Less bad news from Iraq

About counting things in Iraq (such as the killed and other stuff), I really recommend TomDispatch’s “counting lesson” here: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174844 (slightly blogged about here, if I may: http://testsociety.wordpress.com/2007/10/06/counting-lesson/)

What’s Really Happened During the Surge? by Patrick Cockburn.

Quite. By the standards some people appear to be using, one would count Rwanda as a success of non-intervention.

“Quite. By the standards some people appear to be using, one would count Rwanda as a success of non-intervention.”
Posted by dsquared ·

Come on, now, Rwanda was a failure:

No oil
No re-election
No vast theft of government funds by contractors.

Heh, the military conflict between the US and the various insurgents has basically been a sideshow in Iraq since 2004. The US army is just another armed faction, albeit the one with the most guns. Military strategy- as even General Myers admitted a while back can’t end this conflict.

In regards to (1), do you wish to put the Sunni in control? They for over 70 years treated the other groups in Iraq with great brutality, and treated the country as if it was their own private perserve.

This from an anti-war person.

11: really? where? I think that the only possible response to that is “at least I’ve got mates”.

The good news in Iraq is more a function of a news mindset in the Anglosphere, which neatly dices stories into things with only two sides. The two sides of the Iraq story in January, 2007 in the U.S. was the Democratic side and the Republican side. The Democrats lost overwhelmingly – they voted to pay for the war, and they are about to even vote to pay more for the war, and they will vote to pay even more for the war in 2008. If the Democrats lost, the Republicans must have won. However, the Republicans winning is a sort of awkward proposition, since, in spite of the good news, the media keeps running aground on the fact that every poll shows Americans stubbornly want to pull out of Iraq. If you pOlled the D.C. kewl crowd, you’d get a reverse of that number – across the board, Republicans and Democrats who count, in D.C., think we have to stay there – to win, for the Republicans, and for the Democrats, because we have a moral obligation (Democrats like to dress up pure greed and imperialist hysteria with terms like moral obligation – it makes them feel much better about things. It is a sort of moral tooth fairy politics).

In an odd way, this reflects a continuing saga of the deepening divide between political elites and populations. From the Clinton impeachment to the reform/gutting of social security to Iraq, the political elites keep ending up on the unpopular side. Now, as it is a rhetorical habit of elites, when they are grinding out some particularly slimy, gross, and criminal project – say, legalizing torture – that they are forced to ‘compromise’ because the humane, the liberal, the enlightened position, alas, is unpopular, they are in a rhetorically embarrassing position here – after all, it appears that the inhumane, the illiberal, and the unenlightened position is the unpopular one – theirs, the only position recognized by power. The only way out of a dilemma that threatens the very foundations of the two-sided discourse by which our political elites are happily looting various economies and structuring a nice, long war system is to just stop reporting it. And then, after an interval of non-reporting, report that nobody cares anymore, triumphantly turning the failure of democracy into the triumph of the wise and farsighted elites. But the poor elites! they might discover, as recession comes down in 2008, that an ungrateful and ignorant population doesn’t want to pay for the wonderful Iraq war that we are finally winning!

#15, I don’t think the policy is necessarily to divide the country. The policy is (and always has been) to create a client state. Since the original plan to install a loyal strongman (Chalabi) had failed, they now need a leverage against the Maliki government, something that would allow them to run their usual protection-racket-style scheme.

Long-running sectarian conflict is the ideal environment; the government can’t survive without Americans, so Maliki becomes (and remains) a client to the American patron.

But if they were to divide the country, then each part could quickly become stable and self-sufficient. And therefore independent. And that’s the last thing they want.

Nihilism is cool.

Somewhere in moderation limbo is my mention of a new piece by
Reidar Visser
http://historiae.org/congress.asp

“Nonsense of Congress on Federalism in Iraq”

Roger says, “Democrats like to dress up pure greed and imperialist hysteria with terms like moral obligation – it makes them feel much better about things. It is a sort of moral tooth fairy politics.” I understand the sentiment, but attacking politicians’ motives is not much sport, and calling their proposals wishful thinking is not an argument.

I’m not trying to benefit from the occupation, and I’m not an imperialist, but I think there’s something to the idea that the US (or its citizenry) has a moral obligation to do what’s best for the Iraqi people. Do you really think the Iraqis would be better off, in the foreseeable future, if the US withdrew prior to the existence of a stable and effective Iraqi government?

While I don’t think the war was justified, and I’m as worried as anyone about a permanent occupation, I’m more concerned about the consequences of withdrawal. Whether or not there’s a civil war going on in Iraq right now, there are good reasons to think the conflict would be worse, and last just as long as, US attempts at reconstruction.

