I think it does when the post clearly indicates that the case you are attempting to refute is made in the link.

As for the motivations of other coutries, first a UN bailout would be a huge humiliation for the United States, and actually I think the rest of world has been more indulgent of Boy George the lesser than it needed to. And second, I think oil trumps such considerations because the industrial world runs on it, and it is running out. While oil-rich nations outside the immediate neighborhood may reap short-term benefits from this, I don’t think they constitute a large enough share of the world community to be decisive. Russia’s a good point. I think they would want to be a player in the Middle East, though. Their loss of international importance has been grating on them for a decade and a half.

I guess my main objection is to your point that the entire world has an interest is seeing this situation stablize.

I mean – yeah, sure, because this is a vital oil-producing region.

But also – no, because, I think, most people and governments in the world feel that it’s also vital to teach the Americans a lesson.

And also – no, because some countries (oil-producing countries, like Russia) are reaping huge benefits from this thing.

Brenden, yes, I recognize that Bush is unlikely to go for it. I think, though, that Democrats benefit from advocating it whether he does or not, in fact, moreso if he does not. The problem for Democrats is not to be the party of cut-and-run. The public may advocate this at the time, but will still hold it against us later. If we advocate UN involvement and Bush refuses, he has to own the eventual pullout. Democrats do need to start having our own ideas rather than “what Bush says, only less so”.

What are you talking about? Your point simply has no bearing on anything I wrote, you seem to be having a discussion with someone called Kommando Keyboard who is pursuing a completely unrelated argument.

Slow down, look at the words on screen, build them up into sentences, work out what those sentences mean. Then reply to what ws written, not some straw man version of what you think Hitchens said in some bar somewhere back in 2002.

soru

I would go along with your plan, which is not quite as outre as you seem to imply. It’s my understanding, for example, that in my country the Scottish National Party’s policy is something very similar to what you have proposed. Actually almost anything would be better than the status quo. If Iraq ever had a genuine, stable, democratic government they could simply force the American bases to leave. Something similar, after all, happened in the Phillipines.

The problem of course is quite simply the Bush administration. A genuinely stable, democratic Iraq would lean (for reasons of geography and religion) towards Iran. It is almost inconceivable that the Americans are going to permit that to happen. Horrible as the insurgency is, terrible as the threat of civil war is, it is quite likely that the US still prefer what is happening in Iraq now to the possibility of the re-emergence of a de facto Persian Empire. (Perhaps with the US being the new Rome, it sets up unpleasant historical parallels).

India? Come on. India won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. No country wants to have anything to do with it; those who do get involved do it to get access to oil: Poland seeks Iraqi oil stake, Italy sent troops to Iraq to secure oil deal: report. It’s not that complicated.

As for the timetable argument, the prevailing assumption in the Mideast and Iraq, and therefore, I assume, among the insurgency, is that the US intends to maintain a permanent military presence in Iraq. Indeed, the two countries repeatedly trotted out as role models for what we are supposedly trying to do – Germany and Japan – are rich with US bases to this day. FWIW, I think the mideasterners are correct in this, although the US will have to abandon this notion, and may have already. For that reason, I don’t think the insurgency is assuming we will withdraw of our own accord at all, unless by “withdraw” you just mean consolidate the occupation into a few permanent bases. This kind of withdrawal is easily reversed, indeed, that is largely its point.

As for the rest…..’against all precedent.’ ‘unexpected’? ‘Novel’? Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? Not least because it was one of the key arguments of the pro-invasion side was that the anti-war side predicted a long term insurgency with the deaths of tens of thousands of people, threat of civil war etc. etc. etc. It seems like only a few years ago (oh, it was), that Captain Chris ‘itchens of the Keyboard Kommandos was crowing that all these predictions had proven false!!

Say what you want. But the current situation was not in the slightest bit unpredictable (or for that matter unpredicted), and was in many aspects predicted by the same military experts that you claim to be discussing.

However I take it that the ‘no-one predicted a quagmire’ will now be moved up there with ‘everyone thought Saddam had WMDs’ and ‘George Bush always claimed this was pre-eminently a war to bring democracy to Iraq’ as ways for the pro-warriors to play Cover Your Ass and pretend they were not in any way responsible for the current catastrophe.

Even a full 3 years is generally not considered a particularly long time by people not suffering from historical ADD.

Tell me Soru, at least theoretically, when would you be prepared to admit that your theory that the insurgency is ‘guttering out’ as these things ‘always do’ is wrong? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? On your deathbed?

