I wanted to write about this yesterday but ran out of time. This morning I've been a little busy with other stuff and I'm just now getting around to writing for the blog. I'm going to follow Yglesias' lead with what appears to be an unconfirmed email from a soldier/officer serving in Iraq. Like Matt I'll post the most relevant part.
In my opinion, what everyone fails to realize is that this is not a counterinsurgency. If we wanted to stay in Iraq, then it would be a counterinsurgency. But it is clear that our goal is to turn over power and pull out. So, in building our strategic endstate, it's pointless to set goals that relate to our presence in Iraq. If the "insurgency" is a function of our being there, then it is not an insurgency in terms of our endstate. For example, if one of our goals is to stop IED attacks on US forces, that is pointless. When we leave, there will be no more IED attacks on us forces. So our endstate needs to be different. We need to ask "if we left tomorrow, what would happen in Iraq?" and from there, we need to determine which of those anticipated results are unacceptable to us. Then we must aim our efforts on making sure those unacceptable results do not occur.The whole email can be found here and is worth a read. It's really not that long. I'm saying unconfirmed because we all know how many fake emails have turned up in this debate about Iraq. Moving along the lines that the email is genuine, I'll agree and state this is something I've been saying since 2003. Our anticipated results were we would remove Saddam, find WMD, install Ahmed Chalabi as head of government and then work on the functions of a democracy. In the beginning that was our endstate, or our anticipated results. Five years later, we've removed Saddam, found no WMD and have still yet to form any sort of functioning government much less a democratic one.
When I look at the problem that way, it becomes almost impossible to find a purpose in what we do.
Like the soldier states, we are in a position now-- five years and counting-- that we must ask ourselves what are the desired results to come out of our invasion and occupation of Iraq. From there we need to determine what results are unacceptable and do everything we can to keep them from happening. What this means is more war and more war. Like Yglesias says, "What this misses is that the U.S. presence is one of the main issues at stake in the war. It's not that peace would suddenly break out if we left, but peace is certain to never break out as long as we stay."
John McCain has been stating that a permanent presence in Iraq is fine with him. We can stay ten years or 100 years as long as troops aren't dying, he says. In effect McCain is saying that as long as we are incurring casualties we can't leave, but if troops aren't dying then we can stay forever. This doesn't give us an endstate that is acceptable. Finding a purpose for an endless war that Republicans salivate over must be at the forefront of this election.
1 comments:
The email makes good points, whether it was written by a soldier or not.
Cutting through all the arguments and rhetoric on both sides, my question is this: Can the United States really afford to hand over Iraq to a group of radical terrorists?
That's what would result with our leaving and everything we've done the past five years would have been in vain.
We can't leave.
Four critical mistakes in '03 have given us the current situation. We did not:
1. Have enough troops.
2. Level everything.
3. Allow civilians to keep their firearms. Taking their guns away resulted in the insurgency.
4. Kill al Sadr.
Had we gone in heavy, converted everything and everybody that stood in our way to dust, partnered with the locals and terminated the radicals, this thing would have done in six months.
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