Weston, you’ve made quite a defense of continuing the occupation there, consisting of a rhetorical question and this: “there are good reasons to think the conflict would be worse, and last just as long as, US attempts at reconstruction.” So, pray tell, what are those good reasons? Since, at last count, the U.S.’s humanitarian occupation, has produced +675,000 casualties, plus a million and a half external refugees ( with those devil states, Syria and Iran, selflessly taking in most of them – obviously they haven’t reached America’s moral heights, where you take in maybe 5,000 Iraqi refugees if they can survive long enough to go through the bureaucracy), I wonder just how much more goodness from the U.S. Iraq can take. You might have noticed that violence dropped, recently, 90 percent in Basra when the British withdrew. Also, you might notice that the poor Iraqis have a whole delusional mindset about this: by a large majority, they actually think it is justified to kill or attack the always humane U.S. forces. I suppose they don’t understand the essential kindness of Blackwater.

So, let’s add up what we’ve done for these people, and give ourselves a big Christmas hug. We’ve saddled them with an unworkable constitution. We’ve tried to privatize their oil reserves at a time when almost all of the rest of the oil producing states are going the opposite direction. We’ve proposed dividing the nation. We’ve definitely refunctionalized Saddam’s prisons into … our own prisons. We’ve presided over the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and called it victory. We’ve sacked Fallujah and called it breaking the backs of the terrorists. And those same ‘terrorists’ have since become our best pals in Anbar province, to whom we are supplying a motherlode of weapons.

Looking through this endeavor, you see how much and how truly we love, as good liberals and Christians, our Iraqi neighbors – but of course, you were opposed to the war! I am not sure why – did you think it would turn out badly? And has it? And do you think, wow, this is so bad that we have to keep going, see how much we can pile on?

Roger, I see that extremity is an expected currency in forums like this, but I don’t believe I was throwing myself behind a full-throated defense of the occupation. Nor was I pretending to offer an argument–I was asking for one. And in spite of your ill-targeted sarcasm, I believe you may have given me one. But first, let’s be clear: yes, I thought the war would turn out badly. And of course, it did. But saying that the invasion and all its attendant evils should not have happened does not show that pulling out now would be better for Iraq.

I didn’t need a recitation of how badly the occupation has gone. In fact, I agree with all of your complaints (which made enduring your acerbic tone all the more bizarre). What I need is a reason to think that a post-withdrawal Iraq wouldn’t be even worse. My skepticism about immediate, or at any rate, precipitous withdrawal from Iraq is based on the observation that withdrawing occupation forces prior to the existence of a viable government typically leads to a power vacuum, and power vacuums surrounded by heavily armed groups already engaged in ethnic conflict typically lead to all-out civil war. (By the way, while the US is certainly responsible for the insecurity that brought the death of so many Iraqi civilians, it is clear that intra-Shiite and Shiite/Sunni violence was the direct cause of many of those deaths. I don’t see how an American pullout would stop that carnage.)

The only thing in your response that moved me is the possibility that the rest of Iraq, and Baghdad in particular, might react the way you believe Basra did. I’m not sure where you’re getting your statistics. The latest information I’ve read about Basra comes from an interview with Damien Cave (NYT), who has this to say:

Well, it’s clearly a battleground, and it’s been a battleground for much of this year. As violence has declined through much of the country, in places like Baghdad and Diyala province and Anbar, Basra has in some ways been an anomaly. It’s a place that remains as violent today or appears to remain as violent today as it was a few months ago. So it’s a sign of the fact that, even as security improves in much of the country, there are still places in Iraq that are very dangerous and that have yet to be brought under control.

And in any case, even if Cave is just wrong, it’s not clear that we should take Basra as a model for the rest of Iraq, since most of the violence there is between Shiite groups competing for control, rather than the more trenchant forms of ethnic warfare that mark Baghdad and much of the rest of the country. Nobody thinks the US is above reproach. All thinking persons are rightly appalled at the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war. But we should not leap to the conclusion that the solution to an initially unjust and consistently awful occupation is complete and immediate withdrawal. Contrary to much of the anti-war movement’s assertions, it’s a lot more complicated than that.

But we should not leap to the conclusion that the solution to an initially unjust and consistently awful occupation is complete and immediate withdrawal.

Would the same concern apply to, say, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s; should the Soviets have stuck around until a stable government emerged under their occupation, until the local secular/marxist constituency managed to reconcile with the Islamic/nationalist one? If not, why not?

