J F Beck made similar statements over the course of the week. All this has a cumulative effect, and irony or humour or otherwise, you should be aware of how you’re contributing to it.
2. I don’t quite know how to take your various somewhat qualified apologies except to accept them.
Thanks, Mark.
Can I say I think Leinad made some very good rejoinder points that I’d like to get back to when I’m less tired.
Nabakov - as a social democratic democratic socialist I’m honestly tempted to chuck it in and join you debased optimalist economic liberals if only to thumb it up to the stinking boomers. However, this is the 21st freaking century and this happy slappy ‘Smith and Ricardo (and Malthus) were never wrong about anything ever’ crap peddled by most classical liberals and their sucessors really shites me off as much as all the ’socialism has all the answers’ guff. At the risk of sounding like an enfant terrible: this is the fyching 21st century and economic liberals are still arguing that the only choice is lassiez faire vs VSNKh?! Give me a break…
Rob - Everyone gets moderated. I did last night, but you’re the only one who complains. I think Mark hit the roof last night but I can see why he would. All irony and sarcasm aside, spam filter moderation is a compromise between occaisional post quarantine and crapflooding by mindless bots, a choice far less decent moderators than Mark wouldn’t agonise over for a second. The fact that you make a habit of bitching about it strikes me as flat out freaking whiny: It happens to all of us. Deal with it and quit moaning. As a not yet twenty year old its embarrasing to watch an elder carp and whinge like a two year old.
Gah, posted under the influence last night and it shows. Didn’t read through the whole Mark-Rob exchange to it’s conclusion - apologies, Rob for that Lathamesque spray.
Bitch slapping aside, to abandon the fledgling and shaky democracy that is now in Iraq to the wolves would have to be an act of gross derelicition.
Back to the point-scoring
Fledgling and shakey are one way of putting it, and DOA is another. The current government is a bizarre coalition of secular democratic Kurdish parties and a united goup comprised of dudes linked to the 1983 truckbombing of the US Marines in Lebanon (al-Dawa) and an Iranian backed, Iranian armed fundamentalist party (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq). These strange bedfellows are essentially in it together to get the new constitution passed, whereupon they will politely tell the Coalition of the Willing to get the hell out.
The constitution creates an incredibly loose federation, allowing the Shia South and a Kurdish North to amalgamate into super provinces which will essentially function as separate nations with their own police forces, laws and armies. Moreover, it directs revenue from oil rights and government assistance to those same parties at the expense of the Sunnis in the centre. In driving for this they are effectively sowing the seeds of civil war.
Large densely populated areas of the country are claimed by rival enthnic groups; the Kurds in particular are laying claim to the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul and their outlying provinces both of which are in no sense Kurdish majority and contain substantial Turkmen and Sunni populations who are now at the other side of a slow-mo ethnic cleansing program. While the Western World was watching New Orleans dissolve into toxic sludge, the largely Turkoman city of Tal Afar went over to the insurgency and was retaken by US troops and Kurdish peshmerga.
Likewise, Baghdad and cities like Hilla and Balad (scene of three simultaneous carbombings in a Shia district just a few days ago) in the Sunni ‘zone’ have large Shia and Kurdish populations - Sadr city in Baghdad, stronghold of Muqtada (it’s named after his father Muhammad Sadiq) has a million Shias at last count. Unsurprisingly, al-Sadr and his slum army are opposed to any agreement that would leave them stranded in the Sunni territories.
Democracy huh? It’s a wierd sort of democracy that refuses to recognise any laws that contradict Islamic law. I find it strange that right wingers claiming we need to stick by the SCIRI government and claim it is a democracy declaim the laws it has put forward in the constitution, laws which make it little different from shariah states like Iran (and Saudi Arabia). It’s a wierd sort of democracy that allows states to field their own entirely differant law courts, seperate paramilitary groups, and revenues beyond the control of the ferderal government.
If this is democracy I don’t understand what Bush’s problem with Syrian Lebanon was.
“to abandon the fledgling and shaky democracy that is now in Iraq to the wolves would have to be an act of gross derelicition”
Ah ha! So that’s what it was really about. Well why didn’t you say so at the start rog?
Show me any example of you from any time in the year 2003 saying that’s what it was really all about and I promise never to yank your chain again.