One of the key policies of the UIA was ‘A timetable for the withdrawal of the multinational forces from Iraq’. This was published in December 23. When one takes into account the Sunni hatred of the occupation it is reasonable to assume that a ‘solid majority’ of the Iraqi people did in fact vote for the removal of American/UK troops. From what I can tell, the government only agreed to not set such a timetable in september of this year (this may not be correct). So what we have here is plain and simply an example of a government breaking its own stated promises: something that Americans (“read my lips: no new taxes”) are usually pretty upset about. The US political class seem mysteriously not to be bothered by this current betrayal, however.

I am glad to see, incidentally, that by not challenging the opinion poll results, Slocum is implicitly accepting that the majority of British American and Iraqi people want the troops brought home. It’s only a tiny minority of pro-war fanatics in all three countries that want this war to continue .

Get lost, sucker – I want that oil, I paid for it. It’s mine now.

If a solid majority of the Iraqi people really have concluded that they’d be better off without the coalition forces, then they should elect representatives running on that platform in December and the Iraqi government should then request the departure of the troops. When/if the Iraqi government requests the withdrawal then, yes, it surely will be time to have a parade and pack up and go. No argument there.

There goes the cat out of the bag. I bet you didn’t even realise when you wrote that how revealing that sentence is. I don’t doubt that YOU think that the troops must stay. I also don’t doubt that you automatically (as you did above) count YOUR opinion as being the most important in this issue.

But I frankly don’t care what the pro-invasioners think, or why. What I care about, vis a vis Iraq, is what the Iraqi people think and the British people and the American people.

’ Only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led occupation of their country is doing more good than harm, and a solid majority support an immediate military pullout even though they fear that could put them in greater danger, according to a new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll.’

‘The effort to promote democracy in Iraq is generating little enthusiasm. Seventy-four percent (including 60% of Republicans) said that the goal of overthrowing Iraq’s authoritarian government and establishing a democracy was not a good enough reason to go to war. Seventy-two percent said that the experience there has made them feel worse about the possibility of using military force to bring about democracy in the future. Sixty-four percent (65% of Republicans) are ready to accept an Iraqi constitution that does not fully meet democratic standards and once the constitution is ratified 57% want to start withdrawing troops.’ (note: the constitution has just been ratified).

‘A Channel 5 poll in September 2005 asked “Should British troops pull out of Iraq?” A majority – 57% – said yes. That number is similar to a finding in a January 2005 poll by The Independent in which 59% said that British troops should be withdrawn quickly after the January election in Iraq.’

(Interestingly enough, I couldn’t find a single opinion poll that had been carried out in Afghanistan which asked people the interesting question if and when they wanted the troops to leave. Nor could I find such a poll that had been carried out recently in Kosova, so either no one cares, or else such polls have been carried out and no one has thought them worth publicising.)

But in Iraq, the people have spoken (and in Britain, and the US). It’s the middle class academics and journalists and bloggers of the ‘pro-invasion’ side who are out of touch with public opinion. It’s them that are the elitists attempting to force their opinions on the British (and American and Iraqi people). And in case you were wondering, yes I know that opinion polls fluctuate, but believe me, these numbers are not going to improve for the pro-invasion posse. Instead they will get worse, particularly after the January elections (assuming they happen) which is the last remaining coherent reason for the Americans and British to be in Iraq.

===

Take up the White Man’s burden—Send forth the best ye breed—Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

Take up the White Man’s burden—In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

Take up the White Man’s burden—The savage wars of peace—Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.

Take up the White Man’s burden—No tawdry rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper—The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go mark them with your living,
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man’s burden—And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard—The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—“Why brought he us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?”

Take up the White Man’s burden—Ye dare not stoop to less—Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloke your weariness;
By all ye cry or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your gods and you.

Take up the White Man’s burden—Have done with childish days—The lightly proferred laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

The ‘pro-invasioners’ are not calling for immediate withdrawal of the troops for the same reason they aren’t calling for withdrawal from Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq—because they don’t think withdrawal is the best way forward FOR THE IRAQI PEOPLE. That hardly proves their goal is secretly imperialist.

The US caused the current situation. They are responsible for the insurgency, the power situation, the civil war. When they leave there might be hope (although we can’t be too sanguine): while they stay there is none.

And that really is a fact.

No, it’s clearly not a ‘fact’ in any reasonable sense of the word—it’s your assessment. I would never claim my own predictions for the future had the status of a ‘fact’, and even if you are certain you are infallible, I suggest that you might want to disguise that and back off just a bit for PR reasons.