If it is still going strong at the next US election, military experts will be writing speculative papers attempting to explain how and why it did so, against all precedent. Sometimes unexpected and novel things do happen, if they do, then the baseline expectations will be wrong.

Not to say that, rather like your Ireland example, a new one might not start up in 10, 50 or 200 years time, should the opportunity of peace not be taken. Imagining Ireland as being in a continual 800 year long open revolt is rather ahistorical.

soru

And get their rifles, machine guns, RPG’s, mortars and IED’s.

What Democrats need to do is start pushing for Bush to turn the situation over to the UN.’

Martin
I went and read your piece on LiveJournal and I agreed with a lot of it. However, I think that certain aspects of it are problematic.

The first problem is your idea to ‘turn things over to the UN’. But of course Bush would immediately respond that in his opinion he already has . It should never be forgotten that, whatever one thinks about it, the current occupation of Iraq is, technically, legal under international law: the US is (technically, and of course only technically) acting under the aegis of the UN. Hence their current desperate attempts to obtain a years extension of this ‘legitimacy’.

The next question is: who would run the UN force if the UN was brought more and more to the forefront? Actually, ‘bring the boys home’ and ‘involve the UN’ are not mutually exclusive. The Keyboard Kommandos are pretty explicit that in theory they would have been happy for anybody to topple Saddam. In reality of course, this is simply false: they would not have supported a German or French or Iranian invasion of Iraq. But again in theory (and by the logic of their own argument) there is no reason that the current occupatio force has to be US/UK. It could be French or German or Italian or, for that matter, a pan-Arabic force: and for cultural reasons you could make a clear case that in fact the country should be run by a pan-Arabic force, at least until the country is ‘settled’.

What is clearly the case is that the Americans and British are now so hated that any occupation (legal or otherwise) that involves them is simply going to stoke the insurgency. Purely on pragmatic terms, both countries have shown themselves to be so crushingly incompetent that they should no longer be permitted to ‘run’ the country.

The (surprisingly popular) argument that we cannot give a timetable as this would let the insurgency know that they ‘just have to wait it out’ is vapid, incidentally, as the insurgents already know they just have to wait it out. Unless Bush and Blair plan a literally eternal occupation, at some point the troops will have to go home, and then the insurgents will take over. The situation is exactly the same as Vietnam. No ‘timetable’ was set, but at the end of the day, the insurgents knew that at some point the Americans would have to go home and they would take over. Which is exactly what happened.

The ‘timetable’ argument would only hold if the insurgents were actually beatable, but, with the vast majority of the Iraqi people now more or less supporting their aims (withdrawal), and a sizeable minority supporting their methods as well, this is simply impossible.

Let’s see: operation ‘Iraqi Freedom’ (or, let’s not forget, what was originally (apparently) going to be called Operation Iraqi Liberation until someone said…’er….guys….’) was in 2003. It’s now nearly 2006.

Do you think that, in 1172, that is, three years after the original English/Norman invasion of Ireland, you might also have been giving smug little lectures to doom-sayers about how things were ‘progressing nicely’, and that resistance ‘would peter out’ as these things ‘always do’?

And yet, here we are nearly a thousand years later with terrorist violence still continuing.

Tell me Soru, at least theoretically, when would you be prepared to admit that your theory that the insurgency is ‘guttering out’ as these things ‘always do’ is wrong? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? On your deathbed?

That said, I think short or medium term withdrawal will worsen the situation. Almost the only thing Bush has said with which I agree is that announcing a timeline is a bad idea, as it tells the insurgency to wait us out.

What Democrats need to do is start pushing for Bush to turn the situation over to the UN. The entire world has an interest is seeing this situation stablize. Of course, this would be major crow for Bush and he would likely refuse. In which case, he has to own the eventual withdrawal and accompanying disaster. I argue for this in more detail here:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/explodedview/11332.html#cutid1

U.S. soldiers fired on Iraqis at a demonstration in the town of Fallujah after some crowd members shot at troops, U.S. officers said Tuesday. According to the Red Cross and a local hospital director, troops killed 15 people and wounded some 75 others.

U.S. officers said the troops opened fire after protesters shot at them, although locals countered that the shootings were unprovoked.
[...]
Townspeople said they were protesting the continued presence of U.S. soldiers at Fallujah’s elementary school, where classes were supposed to resume Tuesday. They disputed U.S. assertions that troops shot protesters in self-defense, saying the Iraqis were unarmed and did not provoke the Americans.

This, of course, is only one out of a large number of similar incidents. I don’t think you’re being realistic here, Bob.