it's time to end our involvement.
Amen, and I'd prefer we not increase the size of our armed forces, lest some future preznit be tempted to try the same shit again somewhere else. I think having such a huge military capacity actually lessens the US's security overall, because then we feel like we've got it, so we have to use it.
I think you're right. But someone's got to recognize that there are things we just can't do with an army the size we have, or that we can reasonably get to. Which means that we shouldn't do those things.
I just want to know *how* they propose getting more soldiers. Robots?
Haven't you been reading? The Army has consistently achieved its recruiting goals over the last five years. Which means that recruiting isn't a problem -- people are lining up to get into the Army. Really. It's true.
They only way they can successfully get more people to join the military is to get the hell out of Iraq. Of course if they did that, they wouldn't need the extra people.
I'd prefer we not increase the size of our armed forces, lest some future preznit be tempted to try the same shit again somewhere else.
It didn't help this time, why would it help next time?
I was thinking all last night about how plausible McManus' total war prediction is. We carpet bombed Viet Nam before we finally gave up, and everything else seems to be following the Viet Nam script. I think the president could easily sell the nation on carpet bombing Al Anbar province. All he has to do is tell the nation that Al Anbar is where the Bad People live. He could portray us as saving Baghdad from the bad guys in Anbar, the same way we were saving the South Vietnamese from the North. He doesn't even need to learn the messy details about the difference between Sunni and Shia, or anything about what is really driving conflict there. He can simply invent his own dividing line and then bomb accordingly.
3: Don't laugh. I actually think that was one of Rumsfeld's plans for a leaner high tech army.
Is 4 a joke? Haven't they been lowering their requirements because not enough qualified people were signing up? That seems like a recruiting problem.
I get the sense that the conventional wisdom is that none of this would have happened if the Iraqi army hadn't been disbanded, and that Bremer really screwed the pooch on everything by doing that. My question: how accurate is that? Were the sectarian conflicts just waiting for their chance to flare up for decades and would have the second Saddam was gone, no matter how armed the Iraqi government itself was in his absence, or is the disappearance of a homegrown military really what pulled the lid off?
I feel like there's some chance that said question is not merely tangential to the point of whether our military can make the difference in the absence of an Iraqi force of any consequence. Would they have been screwed anyway? Are we learning a lesson here by trying to increase our capacity to play surrogate to a disbanded target army, or are we making the same mistake they did by thinking (wrongly) that a larger military means greater security? I don't have time at the moment to try to refine that into anything more clearly asked or related.
(I realize that the real answer is that none of this would have happened if we hadn't invaded in the first place, and wish we hadn't. I'm just wondering if, now that we've fucked it all up, there's a chance we can at least salvage our own future actions by learning from these.)
Is 4 a joke?
Must develop sarcasm telegraphing skills further. I thought the two final sentences would do it, but apparently not. If one of the people who understand how the blog works would enable the <font> tag in comments, I could color-code the sarcasm, which might help.
It would not help for me because I override text and background colors to my own choices. Just sayin.
10: That's an excellent question, and I don't know the answer. It's possible it might have made a big difference, but I really don't know.
But someone's got to recognize that there are things we just can't do with an army the size we have, or that we can reasonably get to. Which means that we shouldn't do those things.
Furthermore, there are things that not even the greatest military strategist ever born could do with any army of any size. Which means we should seek non-military solutions to those problems.
So, I'll just go on asking if you're making a joke when I don't get that you are doing so, and you can go on replying in the affirmative (in those cases where you are in fact joking). Doesn't seem too horrible to me.
10: It does seem compelling that it wouldn't have gotten so bad so fast if the army hadn't been disbanded. Hundreds of thousands of native soldiers are perhaps more effectual as a force than the same number of outsiders, and they might have preserved some institutional independence to stem the current tide of Balkanization. Even if they would have been uncooperative in many ways, perhaps tacitly aiding insurgents, they could at least have stopped the looting, and kept better order generally.
But I don't use this notion, as a weasel would, to say that the Iraq War could have worked. I think it's mostly academic.
Was that jawdropper ever mentioned here, that Rumsfeld's original memo also said to eliminate the Interior Ministry, which includes the police?
Yeah. It's as if the morons planning the aftermath of the war genuinely didn't believe that government does anything useful. Oh, wait, that's what they say they believe. When will we start listening?
If we hadn't disbanded the army, to whom would the Iraqi army have been loyal? How long after Baghdad fell was it that any sort of Iraqi government was in place? Do we expect that the Iraqi army would have just declared allegiance to the Christian, non-Arab army that had just defeated it and not begun stockpiling weapons and establishing relationships for the coming sectarian violence?
Lots of people are looking for how this could have been executed competently. No matter what decisions were made, this was going to be a grade-A disaster.