It’s obvious that there are a lot of factions in Iraq that want things that they’re ultimately not going to be able to get. Yes, the vast majority of Kurds probably do dream of an independent Kurdish state, but Turkey won’t stand for it, and they’ll lose U.S. backing if they attempt it, and other Iraqis will fight them for control of the oil fields, so they’re going to have to accept some form of autonomy within Iraq. The Sunnis want something like their previous dominance, but they aren’t going to be able to get it. The Shia would like to be able to use their majority to call all the shots, but it’s not going to happen. The religious parties would like a more religious state with Sharia enshrined in the constitution, the secularists want a secular state and constitution, and so on. And, of course, none of these groups are accustomed to resolving such conflicting demands through democratic politics. There’s no doubt, it’s a tough situation. But it does not follow from that (certainly not as ‘a fact’), that these competing demands could be better resolved by letting the various parties have at each other in Iraq any more than in Kosovo.

For a start, this omits the Shia ‘insurgency’. Al-Sadr etc. But the Shias are a major force in Iraq as the recent elections have shown: nor are they friendly in any sense to the US/UK. For example: ‘But whatever happens nationally, Shia militias – many backed by Iran – are already imposing their own strict version of Islamic Sharia law on the streets of Basra, in southern Iraq’. Etc. etc. And I could supply many more links to talks of Shia extremist/militia.

The Kurds themselves are extremely friendly to the US but only because they want to destroy Iraq and see (entirely correctly) that the US might inadvertantly help them to do this. In a recent referendum 98% of them () voted for independence. I saw a Kurdish politican on the news the other day denying that the Kurds wanted independence. This is a flat out lie, believed by no one except those who want to believe it (another Iraqi politican on the programme correctly pointed out that the only reason the Kurds wanted a ‘yes’ vote on the constitution is because they believe it will fatally weaken Baghdad and lead to the break up of the country).

Likewise: yes the Sunni insurgency does have Ba’athist roots, but that’s very different from saying that every Sunni who picks up a rock, or fires a gun or helps shield someone running away from the Americans actually wants the return of Saddam Hussein.

For example:

‘Sunnis fear the charter will break up Iraq by ceding too much regional autonomy to their sectarian and ethnic rivals.

Some leaders denounced the initial tallies as evidence of a rig but others welcomed the fact that the community had mobilised for the first time since the invasion, paving the way for participation in December’s poll.

Voters in Falluja said they would continue supporting the insurrection. “The resistance will go on,” said Hamid Jassim, 60, queueing to vote at al-Khansa primary school. Those within earshot nodded vigorously. “God willing it will go on,” they said.

Amir Ismael, 45, a former army colonel, said the ballot box was a complement, not a substitute, for armed revolt. “The resistance is legitimate.”

Sheikh Kamal Shakur, the head of the city council, said violence would continue while Iraqi and US troops continued to raid homes and detain suspects. “Tribal sheikhs here say there is a legitimate national resistance,” said Lt Col Patrick Carroll, a US marine political officer.

One year ago Falluja, a city of 300,000 an hour’s drive west of Baghdad, symbolised resistance when US marines levelled the city, destroying or damaging almost every single home, during an effort to flush out insurgents. Now the flashpoints have migrated to other parts of Anbar – a bomb killed five American soldiers in Ramadi on Saturday – and Falluja is relatively quiet, with residents requiring special badges to enter and leave.

Drones and helicopters buzzed overhead but the marines lurked mostly out of sight, leaving security to Iraqi police. New Iraqi flags distributed by the Americans gleamed amid the dust and rubble.

Most voters had not received copies of the constitution and some were allowed to cast ballots for relatives. Uday al-Hatib, the supposedly neutral director of one polling station, made his feelings plain. “I pray everyone votes no.”

There was no doubting the enthusiasm and sincerity of the no vote, the dawn of a strategy some homegrown insurgents have consciously modelled on Sinn Fein’s “ballot box and Armalite” policy in the 1980s, though in their case an AK-47.

Ahmed Mohammad, a 26-year-old furniture-seller, was the sole resident who told journalists he voted yes, citing his impatience for stability and a job.

The turnout was a stinging rebuke to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq and other extremist groups which had called for a boycott of the vote. But the question is whether those who endured decades of oppression under Sunni dominance will share power now that Sunnis have signed up to politics.

‘What is important to me is that I participated’

Like pretty much all the Sunnis I didn’t vote in the election in January and we were marginalised. We didn’t want that to happen again. All the mosques were urging us to participate. So I voted today to guarantee our rights.

