http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14288514
Everyone calls me naive, but I’m really glad about this. This should prove that we need to give the military more time - that there is hope for Iraq. Petraeus even said that some units should be withdrawn.
Since I’m in the great minority here, I’m prepared to hear the rants about how Bush is the devil and how we should leave now, so ya’ll can begin.
What makes you think this is even true?
The whole premise to the war was a lie.
Wars = Good Business = Happy Capitalists.
Whether or not America leaves the middle east, it will still be at war in Afghanistan (anyone remember that country? It hasn’t been on Nancy Grace so maybe you have all forgotten about it.) and probably make war with Iran or North Korea or Russia again- at the very least begin another arms race with countries.
Did you ever think that maybe the problem here is deeper than “lol troops need to stay and fite 4 freedom! Democracy! and Capitalism! Which are all really the same thing LOL!”?
Anyways nothing of this really matters since nothing that is complicated is media friendly, and most people don’t care enough about anything beyond themselves and maybe their family to try to learn.
Was that ranty enough for you? I didn’t want to disappoint :o
Now lets let this thread die so I can continue being blissfully uninformed of my upcoming doom.
:kissy:
Meh, I give your rant a B-. You only barely cited the “war for oil” bull and didn’t call Bush stupid.
Yes, I know the problem is deeper than whether or not we have soldiers stay there. What’s so great is that Petraeus does also. For Iraq’s semblance of hope to truly manifest we must stay there until they can assemble a government that will not shatter once we leave. My family has suffered due to this war, granted, not as badly as some unfortunate others. To honor those many sacrificies, we have to stay until we know that Iraq can stand on it’s own two feet.
…And, if America left the Middle East, we wouldn’t be at war with Afghanistan since…you know, Afghanistan is in the Middle East.
There’s just one problem with that comment:
Iraq isn’t the Middle East.
Afghanistan isn’t the Middle East.
They are simply just countries in the Middle East. In other words, that report says nothing about withdrawing troops from Afghanistan. And, even if we did withdraw troops from ‘The Middle East’, there would still be a lot of conflict and war - just not directly involving us anymore. That doesn’t wipe our hands clean of the fact that we’ve had a dramatic impact on the situation there. Withdrawing troops doesn’t simply fix the problem.
I realize that, however people including yourself:
are guilty of focusing on Iraq and really forgetting about Afghanistan.
I’m sorry my rant wasn’t good enough for you 
:kissy:
Edit: SG beat me. That’s what I get for watching TV when I should be ranting!
And sadly that hasn’t been true for this war.
For me, we need to stay in Iraq because we created the situation there. Granted I doubt things will really get better, but it is still our mess. Also, pulling out at this point would sort of create big waste of the sacrafice made by troops. On the other hand, if things won’t get better regardless of how long we stay, then why make more sacrafice for nothing.
I looked at the charts that were presented and the results are optimistic and a little surprising. I’m hesitant to claim a cause and effect relationship between surge and a decrease in the violence because that could be like linking numbers of ppl who drown to numbers of people who eat ice cream in the summer. I think we have to wait longer and see where the security situation goes. What I’d like to know is what is the ratio of casualties to event. Are we seeing fewer but more effective attacks? People don’t feel any different with the surge, though these polls are rather subjective and reflect on other issues in Iraqi society, I think.
Nevertheless, Senators are right to state that the Iraqis are doing piss poor when it comes to achieving political progress. They have themselves to blame though because they opened Pandora’s box by removing Saddam. On that end, Iraqis are actually meeting with people that were key to resolving the Northern Ireland conflict, so that could be optimistic. Though considering how long that took to resolve…yeah.
People are just playing all this for political points. Its bullshit. There isn’t enough data to really discuss anything.
My impression of the Iraq war is that it’s a forced-assimilation program. We establish a military presence and force the locals to run things our way, in a secular capitalistic democracy, until they do so willingly.
Hellenistic Greece, under Alexander the Great, ran a similar program successfully. So did Imperial Rome, various tribes under Charlemagne, and the Mongols under Genghis Khan. Until recently, Great Britain was out assimilating half the world. The countries it assimilated, although no longer affiliated with Great Britain, generally have systems of law and government patterned on those of Great Britain. The United States has accomplished the same in all its territorial possessions, and arguably in some Westernized portions of Asia.
My question is, why won’t it work with Iraq? Our military presence in Iraq vastly exceeds the presence of resistance forces. This was not always the case, for the assimilators listed above, but they managed to accomplish their goals. What’s different now?
