Screw the experts
CNN collects their stable of doomsayers disguised as experts to warn against the dire consequences of a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. They basically preach there's no way out. According to these guys we have to stay pretty much forever in order to avoid a "full scale civil war."
Bloody hell. These are the same guys who wouldn't admit the greater part of the violence in the country was sectarian for months and months after it was painfully apparent to even the least informed observer. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong here, but aren't these the same experts that were predicting for the last four years that everything would be fine in just another Friedman unit or two? Come to think of it, weren't at least some of them predicting how easy it would be before the invasion?
These are the same sort of experts that predicted dire consequences from leaving Vietnam. Yeah, the transition wasn't pretty but it didn't turn out as badly in the end as they proclaimed it would then either. The truth is, no one really knows what will happen when we leave and these experts stand to gain more if we stay. At the least their punditry services will be higher demand.
Personally, I trust my gut instinct over the pompous predictions of experts any day and my gut tells me things have gone from bad to worse in the last four years. Nothing we're doing there has made life better for the average Iraqi and it has already destabilized the Middle East. Our Imperial President royally screwed this mission up and staying as an occupying force is only delaying the inevitable upheaval. It won't be any less ugly a transition in ten years than it would be in ten months.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. The Iraqis will never be able to stand on their own as long as we're holding their hand. I find it incomprehensible that the reason we can't leave is because in four years their government has only managed to muster "120,000 Iraq soldiers now classified as trained by the U.S. military in Iraq, along with 135,000 police force members." And this doesn't lead me to believe that they have any incentive to speed up the process.
When we're fighting harder for their freedom than they are themselves, it's time for us to go home.
Bloody hell. These are the same guys who wouldn't admit the greater part of the violence in the country was sectarian for months and months after it was painfully apparent to even the least informed observer. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong here, but aren't these the same experts that were predicting for the last four years that everything would be fine in just another Friedman unit or two? Come to think of it, weren't at least some of them predicting how easy it would be before the invasion?
These are the same sort of experts that predicted dire consequences from leaving Vietnam. Yeah, the transition wasn't pretty but it didn't turn out as badly in the end as they proclaimed it would then either. The truth is, no one really knows what will happen when we leave and these experts stand to gain more if we stay. At the least their punditry services will be higher demand.
Personally, I trust my gut instinct over the pompous predictions of experts any day and my gut tells me things have gone from bad to worse in the last four years. Nothing we're doing there has made life better for the average Iraqi and it has already destabilized the Middle East. Our Imperial President royally screwed this mission up and staying as an occupying force is only delaying the inevitable upheaval. It won't be any less ugly a transition in ten years than it would be in ten months.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. The Iraqis will never be able to stand on their own as long as we're holding their hand. I find it incomprehensible that the reason we can't leave is because in four years their government has only managed to muster "120,000 Iraq soldiers now classified as trained by the U.S. military in Iraq, along with 135,000 police force members." And this doesn't lead me to believe that they have any incentive to speed up the process.
[T]he head of the Iraqi ground forces, Gen. Ali Ghiran-Majeed, recently told CNN that some of his soldiers don't even get paid, and that on any given day one quarter of the force is on vacation.Our soldiers are on their second and third extended tours of duty and routinely recalled early. We're sending back soldiers with serious injuries while a quarter of the Iraqis own forces are on perpetual vacation? Does that even make sense? I mean, whose country is it anyway?
When we're fighting harder for their freedom than they are themselves, it's time for us to go home.
Labels: Iraq, Middle East, military, policy
posted by Libby Spencer at 6:08 PM
13 Comments:
Excellent commentary, Libby. And you are right about Vietnam. The so called bloodbath that the warmongers predicted never happened. My gut tells me that if we pull out of Iraq, the violence will immediately be reduced and eventually a form of government that works in that region will emerge. It probably won't be the democracy that Bush envisions but I don't think that would work there anyway. You can't turn a cat into a dog just because you don't like it scratching the furniture.
" And you are right about Vietnam. The so called bloodbath that the warmongers predicted never happened."
Wikipedia:
"Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese officials, particularly ARVN officers, were imprisoned in reeducation camps after the Communist takeover. Tens of thousands died and many fled the country after being released. Up to two million civilians left the country, and as many as half of these boat people perished at sea."