I think it's probably true that there is no nearby universe in which it could have been made to work as envisioned. My (incredibly ill-informed and amateur) understanding is that the original plan, the one that was supposed to end with flowers and candy, was to wax Saddam & Sons and move Chalabi into power immediately in his place and have essentially the exact same system only the dictator would owe the US big-time and give us lots of permanent bases. I think the plan was for there to be nearly zero time lag between Saddam's ouster and Chalabi's swearing in, and that it would all just be one big cake walk. However, I'm not even sure I've correctly remembered Chalabi's name, so I'm best not granted much credibility on that memory of events.
I do think there's a valuable lesson to be learned by examining the endless and uninterrupted stream of mistakes we have made, however, because if we can find in them some essential truth that can be used to counter future hawks and future build-ups and future strained-voiced cries for war war WAR! then it will save many lives. I don't know if that truth is: "if you're going to invade, do it right, fuckwits," or if it is "don't fucking invade if you can't have two soldiers pointing a gun at every person in the country, and by the way, exactly how will you resolve that situation once everyone there has two guns pointed at them and they fucking hate us?"
As an aside, I find it difficult to get the taste of pessimism out of my mouth after considering what I think was the original plan. If that was the plan, it relied on an assumption that the Iraqi people had been so beaten and so controlled for so long that they would not take an opportunity to live differently - better or worse is not considered, simply differently - and that they would just accept Chalabi or whoever with a sort of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" downtroddenness that speaks volumes about how the Iraqi people were thought of by the war's "planners."
Robust: Your version of the events is roughly what Bob Woodward reports, but with a few details missing. According to Woodward, the plan put up by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz was to simply install Chalabi as a dictator. This was nixed by the President, who on this version of the story really does believe in democracy and free elections. No one else in the government knew how to create a democratic state with free elections, so we went in without any plan for governing Iraq.
(I should say that I'm getting Woodward filtered through my dad, who praised the book up and down to me over thanksgiving.)
How about four years late and several tens (hundreds?) of billions short?
There seems to me to be something terribly wrong with invading a country, fucking everything up, saying "oops, damn, our bad", and then leaving. It's a total failure to accept responsibilty for what we've done. I know the objection is that we're not making anything better, and may be making things worse, by our continued presence, but it still feels wrong to just up and leave. Accepting that a lot of American dollars (and, sadly, lives) will be part of the cost of fixing our mistakes seems more honorable, and better.
Note that I'm not advocating "Staying the course", when "the course" is obviously what got us into this mess. I'm advocating international admission of our mistakes (at least in private diplomatic circles, if not publicly), and a humbled call to build a consensus for ideas on the best options going forward, combined with a commitment to keep American troops and dollars flowing into the region for as long as necessary to undo what harm we've done (to the extent possible, which is obviously not perfect). If the EU/UN/Iraqi government says "pull your troops out now, they're making things worse", we do so, but that's very different from just retreating on our own and leaving this clusterfuck as someone else's problem.
I'd also like unicorns for everyone, but that's a topic for a different thread.
I'd also like unicorns for everyone, but that's a topic for a different thread.
You and your fascist "only one topic per thread" thing again.
I want my unicorn to be sky blue.
The thing is that there's no one obvious to take advice from. I take your moral point, and agree with it -- my sense of the absolutely best and most useful thing we can do is to get out and wait until the situation stabilized somewhat, and then start throwing whatever sort of humanitarian aid seems most useful into the situation in quantities comparable to what we were spending on the war. Hospitals, water supplies, anything, without getting huffy about the awfulness of the government who's going to benefit.
And wanting to salve our consciences isn't a good reason to stay if we're not actually doing anything useful or good there.
Fairly off-topic, but Ogged, can you manage to get your analogy ban extended to Friedman's semi-comprehensible nannerings about Iraq? Christ, but that man's an awful writer.
24: I agree with the sentiment, but I have to ask at what point are we taking responsibility and doing what's best rather than remaining to assuage our own guilt. If it's the latter, I have a hard time asking a 19-year-old American kid to die so the guys in charge feel better about themselves.
I find that the d^2 post that ogged just linked speaks to 24.
It's a total failure to accept responsibilty for what we've done.
"Responsibility" is overrated, certainly as an explanation for any lasting behavior.
most useful thing we can do is to get out and wait until the situation stabilized somewhat, and then
My sense is that this would involve a lot of Iraqi deaths. More than our continued presence. I could probably be talked out of that position, and the country is damn near free-fall even with us still there, but I still believe it would get worse, quickly, if we just up and left.
I guess I don't really buy that we're not making anything better -- at least helping to stabilize -- by our continued presence. But I fully admit I could be wrong.
And yes I threw the word "honorable" into 24 just to annoy Apo.