I didn’t get to read the constitution but I got the gist from television and newspapers. I don’t like it. It’s not the way to unify the country and ensure there is no sectarianism. Other people are entitled to vote how they want. What’s important to me is that I participated. I’m looking ahead to the election in December and intend to vote. It’s an additional way to register protest. You ask: ‘Is the resistance legitimate?’ What would you say if it was your country that had been invaded?

· Jumah Abid, 33, an Arab engineer who lives in Fallujah and voted no’

The fact is that the Sunnis are terrified not just of American but of IRANIAN imperialism. They see themselves as true patriots fighting for Iraq against Iranian/US forces trying to break it up.

So to repeat: talking of Al-Qaeda-Ba’athist insurgency is a highly misleading way of talking about the current ongoing civil war.

As to the rest: where are the ‘pro-invasion’ forces calling for the troops to be pulled out of Kosova? Or Afghanistan? They are nowhere to be found because in practice they pro-invasioners will take no action and say nothing that will lead to troops being withdrawn. In practice, therefore, their actions let the troops stay: indefinitely.

The US caused the current situation. They are responsible for the insurgency, the power situation, the civil war. When they leave there might be hope (although we can’t be too sanguine): while they stay there is none.

And that really is a fact.

The Kurds and Shia in the Iraqi army whose dominance is the source of sectarian tensions are ALSO part of the Al Queda-Baathist insurgency (or sympathetic to their cause)? Do you even notice when you advance contradictory theses?

The key fact that everyone sane admits that the Americans are in fact fomenting a civil war by their continued presence would seem to be irrelevant.

‘Everyone sane’? You mean everyone you agree with? This hardly counts as an objective ‘key fact’. I would say that anyone who expects sectarian-driven violence to dissipate with the withdrawal of coalition forces is deeply deluded (if not actually insane).

You just have to ask yourself a very simple question. Would the pro-invasioners be now campaigning for the troops to leave if everything had gone ‘perfectly’, if there was no insurgency, if the elections had gone swimmingly? The answer is simple: of course they wouldn’t.

Are the ‘pro-invasioners’ a monolithic block? Do you think Norm Geras, for example, has secretly been wanting a permanent U.S./U.K. troop presence all along? Did the ‘pro-invasioners’ in the Clinton administration go into Kosovo with the goal of stationing troops there permanently? Is that why the French went into the Cote d’Ivoire?

My point self-evidently has not morphed into anything different. Nor am I claiming that the US ‘will’ have to take over completely. My argument is that, to all intents and purposes, the US already run everything. The Iraqi ‘army’ never has (and never will, as long as the Americans stay) initiated a military action which it then went on to win. Nor is it capable of fighting a war against the insurgency on its own (and it never will). The reason is simple: large sections of the Iraqi army are the insurgency, or are at least sympathetic to their cause.

The argument that civil war will ensue if we leave is a nicely disprovable statement: since the Americans have no intention of leaving (actually by the logic of their own position they can’t) then we will never know will we? Since it is unfalsifiable (in a real world situation) it is a statement of faith, not of reason (cf Karl Popper).

The key fact that everyone sane admits that the Americans are in fact fomenting a civil war by their continued presence would seem to be irrelevant. However, my scientific prediction (scientific in the sense that it is falsifiable, and I hope it will be falsified) is that if the Americans stay, civil war will eventually break out, and Iraq will split.

Note: when this happens I don’t for a micro-second expect your position to change, even though the invasion will have then been shown to be wrong on every level: morally, politically, pragmatically, economically. Instead we will hear much about ‘things would have been much worse’ if we don’t stay even longer.

You just have to ask yourself a very simple question. Would the pro-invasioners be now campaigning for the troops to leave if everything had gone ‘perfectly’, if there was no insurgency, if the elections had gone swimmingly? The answer is simple: of course they wouldn’t.

The pro-invasioners want a permanent American presence in Iraq to keep the Iraqis ‘on track’: in the same way Syria kept Lebanon’s demmocracy ‘on track’ until recently. This is obvious by the fact there is no conceivable situation in which the pro-invasion bunch will ever call for the troops to be brought back home.

Folks: the civil war has already started . The reason it doesn’t look like civil war is because it is disguised as ‘insurgents’ fighting the ‘Iraqi army’ (or ‘our boys’) thus fitting in with a paradigm that the pro-invasion bunch can easily accommodate.

If the coalition leaves, you can bet the sectarian violence you describe as ‘a civil war that doesn’t look like a civil war’ will quickly look EXACTLY like a real civil war—with mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing (think Bosnia).