The Wikipedia account is fairly kind to the People's Republic, not mentioning the firing squads and other details. Of course, your threshhold for "bloodbath" may be higher than mine.
Wikipedia offers a few more details here:
"In The Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the new communist government sent many people who supported the old puppet government in the South to "re-education camps", and others to "new economic zones." An estimated 1 million people were imprisoned as prisoners of war. 165,000 people died in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam's re-education camps, according to published academic studies in the United States and Europe. Thousands were abused or tortured: their hands and legs shackled in painful positions for months, their skin slashed by bamboo canes studded with thorns, their veins injected with poisonous chemicals, their spirits broken with stories about relatives being killed."
I think it will be like beirut. whatever happens is going to happen whether we are there to take arrows from both sides or not. eventually after a decade or so some sort of arangement will be reached.
I already conceded it will be ugly Callimachus but the point is it's already ugly and the Vietnam analogy still holds. All those things were happening to the S. Vietnamese when we were there. Staying longer didn't prevent it from happening and I doubt it would have worked out any better if we were still there today, which we would be if the hawks had their way. The only difference is our troops aren't also dying for what is essentially an intercine conflict.
And the point about the predictions is they were predicting communism was going to take over the world and we were all gonna die. That didn't happen and now Vietnam is a trading partner of ours instead of an enemy.
By the way you seem to have skipped the part about the collateral damage from our napalm bombs and the residual environmental damage that still exists even today from Agent Orange. Not to mention the effects it had on our soldiers.
That was the dirty little secret like the DU of today. In generations to come, DU will be the agent that the government denies is causing any residual damage but the enviroment of the ME will still be poisoned and our soldiers will still be going to early graves from its exposure.
Lester I think you're right. It's kind of like raising a teenager. You're tempted to protect them from their own mistakes but they'll make them anyway and if you don't allow them to face the consequences of their actions, they won't learn a thing from it.
Oh and Brian, I think you're right the reduction in violence. I think it may spike temporarily as the parties jockey for power but ultimately, it will be reduced much more quickly than if we stay.
lke the old europe many of our ancestors escaped from, the middle east is full of old rivalries: sunni-shia, jew -muslim, christian-muslim. black muslim-arab muslim.
throwing our beourocracy and dollars at these ancient feuds is futile.
I was addressing Brian's comment, from which I quoted, not your post.
But in fact all these things -- ideological re-education camps, mass firing squad executions, desperate flights from the country of tens of thousands of people -- were not happening to the South Vietnamese people while we were there, unless they happened to live in parts of the country that had been overrun by the North Vietnamese.
And to pick up one specific subject for factual clarification and get accosted in reply with an accusation that you're ignoring a different, tangential subject which then segues into a lecture about some entirely unconnected but politically hot contemporary topic is, if I may say so, the kind of thing you expect only when you venture in to the den of a fanatic.
And you're right: The dreaded Domino Effect never materialized after the fall of South Vietnam. That was what you said. Expat somehow read you as having written there were no post-war massacres. You didn't correct him, so I did.
One might argue that the failure of the Domino Effect prediction had to do with the change in the relative stability and prosperity of the economies and governments of Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore between 1954, when Eisenhower first articulated it, and 1975, when the communists finally conquered South Vietnam. Some (including the long-time leader of Singapore) credit the war in Vietnam for buying the time for that to happen. The price paid by the Vietnamese, however, was horrific.
Whether all that translates into "and because it was so in Southeast Asia in 1975, so shall it be in the Middle East after we leave Iraq" I'm not so sure.
It's also certainly true that, whatever else the South Vietnamese endured after 1975, they weren't getting accidently incinerated by napalm dropped from aircraft. No-war is always better to live in than war.
But something about the image of hundreds of thousands of people taking their babies out onto shark-infested seas in rickety boats with no guarantee of finding a landing place, just to get away from a country, suggests that not all no-wars are equal.
[P.S.: Isn't referring to people from less developed nations by analogies to children best left to imperialists?]
Sorry if that came across as strident Callimachus. I'm in the midst of moving and the older I get, the crankier I get when I get tired. Not unlike when I was a kid.
As for my analogies, the strategy in Iraq very much feels like raising a kid to me. The occupation is being run by Imperialists so I think the analogy is appropriate. Besides, I'm a grandmother. I see a lot of the world as analogous to raising children.
