Here’s a small list:

1. The razing of Fallujah
2. the institution of airstrikes to support counterinsurgency;
3. the high security construction of the Green Zone;
4. the writing of the constitution with the heavy handed advice of Amrican advisors, many of whom have publicly expressed support for Kurdish separatism (for instance, Peter Galbraith);
5. the use of divide and conquer tactics in military operations—using the Peshmerga, for instance, to attack in Sunni cities.

I think I could go on for at least fourteen or fifteen points. But I will have mercy on this CT thread and … Not.

Compare Pakistan and Afghanistan – which has the dictator, and which allows US troops in?

Power is about choices: if the US doesn’t have any plausible alternative options to supporting the Maliki government, it doesn’t have any power.

But I think even the most prudish members of the US government will think “Fuck a bunch of Iraqi democracy” if they think they can pull the troops out (or back to bases where they won’t get shot at) and leave someone in power who’ll keep the oil flowing. They’ll probably make sure that they don’t have to hand power over to someone who’s appeared on a ten most wanted list recently, but that’s about it. Any criticism will be met with “now it’s time for Iraqis to make their own mistakes – and look over there! I think I see a plane full of our brave men and women returning home! Didn’t they do a great job?!” How many reporters are going to want to stay in Iraq looking for the disappeared then? Who is going to be interested in stories of torture chambers – who is going to want to be interested in those stories?

What other scenario do you think the US is going to hold out for, and at what cost?

I don’t think they have to say any of that, ray, but rather just to do it at some point down the line, when the democratic state is in a somewhat more secure position.

ii) Of course, Rumsfeld should have been out on his ear. That is why I said that the public and press opinion had some impact, rather than, say, a throughgoing or decisive impact.

Now obviously they have does stuff like that in the past, but only out of sight of the media. This is where democratic constraints (hopefully) do count – I can’t really see Bush getting away with standing up at a press conference and saying ‘al Qaeda are now Freedom Fighters, we will be sending them arms to aid their overthrow of the corrupt secular-atheist regime’.

Admittedly, I could be wrong on that…

Soru, as I said in 157, the US is not being deflected from it’s course by a thriving Iraqi civil society intent on creating a healthy democracy even in the face of the occupying power, but by a range of violent groups intent on seizing as much power for themselves as possible. I’m not sure why you see this as a vindication of your position.

That’s interesting, a lot of commentators would say the US can’t possibly win this war. You would appear to be claiming they can’t possibly lose, no matter what tactics or strategy they adopt, what current allies they turn into enemies, what political changes happen at home. Because, surely, that is what is necessary in order to think that he ‘invadees’ (the Iraqi people) have no power over the situation in Iraq.

Could you justify that view in the face of the 400 textbooks and generals I could quote disagreeing?

i) I think there are several notable occasions on which many anti-war commenters would agree that the invadees were able to exert pressurise on the US. One example that used to be often cites was that in which Grand Ayatollah Sistani was said to have made the imperialists press ahead with elections earlier than they would have liked.

ii) I think public and press opinion, here and in the US, has had some effect in ensuring that soldiers and guards are presecuted when there is sufficient evidence of wrongdoing on their part, as in the case of the guards who tormented prisoners in Abu Graib (the US guards that is, not Saddam’s guards, when they were in charge).

Clearer without the ellipsis, I think.
But now I’ve asked you why you think the invadees would be able to over-ride US interests, and I’ve asked you why you think domestic public opinion would be effective in this given that it hasn’t been effective in related cases, and you haven’t answered either question.

That means that I was thinking of the domestic social and political context of the invaders, but not exclusively.

If you’re talking about the domestic context, then why do you think the UK public opinion that couldn’t stop the war could stop the invaders pursuing their own interests? Especially given the well-known ‘rally around the troops’ effect once a war has actually started? For all the good job that you think the Western press does, Abu ghraib and Guantanamo are still open for business. The pressure the US applies to Iraqi governments is likely to be less obvious, and less easily described. And the longer the occupation goes on, the less people going are to care about the form of the Iraqi government, compared to the price of oil and the number of US and UK dead.

Apart from that, if I may restrict myself to a single, possibly controversial, example: I think that the free press in the West does a reasonable job of keeping the imperial forces in line, pointing out where they fail to live up to their own society’s standards and demanding prosecutions where there is sufficient evidence of wrongdoing. In this way, paradoxically—or dialectically, as we used to say—anti-war criticism is essential to the success of the Iraqi democracy—if it is going to be successful over the long run, that is.