It's not that I think that you're wrong, exactly, about it getting worse quickly if we leave. It's that I don't think it's likely to ever get better than it is now if we stay, and my guess is that if we leave it will get very bad for a while, and then someone or several someones will win to the extent that order can be restored.
I guess I don't really buy that we're not making anything better -- at least helping to stabilize -- by our continued presence. But I fully admit I could be wrong.
Well, it certainly doesn't appear that things are getting better, so these hopes are pinned on the idea that they'd be getting worse faster if we weren't there. I suggest that this is much less of a risk than was invading in the first place.
35 could be right. But it seems that just as easily we could leave and things could get much worse, and then qucikly get very much worse if, for instance, neighboring states were pulled into the frey. I find it hard to believe that our presence isn't exerting strong pressure to hold them back. It's not hard to imagine this spiraling into total war in the middle east. That could happen even if we stay, of course, but seems less likely. I understand that maybe our staying is just delaying rather than preventing that day, but I guess what I'd like to see is that we've done everything possible to minimize the chances of that before we wave goodbye.
neighboring states were pulled into the frey
US to the citizens of Iraq: "Are you gonna stay with the one that loves you,/ or are you going back to the one you love?/ Someone's gonna cry when they know they've lost you,/ Someone's gonna thank, the stars above."
37: Unfortunately, what we are mostly doing during our stay, through our "Iraqization" of the army and police, is arming and training members who will move to the militias upon the inevitable meltdown of the security forces. Even our honest attempts to good have nothing but bad ramifications.
7: I read a contrary opinion last night, that Bush just doesn't have the balls to get all medieval in Iraq. Fallujah was used as an example. I think the Air Force is capable of it.
10:Sistani & Hakim & Sadr and the rest of the Shiites did not want Saddam's Baathist/Sunni officered Army left intact. Probably the key mistake made in the planning and early execution was underestimating the intelligence, independence, resources, etc of the Shia. The mistake is still being made. The US is not, and never has been, in total control of what happens in Iraq. Nor are we there only because the Bush and neocons want us there. Sistani could get us out in weeks. Sistani currently thinks he can use the US military to help restrain Sadr. We are much more a tool of Iraqi factions than we were in Vietnam.
Finally, on total war or total mobilization. There are other players involved. Saudi Arabia demands we stay in Iraq. They may be in a postion to do so. Iran can play, Sadr, China, al Quaeda, Taliban, Pakistan. We do not decide on the size of the military based only on domestic considerations and current perceived needs. The circumstances can change overnight and other players get a vote.
As presently constituted, or after withdrawal, I think another 9/11 would guarantee the US use of nukes, or saturation bombing. Just think about President McCain & 5000 dead in an AQ attack out of Anbar. Do we send 200k soldiers back to Iraq?
Has anybody thought about what they would recommend if Iran sent 100 cruise missles into the Basra oil fields tomorrow?
Bush isn't the only one who can start WWIII. If it is politically impossible for total mobilization in America...hey I honestly don't know where this thought goes.
But what's needed is not necessarily a gross numbers increase. What we need is an increase in certain capabilities.
Simply increasing our number of guys who are trained to storm into Russia across Eastern Europe is not helpful. There are no more superpowers. For all the b.s. about China, we ridiculously outgun them, and they know it. Furthermore, they don't seem bent on matching us in this regard.
What we need is an increase in the types of forces that excel in the likely types of interventions we're going to see. Interventions that involve local forces in highly urbanized areas. People trained in the local languages and customs, who train to work with locals to achieve their goals.
Fortunately, we have a model for this. Army Special Forces. If we really want to be more effective, we'd greatly expand Special Forces, and up the pay to help retain quality people in those units.
But surely Iran would get nothing out of attacking openly. My assumption so far has been that all of Ahmedinijad's (lord help my spelling, please) sabre-rattling has largely been (a) exactly that and (b) because right now is a great time to get away with big talk. Surely a war would do them zero real good.
I'll take my unicorn in lavender, please.
And since Ahmadinejad's Sweet Smell of Ass got spanked in the elections a couple of days ago, the Iranian government will be nicely divided, internally feuding, and unlikely to come together on an expansive foreign policy---for a little while, at least.
Fortunately, we have a model for this. Army Special Forces. If we really want to be more effective, we'd greatly expand Special Forces, and up the pay to help retain quality people in those units.
I think the Bush administration has decided to pursue this strategy, except that the additional Special Forces will consist of mercenaries trained in the armies of the US and various British commonwealth countries.
The seed-corn question then comes up...how will these people be trained in the future? The mercenary companies won't do as good a job of it as the militaries did. Presumably the mercenaries will then be hired from the militaries of places like Pakistan. Maybe Blackwater can even hire away some of the Chinese military!