Think of the differences between Bosnia and Kosovo before and after the interventions. Did ethnic hatreds disappear? Of course not. Were ethnic intimidation and revenge killings eliminated entirely? No. But was the level of violence greatly reduced compared to what it had been and would have been without the intervention? Without doubt, it was. Withdrawing from Iraq now would be like running the the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo in reverse.

I have to assume proponents of immediate withdrawal take that position with the expectation that this won’t happen and they’ll never have to see the results.

Lastly, I did not say and am not saying that there are not sectarian problems in the Iraqi forces, I was only disputing your earier claim (which now seems to have vanished or morphed into a different complaint) that Iraqi forces are becoming inexorably weaker and less effective and that, therefore, the U.S. forces will have to take over completely.

It may have been in Russia, but in the West it did wonders for the working class as it showed the Ruling Elites the consequenses of failure and the price of class warfare. It also seems to have prevented a shit load of wars from occuring, how many wars have occurred since 1989?

‘The Bush administration’s exit strategy for Iraq rests on two pillars: an inclusive, democratic political process that includes all major ethnic groups and a well-trained Iraqi national army. But a week spent eating, sleeping and going on patrol with a crack unit of the Iraqi army, the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division, suggests that the strategy is in serious trouble. Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that’s tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.

Ghilan’s army unit is responsible for security in western Baghdad, where many Sunni live. But the soldiers are overwhelmingly Shiite, and, like Ghilan, they’re seeking revenge against the Sunni who oppressed them during Saddam Hussein’s rule.’

I think it can’t be stressed enough that whining from the pro-occupation ‘left’ about how we ‘can’t leave’ because if we leave this will ‘lead’ to ‘civil war’, should be treated with a ‘wake up, smell the coffee’ response.

Folks: the civil war has already started . The reason it doesn’t look like civil war is because it is disguised as ‘insurgents’ fighting the ‘Iraqi army’ (or ‘our boys’) thus fitting in with a paradigm that the pro-invasion bunch can easily accommodate.

But there is no Iraqi army. There is just the Americans and Shia/Kurdish militia who help them. And what these militia do is fight, not for the Americans (why should they? Everyone hates the Americans) but for themselves. And as rational utility maximisers this makes perfect sense. Everyone knows that Iraq is going to split, and the key question is: who is going to get the oil?

The idea that the Americans will leave because they will get a ‘trading partner’ is risible. What they will get is a splntered country, with violence spilling over into Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and a massive increase in Iranian power .

The pro-invasioners endless capacity for self-delusion and mindless optimism used to be sort of charming in the way watching small children leaving presents for santa’s reindeer is charming. But I’m afraid that things are spiralling out of control and their childish delusions are no longer quite so funny. We are in deep shit in Iraq, and unless people start by recognising just how badly we have screwed up there is no chance to make things right.

You’re either part of the solution or part of the problem. The pro-invasion team are part of the problem because their mindless refusal to accept any responsibility for the ongoing black farce in ‘Iraq’ is the main reason why we can’t start looking seriously at where we went wrong, and looking at how we can make things right.

On the contrary, revolutions are rarely successful when not accompanied by foreign intervention. The less famous French revolution, the one that finally deposed Napoleon’s successors and established lasting democratic rule, was only possible given France’s defeat in the franco-Prussian war.

Simliarly Galtieri after the Falklands, the american revolutionary war, the ‘Glorious revolution’ (aka dutch invasion of britain), overthrow of Milosovic and Charles Taylor, etc.

It’s common sense – if you fight an actual revolutionary civil war, your society is going to be so devastated and bitter it will take you a generation to return to the pre-war status quo, better abandon any thoughts of actually making things better. Much better to get some third party to do the job for you, then kick them out when that job is done.

In a few years, the US will be gone from Iraq, and all parties in that country will be agreed on one thing: that that going was a good thing, and that all the bad things that happenned immediately after the overthrow of saddam were the fault of the evil americans, not their neighbours.

At the end of the day, the US gets a trading partner and abscence of a threat, the iraqi people get a government that, at the least, isn’t doomed to a dead end of minority rule that can be sustained solely by terror and external arms supplies.

I’m not claiming that is in any way morally justified, let alone anything I would kill or die for. (Remember the difference between understanding and justifying, and how that is so important to maintain when discussing those who blow up pizza parlours?). I’m just explaining what is, by the precedent of history, the most likely outcome, the baseline from which unexpected events, a skilled politician or military genius may cause a deviation.

soru

So we were very glad at the outcome of WWI, where it turned out that ALL THREE empires lost the war! In the ensuing chaos we were able to carve out the territory for the national state.

Whether or not WWI was justified in the mind of the nations who started it, it was certainly a situation which we were waiting for since 1795.