Wiki:

The government of President Karmal, established in 1980 and identified by many as a puppet regime, was largely ineffective. It was weakened by divisions within the PDPA and the Parcham faction, and the regime’s efforts to expand its base of support proved futile. Moscow came to regard Karmal as a failure and blamed him for the problems. Years later, when Karmal’s inability to consolidate his government had become obvious, Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, said:

The main reason that there has been no national consolidation so far is that Comrade Karmal is hoping to continue sitting in Kabul with our help.

In November 1986, Mohammad Najibullah, former chief of the Afghan secret police (KHAD), was elected president and a new constitution was adopted. He also introduced in 1987 a policy of “national reconciliation,” devised by experts of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and later used in other regions of the world. Despite high expectations, the new policy neither made the Moscow-backed Kabul regime more popular, nor did it convince the insurgents to negotiate with the ruling government.

My only concern is this: will ‘Revolution which the will lead after the vanguard’ become the ‘All our base are belong to us’ style rallying cry of the post-Decent left?

Incidentally, I am prepared to print up ‘Chomskyan nihilist and proud of it’ T-shirts and distribute them on the web if anyone is interested. It could have ‘Which the will lead after the vanguard!’ on the back.

Weston, what exactly are you saying? You think that the U.S. shouldn’t withdraw because of the threat of civil war? Is this the same U.S. that has been pouring weaponry into the hands of a Sunni militia in Anbar, while also arming a Shiite militia dominated police force in Baghdad? In spite of your protests, the tooth fairy fable fits very well here – a dismissal of U.S. actions on the ground while appealing to the high principles that are supposedly embodied by U.S. actions on the ground – for instance, that the U.S. will subordinate its interest in Iraq’s oil to the good of the Iraqi people. These issues were played out years ago – it was a system called colonialism. It did not get better as the colonists persisted – it got worse. As I pointed out in my reply, the U.S. occupation wasn’t just bad because it was inept, it was bad because it tried to embed, structurally, dysfunctions into the Iraqi system. Divide and conquer is, after all, a necessity for a small occupying force in a big country.

I mentioned Basra because there we have seen an experiment. And in November, we got this story from the AP:

“Attacks have plunged by 90 per cent in southern Iraq since Britain withdrew its troops from the main city of Basra, their commander has said.

Their presence in central Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, was the single largest trigger for violence, Major General Graham Binns said.

“We thought, ‘If 90 per cent of the violence is directed at us, what would happen if we stepped back?’ ” Gen Binns said in an interview in Baghdad yesterday.

“About 500 British troops moved out of one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in the heart of Basra in early September, joining some 4,500 at a garrison at an airport on the city’s edge.

Since then there has been a remarkable and dramatic drop in attacks. The motivation for attacking us was gone, because we’re no longer patrolling the streets.”

What the story doesn’t say is that Basra has become a much worse place by all accounts over the last four years, a mini Taliban state ruled by thuggish Islamicists. Eventually, I’m sure there will be more fighting – to overthrow the Islamic militias that run the place. If, as seems likely, the Shiite who are returning to Iraq complete the take over of ethnically cleansed Sunni areas in Baghdad, and the Sunnis who, so far, are staying in Syria and Iran, see this and decide to do something about it, fighting will also break out. In the latter case, it helps that the U.S. has armed all sides. So: what, concretely, do you think the U.S. is going to do? If you aren’t thinking in tooth fairy terms, then surely you have a concrete sense of possible American actions leading to a peaceful Iraq. What are they? Permanent occupation? Permanently arming and disarming militias? Permanently making Iraq a potential launching pad for other Middle Eastern wars? By this time, such ingenue suggestions are no longer simply naive – they are simply pro-war.

Of course if you have a blog, and you raise a complicated issue like Iraq just as a one-off thing, and then on to the pop charts or whatever, then I agree you’re not likely to have a coherent discussion. I notice there are a lot of great aphorisms on this thread. Some not-so-great aphorisms, but there you go.

If you’re off the “what kind of actor” language and back to plain English, then I’ll put it this way:

My reasons for insisting US policy 2003 to date is very important are two: (1) Non GreenZone Iraqis (and I agree) think the policy continues to be bloody-minded as far as tearing the country apart is concerned, and if that is the case (and there is a strong case for that view, which naturally you don’t see much about in the corporate media), then an election on the question of policy-change that doesn’t even raise that issue (namely the issue of what policy you’re changing from) is really a sham. And by saying “it’s moot”, you’re supporting the idea of not even raising that issue. That was my initial beef, namely that it’s pointless to say I JQ am for speedy withdrawal, and it doesn’t matter whether actual US policy is to continue tearing the country apart. The answer would be: So what if you’re for speedy withdrawal, the point is the electorate doesn’t understand the existing policy (supported in this ignorance by 1000 people who like you say it doesn’t matter), hence there won’t be pressure for change.