As for bringing in DU and connecting the dots to Agent Orange, I also think that's a valid point. I had many friends who were sent to Nam. Some didn't come back. Many came badly damaged, either physically or psychologically, or both. Of those that are left, many who were exposed to AO have died at an early age of bizarre maladies. If we're to weigh whether military intervention is helpful or appropriate, I think it needs to factored in.
And as far as the refugees, it was a horrible thing but I must remind you that last I heard some 200,000 Iraqis have already fled their country. Granted they're mostly the educated middle class so you don't have the tragic effect of people dying from trying to get out but they are leaving behind a lifetime's worth of personal possessions and professional acheivement and having to start from scratch. Many have taken a step down from their former comfortable lives. Not a decision one makes lightly. I think that's significant in factoring the value of our continued occupation. Certainly the mass flight of the educated class has not contributed to stability. Rather the opposite I would think.
There's no good options, but I'm not willing to buy that our continued occupation is the best one of the bad choices we have.
Agent Orange and the broader martter of civilian suffering as a result of battlefield tactics (including terrorist tactics of treating civilians as legitimate targets) certainly are important issues. But I thought the point you were trying to make was, roughly, "Pulling out of Iraq now wouldn't be as bad as the doomsayers tell us it will, because we pulled out of Vietnam before and it wasn't as bad as doomsayers then said it would be." Or something like that. It seems to me the use of Agent Orange some years before that pullout isn't really a part of your argument, but I may have misread it.
I, too, have some personal ties to the Vietnam War that perhaps make my opinions about it particularly pointed. Especially on the matter of not glossing over the sufferings of the Vietnamese who had the misfortune to live under the communist rule or in a city like Hue when it fell, temporarily, into communist hands.
If you want to bring up the whole war and everything in it, a comments section isn't going to serve us very well. I only spoke up in the first place to address one point that seemed tacklable in a few paragraphs.
I'm very concerned about Iraqi refugees, and I'm perplexed by the many people in the anti-war movement, who call themselves liberals as I call myself, who already are spinning a narrative thread that writes off the coming bloodbath after our withdrawal -- not merely a pile of colateral damage victims (bad enough), but the exact people in Iraq who are most committed to the same values we are -- womens' rights, freedom of expression, religious tolerance, open government. Targeted for those beliefs and nothing more. Where I would expect to meet agreement again with the people I split with over the war, I find them edging toward, "Pity about that, but they had it coming; as long as we're not there, it's no longer our fault. Anyway, Bush, Haliburton, Cheney, oil, corporations."
I still intend to do something about it, with or without them.
It was your suggestion that Vietnam was an analogy for post-war Iraq. I think it is, too. I also think it's possible to talk about that without changing the subject to what happened during the war, which makes it a different discussion entirely.
there were horrible massacres after we left but the entire world is not now communist, which was the type of fear the "domino theory" was playing on.
vietnam fell to the communists, they got to experience a few decades of near starvation from those policies and now are practicly begging us to let NIke open sweatshops there, which will pay them quadruple what they make now. and instead of costing us in blood and treasure we profit from it. anti war, anti state, pro-market wins again!
Callimachus - Point well taken that I've expanded on my orginal post. I tend to do that in comments because I try to keep the posts short but then explain how I reached my conclusions in the comments. To me it's all connected and it's difficult to discuss just one aspect without putting into context within a bigger picture.
But granted, it's a discussion that perhaps too big to confine to any one post or comments therein.
I'll end this thread by saying that I certainly don't write off the possibility of a bloodbath when we leave and by no means do I believe the Iraqis deserve it. That's become a rightwing talking point as far as I have seen.
My basic point here is that experts and pundits are so much hot air and are often wrong. They have been tragically wrong about Iraq right along and I see no reason to base our future strategy on their dire predictions. I simply don't see how remaining in occupation serves anything but the interests of politicians in both countries and how staying longer would prevent the upheaval that will inevitably come when we leave.
If I thought it would help save lives I would certainly support an extended stay to try to fix this mess - I simply don't and I can't support throwing more lives away on a failed strategy to which there appears to be no good solution.
Thanks for your comments and insightful remarks though. It's certainly food for thought.
Lester - good point. I thought that was the whole point of the free market theory as practiced by the corporocrats. Winning through economic development instead of military coercion.
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