Happy Anniversary!
So I guess we're officially at three years (+1 day) since the invasion of Iraq. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Alawi said, "If this isn't civil war, I don't know what is"; Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says Iraq's been in civil war since Saddam was deposed, in the sense of a violent struggle for political power. Two points for me, but I have to concede that Iraq doesn't meet the standard of civil war that I would use: that is, near constant fighting, with calm only in areas firmly in the control of one side or the other; no Sunnis in south Iraq, no Shi'ites in central Iraq, that sort of thing. So, I guess I lost my bet. With myself, just to be clear.
But there's enough sentiment that what is happening is at least a precursor to civil war --the sorts of events that, when looked at from a future civil war, can be seen as the actual start of that war -- that I think my point's been made.
To summarize, in the spirit of commemorating the anniversary:
Tell me I'm wrong. I've fleshed out my position on these points in lots of different places, so specific points may require elucidation in the context of this post.
But here we are, three years later. Any predictions for March 20, 2007?
But there's enough sentiment that what is happening is at least a precursor to civil war --the sorts of events that, when looked at from a future civil war, can be seen as the actual start of that war -- that I think my point's been made.
To summarize, in the spirit of commemorating the anniversary:
- We are not "at war" with Iraq: we invaded it, destroyed its current government, but since then we have been occupying Iraq. This is therefore the Iraq occupation, not the Iraq war.
- The invasion was not a necessity of national survival, and therefore does not fit the model of WWII that some politicians have advanced; further, the Bush administration lied when justifying the reasons to go to war:
- Iraq was not, as the administration on several occasions implied, involved in the 9/11 attacks.
- Iraq was not, as the administration explicitly stated, supporting al Qaeda; in fact, the only Islamic terrorist group based in Iraq, Ansar al-Islam, was in the northern, Kurdish-controlled region, protected from Saddam's regime by U.S. and British aircraft.
- Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and the administration lied when it released statements like Cheney's "there is no doubt that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction":
- Iraq did not seek to buy uranium from Niger, and the source saying it did was known to be discredited before Bush's 2003 state of the union address.
- Those aluminum tubes were known to be unsuitable for centrifuge of uranium, and the Bush administration blocked any effort to test the possibility that they were suitable for use in Iraqi missiles, starting almost immediately upon interception of the tubes.
- It was known that the source ("Curveball") promulgating the mobile chem-labs story was unreliable long, long before Powell's address to the UN.
- et cetera
- democratizing a country through external force is not a reasonable goal, and it has no historical precedent outside of Japan, which was a homogeneous nation united in loyalty to an undeposed emperor -- a model that in no way fit Iraq; further, it is not the responsibility of the U.S. government, as it does not represent protection of the rights of U.S. citizens, but rather endangerment our soldiers and expenditure our money for no legitimate purpose.
- the invasion was initiated without a shred of Constitutionality:
- the President is Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces only when "they are called into actual service of the United States", and the only governmental entity authorized to do that is Congress.
- HJ Res 114 and SJ Res 23 were not declarations of war, but rather legislative attempts to delegate war-declaration discretion to the President -- something only a Constitutional amendment could do. Every legislator who voted for these acts betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution, and is therefore a traitor.
- Our Contitution does not grant the right to commit our forces to a conflict to any international body, not even the U.N. Security Council.
- By launching the invasion in the absence of a Constitutional initiation of war or calling into service of the armed forces, President Bush betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution, and is therefore a traitor; any soldier who deployed on this basis also betrayed his oath to defend the Constitution in preference to being mindful to the orders of the President, and has done little more than facilitate the un-Consititutional act of an overambitious executive.
- the invasion was carried out without sufficient consideration of securing the peace, especially given the asserted goal of bringing democracy to Iraq; it has been known for some time that the force required to secure a country in peace is larger than that required to defeat a country in war; the Bush Administration is therefore not only deceitful and traitorious, but incompetent.
- Iraq fits the model of Yugoslavia much more readily than the model of Germany or Japan, to which several politicians have referred; its population contains more than sufficient numbers of individiuals belonging to groups that seek favored or dominant positions in the state, or vengeance against other groups, to sustain and inflame internecine violence up to civil war -- no matter how long we stay there.
Tell me I'm wrong. I've fleshed out my position on these points in lots of different places, so specific points may require elucidation in the context of this post.
But here we are, three years later. Any predictions for March 20, 2007?
posted by heavynettle at 19:41
3 Comments:
All true. All absolutely true. But the U.S. has a long history of extralegal military intervention, mostly in the Western hemisphere, that had no lasting consequences (at least not the kind where you draw a line from point A to point B and yell "Aha!").
Iraq is different because our involvement in Iraq has real consequences:
1) Al-Qaeda, the sworn enemy of puppy dogs and all things good, has regrouped throughout most of Afganistan and taken over Baluchistan and other parts of Pakistan.
2) The U.S. military is overextended to the point were it is having trouble maintaining even the much-too-low troop strength Bush's tax cuts require him to hold it at. Currently, the administration is keeping the armed forces smaller than Congress has asked for.
3) The U.S. military is no longer a credible deterrent to Iran's government.
4) While nobody was looking, North Korea has gone into overdrive on building bombs. I'll say it again, if they haven't sold one to the Iranians yet, it's only because the Iranians figured out a cheaper way to build their own.
5)While nobody was looking, well, ethnic cleansing escalated throughout the Muslim world from Darfur to Pakistan.
