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For too long since 9/11, the political elites in the US held their
fingers in the leaky dike that is Bush 43 foreign policy, particularly on Bush’s
War, but more widely. Critics have not been limited to the opposition party, significantly,
dissension was heard from experienced diplomatic, intelligence and academic voices
within the Republican party, just quietly in the beginning. No longer. The so-called
‘general’s revolt’, is a war of words, not bullets, fortunately, but is exceptionally
rare in US history. It has been accompanied by OpEd pieces and open letters, private,
closed door and open testimony and finally on camera appearances. I’ve taken the title to this post from an email by a Marine serving in
Iraq, written for his family, which has made its way into Generals’ inboxes. It’s
linked, below. The other opinion analysis I’m sharing today is significant in
that, like Friedman, another well-respected foreign policy pundit, Zakaria is
calling it quits, not just on 6-month extensions of good faith so the Bush
administration can ‘get it right’ in Iraq, but saying that our being there isn’t
helping anyone and we should come
home, redeploy, whatever language is used, before this civil war gets much,
much worse. It’s one thing to admit second thoughts and propose modifications, as
the administration has belatedly done, substituting ‘adapting to win’ for ‘victory’
but quite another to publicly conclude a strategic retreat is the best option. So
whether you hear the ‘soft’ or the ‘hard’ sell, this administration’s foreign
policy has reached its dead end, right along with its credibility. KwC The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by
James Baker and Lee Hamilton, may be recommending
a ‘soft partitioning’ of Iraq (but not until after the
November elections!) The ISG “will not advise “partition”, but is believed to favour a
division of the country that will devolve power and security to the regions,
leaving a skeletal national government in Baghdad in charge of foreign affairs,
border protection and the distribution of oil revenue. The Iraqi government will be encouraged to hold a constitutional
conference paving the way for greater devolution. Iran and Syria will be urged
to back a regional settlement that could be brokered at an international
conference. Baker, a leading exponent of shuttle diplomacy, has already met
representatives of the Syrian government and is planning to see the Iranian
ambassador to the United Nations in New York. “My
view is you don’t just talk to your friends,” he said last
week. “You need to talk to your
enemies in order to move forward
diplomatically towards peace.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-2393750,00.html
ALSO SEE Baker’s interview on Sunday ABC This
Week, http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/story?id=2542039&page=1 Iraq's Dark Day of Reckoning If you were a Shiite, having suffered through a brutal insurgency and
an incompetent government, would you give up your weapons? By
Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, Oct. 16,
2006 Issue When Iraq's current
government was formed last April, after four months of bitter disputes,
wrangling and paralysis, many voices in America and in Iraq said the next six
months would be the crucial testing period. That was a fair expectation. It has
now been almost six months, and what we have seen are bitter disputes,
wrangling and paralysis. Meanwhile, the violence has gotten worse, sectarian
tensions have risen steeply and ethnic cleansing is now in full swing. There is
really no functioning government south of Kurdistan, only power vacuums that
have been filled by factions, militias and strongmen. It is time to call an end
to the tests, the six-month trials, the waiting and watching, and to recognize
that the Iraqi government has failed. It is also time to face the
terrible reality that America's mission in Iraq has substantially failed. More waiting is
unlikely to turn things around, nor will more troops. I understand the impulse
of those who want to send in more forces to secure the country. I urged just
such a policy from the first week of the occupation. But today
we are where we are. Over the past three years the violence has spread and is
now franchised down to neighborhoods with local gangs in control. In many
areas, local militias are not even controlled by their supposed political
masters in Baghdad. In
this kind of decentralized street fighting, 10,000 or 20,000 more troops in
Baghdad will not have more than a temporary effect. Nor will new American
policies help.
The reason that the Democrats seem to lack good, concrete suggestions on Iraq
is that the Bush administration has actually been pursuing more-sensible
policies for more than a year now, trying vainly to reverse many of its errors.
But what might well
have worked in 2003 is too little, too late in 2006. Iraq
is now in a civil war. Thirty thousand Iraqis have died there in the past three
years, more than in many other conflicts widely recognized as civil wars. The
number of internal refugees, mostly Sunni victims of ethnic cleansing, has
exploded over the past few months, and now exceeds a quarter of a million
people. (The
Iraqi government says 240,000, but this doesn't include Iraqis who have fled
abroad or who may not have registered their move with the government.) The
number of attacks on Shiite mosques increases every week: there have been 69
such attacks since February, compared with 80 in the previous two and a half
years. And the war is being fought on gruesome new fronts. CBS News's Lara
Logan has filed astonishing reports on the Health Ministry, which is run by
supporters of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. According to Logan, hospitals in
Baghdad and Karbala are systematically killing Sunni patients and then dumping
their bodies in mass graves. Iraq's problem is
fundamentally political, not military. Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds need a deal
that each can live with. Sen. Joseph Biden has outlined an intelligent power-sharing
agreement, but what he, or for that matter George Bush, says doesn't matter.
Power now rests with the locals. And the Shiites and the Sunnis have little trust in one
another. At this point, neither believes that any deal would be honored once
the United States left, which means that each is keeping its own militias as an
insurance policy. If
you were a Shiite, having suffered through a brutal insurgency and an incompetent
government, would you give up your weapons? If you were a Sunni, having watched
government-allied death squads kill and ethnic-cleanse your people, would you
accept a piece of paper that said that this government will now give you one
third of Iraq's oil revenues if you disarm? Power-sharing
agreements rarely work. Stanford scholar James Fearon points out that in the
last 54 civil wars, only nine were resolved by such deals. And the success
stories are telling. South Africa after apartheid is perhaps the best example.
Despite gaining absolute power through the ballot, the African National
Congress chose to share power with its former oppressors. No whites were purged
from the Army or civil service. In Iraq, of course, hundreds of thousands of
Sunni soldiers and administrators were fired, leaving the country without a
state but with an insurgency. And unlike South Africa, Iraq has no dominant political
party. It is run by a weak and fractious coalition. Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki relies on support from the very extremist groups that he must
dismantle—such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. President
Bush says that if America leaves Iraq now, the violence will get worse, and
terrorists could take control. He's right. But that will be true whenever we
leave. "Staying the course" only delays that day of reckoning. To be
fair, however, Bush has now defined the only realistic goal left for America's
mission in Iraq: not achieving success but limiting failure. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15177998/site/newsweek/ ALSO SEE Prof. Juan Cole, at his personal blog, Informed Comment, argues against the
forthcoming Iraq Study Group proposal for a ‘soft partitioning’ of Iraq. “This is a very bad
idea for so many reasons it would take me forever to list them all. But here
are a few: Secret Letter from
Iraq: a Marine’s email home describing ‘Dante’s
Inferno’ makes it way to Generals’ inboxes. Reprinted with permission in Time. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1543658-1,00.html |
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