(2) The US has been in talks of some kind with people connected with the Sunni resistance, and one major stumbling block seems to be their demand for a commitment to speedy and complete withdrawal. Negotiations and withdrawal in the real world seem to be connected issues. You can have helicopters on the roof, or you can have a negotiated withdrawal. So to your phrase about the US will unilaterally (and voluntarily) withdraw or it won’t, the answer is “it won’t”.

But as you say, this isn’t the right forum…We could leave it at that

Magistra,

I don’t think the length of the occupation is directly relevant to the moral question. Indirectly, of course, the longer the US stays in Iraq the more people will become convinced that the occupation is really an attempt at imperial expansionism. But suppose, contrary to fact, (1) that the Iraqis are permanently unable to form a working government, and–maybe not contrary to fact–(2) the violence in Iraq will continue to decrease. Under those conditions I’d think we should stay, if only because some form of political authority is necessary to secure human rights, but also because their instability is the result of our initial stupidity. In that sense, and on those idealized assumptions, I don’t see anything wrong with a “holding operation.”

Of course, at some point, the Iraqis will probably be able to form an effective government (or several regional governments–I’m inclined to think the Kurds are entitled to their own state, moderate Turkish oppression notwithstanding). And of course, violence in Iraq will continue to fluctuate. I’m genuinely pained, Magistra, because part of me strongly agrees with you: if we’re making any gains at all, its in inches, not miles. But I’m not convinced that substantial gains are beyond reach. And it’s important to remember how tragic the choice really is, because more–many more–are going to die no matter what we do.

What frustrates me on the domestic political front, however, is how quick those of the anti-war persuasion were to criticize the surge on the grounds that not enough political progress has been made. I’m not sure if the US could ditch attempts at democratization and install a relatively benign dictator at this point, but I think the Iraqis certainly deserve more time if we can give it to them. If a drawdown of the ‘surge’ troop levels results in increased violence, I would take that as evidence that more troops are needed, not less. But again, increased troop levels will only incite Iraqis to more insurgency, so there is definitely a balance to be struck. As for how to strike it, and whether the attempt will ultimately be worth it? Those are exactly the complicated questions that anti-war advocates must face honestly, and answer convincingly, if they’re going to have a case for withdrawal.

On July 20, 1987, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country was announced…and on February 15, 1989, the last Soviet troops departed on schedule from Afghanistan.

Najibullah’s regime, though failing to win popular support, territory, or international recognition, was however able to remain in power until 1992. Ironically, until demoralized by the defections of its senior officers, the Afghan Army had achieved a level of performance it had never reached under direct Soviet tutelage. Kabul had achieved a stalemate that exposed the Mujahideen’s weaknesses, political and military. For nearly three years, Najibullah’s government successfully defended itself against Mujahideen attacks, factions within the government had also developed connections with its opponents.

According to Russian publicist Andrey Karaulov, the main reason why Najibullah lost power was the fact Russia refused to sell oil products to Afghanistan in 1992 for political reasons (the new Russian government did not want to support the former communists) and effectively triggered an embargo.

Well, I guess it’s just that the Soviet military left and then things didn’t change much for 3 years; no apocalypse, no mass-slaughter. And that’s in the situation where the mujahideen (aka ‘the insurgency’) had, as you noted, virtually unlimited material and political support. And ideologically the government and the insurgency were much further away from each other than what they have in Iraq now.

I’m skeptical about the claim that in Iraq it’s going to get worse if the US troops leave.

“As Badger and John pointed out, these debates become unmanageable in a comments thread.”

Mostly because people continue to talk out of some sort of psychological inertia, some version of: “I still think…” etc., even when their question has been answered (or their ignorance confirmed.)
“So to your phrase about the US will unilaterally (and voluntarily) withdraw or it won’t, the answer is ‘it won’t’.”

As to whether the US plan has always been to break up Iraq, I’d say no. The one thing the US has been consistent about is the desire for long term military ties, in the form of bases and men on the ground. This is not occupation as such, but its got nothing to do with the interests of the Iraqi people. The Iraqi’s recognize that, as Badger has pointed out, much more than Americans do, or even than JQ is willing to admit.
Everybody wants to be a doctor and no one is willing to listen to the god damn patient.

“This is not occupation as such, but its got nothing to do with the interests of the Iraqi people.”

I should have been clearer. It’s never been a question of breaking up the country or not. There’s no evidence that anyone in US policy circles has ever cared one way or another.
The overriding interest, the only thing about which this administration has been absolutely consistent, is having more military outposts in the mideast.
Facts on the ground.

Better yet, do it here.