6) Al-Qaeda has acheived most of its stated aims in creating a growing sense of separation and animosity between Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Remember back in the day when tourism to Egypt was safe and easy? Who the hell would go there now? And that's a friendly country. Also note the shameful display on both sides of the ailse in congress over the Dubai ports acquisition. Americans are hunkered down and scared, and even Bush seems to have been surprised by the depth of the ignorant nativist outcry against Dubai, one of the few Arab Muslim states that has been unequivocally opposed to Al-Qaeda and intra-Muslim sectarian violence in general. Watch closely as foreign capital flees North America by every available cable.
7) We're going bankrupt. But this isn't solely because of the war. It also has to do with the anti-government wing of the Republican party seeing government as having no other function than as a trough.
8) American civil liberties are being shredded, apparently, if you believe the polls, with the willing collusion of a majority of the public. This war is remaking America in frightening ways.
I could go on, but suffice to say that the brash-talking, macho amateur(s) in the White House and Navy Building have done what Donald Duck-esque displays of testosterone usually do: left us looking flailing, weak, and an object of universal ridicule.
God, I hate that man.
Howdy, Sage Thrasher -- how's the sabbatical?
This stuff makes me tired. I was watching Charlie Rose on PBS last night, and he had a panel of folks (including USN&WR's Fouad Ajami, with whom I often agree) that ranged in opinion from "we should never have gone" to "ours is a noble quest". The most interesting question asked there was what all of them would be saying next year at this time.
The reasonable ask what should be done now, of course. And on that, I would refer readers to my post on inaction, even as I recognize that this would be a tough course to take, as deep as we're in it now. But the first thing we should do is clear out the bums who fucked up this affair to date. I mean, when junior gets into a car wreck, do you trust him to drive home? Whatever we do henceforth, we must impeach Bush, then convince the 400-odd legislators who passed "authorizations for the use of force" to commit seppuku in a star-studded television event. Then we can approach the Iraq occupation as it needs to be approached.
Then we have two choices: to wash our hands of the whole affair, accepting the chaos that erupts as an inevitable consequence of our meddling, but sparing ourselves the cost of further meddling; or to commit ourselves to a much more focussed effort to create the institutions necessary to bring order and credibility -- oh, hell. Even as I write that, I realize the futility. Iraq, ultimately, must fragment, a la Yugoslavia, to yield maybe one out of three representative democracies (most likely, actually, the Kurds, since Kurdistan is already mostly homogeneous and self-governed). Woodrow Wilson unleashed the most corrosive, and anti-American, ideology in the form of national self-determination (an American approach is individual self-determination), and as hateful as that ideology is, we're stuck with it, as each new disintegration of a multi-ethnic autocracy clearly demonstrates. Maybe we can trust that, with time (and if we can keep the Turks from going to war with Kurdistan), ethnically pure states can achieve some form of enlightenment.
To my other models, I add the model of Turkey and Greece: the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in WWI led the Greeks to try to take Anatolian territory from the barely-arisen Kemalist state of Turkey. When that effort failed, both Turkey and Greece engaged in a bizarre and tragic form of ethnic cleansing, deporting non-Turkish or non-Greek folks (despite the fact that Turks in Greece spoke Greek, and Greeks in Turkey spoke Turkish). That was only 83 years ago, and these days Turkey (the former autocracy) is a reasonably stable democracy. Sage Thrasher said this elsewhere, and I'll reiterate: we have to let these artificial imperial and colonial constructs self-destruct, in favor of polities formed along more stable (if, again, racist and therefore noxious) lines -- just as Europe did over several hundred years starting 700 years ago.
And the fact is (well, my opinion is) that Iraq shall go that path no matter how long we stay. So we can leave now and have the consequences now, or we can see the same thing happen after a certain period of time and a chunk-load of my (and y'all's) money is poured into the mess. So let's stop throwing good money (and blood) after bad, and pull out of Iraq en toto -- and let the chips fall and restabilize where they may.
Wilson was an idiot; must be the most over-rated president in U.S. history (exceptin Lincoln, if you believe the Civil War could have been avoided while achieving the same goals.)
It won't just be Iraq, it'll be a lot of countries that fragment along the Shi'a/Sunni line. The Taliban's main targets in Afganistan were Shi'ites, such as the Hazara. Whole villages were tortured to death as spectacle. The same thing happened (happens: Balkans) in Eurpoe of course if you look at events like St. Bartholemew's day; but it's really ugly. I kind of agree in principle with the neo-cons that shit like Saddam Hussein pulled in attempts to exterminate the Kurds, the current genocides unfolding in the Sudan, Indonesia's brutality in New Guinea, etc. shouldn't go unchallenged. But then you get into the details and (should) realize that you can't fight the whole world, but would eventually have to if you decide to fight anyone.
I have to wonder what the consequence of international intervention would have been in the 1870s or back during the Jackson presidency, when the U.S. government followed policies of explicit genocide against our own minority populations who were by then almost completely defenseless. Would the Dakotas, Nebraska, western Kansas and Oklahoma, not to mention NW Georgia/NE Alabama now be a separate country perpetually protected by troopers of the Austio-Hungarian, Russian, British, Prussian, and Ottoman Empires? Oh wait, they were too busy forcibly fragmenting China to notice our shenanigans, except to note that they acheived the desired end.
As for Iraq, it's a front in a world-wide civil war of intra-Muslim violence. For the U.S., the new realignment of national alliances based on simple anti-Americanism--Venuezuela & Iran meeting to discuss no longer accepting dollars in payment for oil--is probably more important in the long run than anything going on in Iraq right now. The same, however, cannot be said for Afganistan/southwest Pakistan, where there is little evidence of control by a stable outside power, like Syria or Iran, to keep a lid on things.
I seem to be descending into Babble. Sorry. The sabatical is going well.
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