I think, for better or for worse, we lack the patience and the callousness to carry out a forced assimilation. We forget that assimilation has historically taken a generation or more, during which time violent uprisings are frequent. We turn against a war because we’ve lost three thousand troops, and ignore the fact that in ancient Rome, a nation with less than a tenth of our population, losses of three thousand in a military occupation would have been considered minor. We stage protests over the treatment of enemy combatants and civilians, where once entire cities were razed and executed for military purposes. It may have been morally abominable, but it worked.
This, I believe, is the proper context in which to understand Iraq. We’re trying to assimilate a nation, in a fraction of the time that’s usually necessary, while rejecting all the ruthless methods that would make such assimilation easier, purely by an overwhelming military presence. Think of a bar that needs bouncers. Get an ordinary guy with a gun and give him a license to kill, and he’ll keep the place in order. But since the bar can’t do that, instead it hires a few huge guys who are just so big that they can peaceably subdue anyone who misbehaves. That’s what we’re trying to do in Iraq. Send in hundreds of thousands of world-class soldiers to – what? – stand around, look tough, and frighten the enemy into submission. Subdue some miscreants here and there. If we were ruthless, we’d level all the “problem areas” of Iraq in a week and say to what’s left, “Don’t make yourself a problem area.”
That may be what forced-assimilation requires. I don’t condone it, but it certainly explains why these situations become “quagmires” nowadays.
On the contrary, most of these programs did not really “accomplish assimilation.” They achieved temporary control over some territory, by ruthless means, mostly due to superior military strength or battle tactics. However, ultimately they fell apart, precisely because the people they conquered never really accepted them as their rulers.
For example, the Mongols could control all of Russia at one time. But they did not turn Russians into Mongols. In the end, their occupation only served to make the Russian princes band together. More than that, a strong Russian nationalism appeared for the first time in history. Russians began to form a view of “their own” culture and history, in which Mongols were outsiders and invaders. Ultimately, their uprising was successful and the Mongols were defeated. This took a long time – the occupation lasted for about 75 more years after the first major Russian victory, and the Mongols were still extremely ruthless during that time – but that really doesn’t matter. The process only goes in one direction.
The only difference between those ancient conflicts and Iraq is in the time scale. Whether it takes 300 years or 5, the underlying process is the same. In this case, it just goes much more quickly because our neoconservative Genghis Khans, while just as bloodthirsty, have really been remarkably incompetent at absolutely everything they have thus far tried to plan. But even if they weren’t, the end result might take longer to arrive, but it would still be the same – our empire would go bankrupt and collapse. Our democracy, of course, would have ceased to exist long before then.
Oh, it has, it just wasn’t “capitalism” in the conventional sense. The companies that received reconstruction contracts were able to gorge themselves with taxpayer money beyond all reason.
That’s what they used to say about Vietnam.
There is a bizarre contradiction in this kind of argument. No American trusts the government to run his own life. Conservatives don’t like taxes, liberals don’t like wiretapping and censorship. Nobody believes that the American government can capably fix the problems in America or tell every American what to do. And this is in America, where everyone already accepts the legitimacy of the American government, where everyone is already part of American culture! Yet, when the topic switches to Iraq, a country that is totally different from America, with a culture and history that no one, including the American government, knows anything about, where the population has already rejected American authority as illegitimate, then these same conservatives and liberals suddenly gain great hope in the wisdom and competence of the state.
Hellenistic Greece, under Alexander the Great, ran a similar program successfully. So did Imperial Rome, various tribes under Charlemagne, and the Mongols under Genghis Khan. Until recently, Great Britain was out assimilating half the world. The countries it assimilated, although no longer affiliated with Great Britain, generally have systems of law and government patterned on those of Great Britain. The United States has accomplished the same in all its territorial possessions, and arguably in some Westernized portions of Asia.
For Ancient Greece and Rome, the people of those empires assimilated because they wanted to, or were forced to by a changing economy, not because of the efforts of the Roman and Greek governments. Furthermore, the local patterned governments collapsed after the imperial authority did.
The British example is true to an extent; but are all of those patterned governments actually running the way they’re intended to? Most Indians still support the caste system…
Cultures change and adopt the values of other cultures, but it happens naturally, through the free flow of trade and ideas. Certainly not because of any government-designed program.
[QUOTE][There isn’t enough data to really discuss anything./QUOTE]
There probably is but our government is hiding it from us.
