Iraq Civil War, etc.
Of course, it comes as a shock to no one reading this that anyone would find that the War in Iraq is not going well. However, it may come as a shock to hear that today John Warner, a senior Republican Senator and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has returned from a trip to Iraq to say that things are falling apart. You can see the New York Times report at: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/world/middleeast/06capital.html. Warner’s indignation at Prime Minister al-Maliki only serves to highlight the starry-eyed naivety that still predominates among US leadership. They now have the audacity to claim that the Iraqi leaders are the problem. Their general sentiment: “The US Plan would be working but the Iraqi government isn’t doing enough to stop sectarian violence.” Indeed, this was the reason for Condaleeza Rice’s visit yesterday to Iraq and this pressure on the Iraqi government led to the suspension of a full brigade of national police (listen to the NPR report here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6204238). This idea is fundamentally bankrupt and represents an attempt on the part of Republicans and the Bush administration to admit there’s a mess (thus not to seem out of touch or like liars) and to simultaneously shirk responsibility. This itself only serves to illustrate how narrow their vision is and how completely self-serving - more US troops have been killed in the last week than during almost any other week of fighting (24 in a period of three days) and it was reported in today’s New York Times that nearly 4000 Iraqi police officers have been killed in the last two years. As the title of Bob Woodward’s book suggests, these people are in a state of total denial.
There is currently a civil war in Iraq. The US initiated this war by 1) destroying Iraq and its infrastructure in a frivolous war, 2) failing to repair this infrastructure after the war, 3) failing to consider prior to the war that there would be any ethnic or religious tension, and 4) exacerbating what tensions there were through a complete insensitivity to anything like REALITY. There is no simple solution to these problems. Suspending a police brigade will not end a civil war. Nor will decrying a prime minister. The US should never have gone to Iraq and it should not remain there now. Iraqis living in Iraq believe that the US presence in Iraq causes more violence (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/28/AR2006092800408.html). Isn’t time that we start trusting Iraqis over US politicians about the political fate of Iraq?
Brandon