Here’s an interesting analysis:
So while the surge has produced some fringe benefits – Petraeus spoke at length of how Anbar province has been transformed from one of Iraq’s most dangerous regions to one of its safest – it has failed in its core mission: to wring a deal out of Tehran. No deal with Iran, no stable Iraq. It is that simple as that.
The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, on Monday began his testimony before Congress on the status of the Iraq war as well as on the surge of forces that begin earlier this year. Though both Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker answered questions from nearly 100 representatives for hours, the whole spectacle can really be summed up quite simply.
Petraeus said the surge has succeeded somewhat in reducing the level of violence in Iraq, and a drawdown within the next six months would make that progress for naught. But right now the political stage is no more set for the Iraqi government taking full control than it was at New Year’s and there are precious few reasons to be optimistic at all on that front.
If anything, the political question is even more hopeless. Ultimately, there cannot be a deal in Iraq that re-establishes some semblance of the pre-war balance of power in the region unless the United States and Iran manage to hammer out some sort of agreement. Both have too many tools to prevent the other from getting its way so long as they remain engaged.
This means the surge was not really about reducing violence levels or helping the Iraqi government get its act together. Behind the surge’s military tactics was a much deeper geopolitical effort intended to convince Iran that the United States still had some options, and therefore urge Tehran to makes some concessions in the context of those negotiations.
So while the surge has produced some fringe benefits – Petraeus spoke at length of how Anbar province has been transformed from one of Iraq’s most dangerous regions to one of its safest – it has failed in its core mission: to wring a deal out of Tehran. No deal with Iran, no stable Iraq. It is that simple as that.
The Petraeus testimony broadly echoes the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) – the collective opinion of the U.S. intelligence community released three weeks ago. Both argue that progress has been made in the war, but that without an ongoing (both hinted that the word should be “open-ended”) commitment by U.S. forces, not only were the gains not sustainable, Iran was very well-positioned to seize control of the region for itself. “Well-positioned” is a bit of an understatement. In addition to the sponsoring of a gaggle of Iraqi Shiite militias, Iran is right on Iraq’s eastern border and still sports a million-man army.
Put another way, Petraeus and the NIE both said the United States can either suffer through Iraq indefinitely in order to prevent Iranian hegemony, or it can walk away and consign the region to that hegemony. As U.S. Iraq policy evolves, the trick will be to shift from direct responsibility for security into an overwatch mode. The problem with that hope is that this evolution will depend not only on the often-questionable quality of Iraqi forces, but also on the quality of government in Baghdad that commands those forces. And with Iran moving from being a potential partner to a more formal adversary, what hope does that government have?
But that will be a fight for another day. For now the action remains firmly in Washington under the glare of congressional lights. Petraeus has said that though an end to the surge is in the cards, drawdown should not begin for several months. That recommendation provides the Bush administration with just enough political cover to continue the war as is, but puts the entirety of the Republican delegation in Congress in the most awkward position possible. When elections arrive in November 2008, there will still be in excess of 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq attempting to carry out the same mission that 165,000 failed to secure. For the Democrats this will likely prove to be the electoral issue, and in the weeks ahead all eyes will be on how Republican members of Congress begin to deal with that looming fact.
"And our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people."
a) Iraq had no weapons; the war encouraged N. Korea to go nuclear b) The invasion allowed Al Qaeda to enter Iraq c) An occupying army, lack of stability, 50 deaths/day (plus the seriously wounded), destroyed infrastracture and the looting of the museum of Baghdad must be doing wonders for the self respect of the Iraqis (not to mention the secession tendencies in the country) d) As for the “war for oil” the U.S. contractors may be happy but the rest of us have just seen the price of oil double.
And this whole mess for nothing.
edit: Re: the Greek influence in the areas conquered by Alexander keep in mind that it wasn’t a one way process. The commanders and the army who stayed in the respective areas were influenced by the locals and settled there. There were certainly “old school” Greeks who thought the settled Greeks had become decadent and barbaric. Now if Bush marries a Persian princess…
Speaking of the economy, I think that the sub-prime mortgages commotion could damage the US economy more than any wars or terrorist attacks. Actually, since Iraq was “liberated”, the US economy is doing rather well. USA’s GDP growths rates exceeded those of most other major industrialized countries since 2002; a weaker dollar is helping exports to reach record highs (the past five months); the employment rates are stable (there was a sub- prime warning though – U.S. employers sliced payrolls by 4,000 in August, the first drop in four years); and corporate profits are growing steadily. Of course not every American gets on the action – the gap between rich and poor is widening.
QFT.