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| Definitive statement on Iraq Oct, 2006 | | Date Created: Oct 22, 2006, 02:36 PM |
Definitive statement on Iraq -- October 2006
It's time for a reassessment of the situation in Iraq. What have we learned? What's the best approach at this point? What's working? What's not working?
A recent lecture by Robert Pape has given me the latest piece in the puzzle to figure what's going on and what would be best at this point. Find it here:
You can ignore the rest of this but listen to the lecture.
Before summarizing Pape's thesis, let's review what's happened and what I said before.
The War in Iraq is not war. The war was over in two weeks. The current situation is a military occupation. The reason it's portrayed as a war is intellectual laziness and the partisan attempt to link it to the Viet Nam war and get Bush out just as Nixon was forced out. Most of the rhetoric and portrayal of the current situation is politically motivated to attack Bush, the Republicans, and the party in power. The liberals/Democrats don't have a better answer, they just want to be in power. This doesn't mean the occupation of Iraq was a wise or necessary move.
The war, such as it is, is the War on Terrorism. One of the fundamental problems is that a war on terrorism cannot be won. It's not even possible to know if you've won. It's like the war on drugs or the war on poverty. It functions to increase our own government's power and money and curtail our freedoms just like a real war, but it can't be won.
It's clear that a legitimate role of our federal government is to provide for the common defense. Unfortunately it's not at all clear that taking out Saddam, regime change, and trying to remake Iraq is a worthy tactic in defense of our country. The takeover of Iraq (differing from Afghanistan) was a preemptive strike, and, like prophylactic surgery, it's never clear whether it was warranted and even if it was, few will ever thank you.
The WMD thing was largely a red herring used by the left to attack Bush but it was certainly part of the equation of a preemptive strike. The arguable absence of WMD as a threat of Iraq beyond its borders is part of the usual argument that the prophylactic surgery wasn't justified -- the effects were worse than the threat -- the tumor wasn't malignant.
The real problems with the situation in Iraq or any foreign country is the common fault of Big Government and perversely that of "neoconservatives". It is the idea that one can build a government in our own image and to our own desires and, further, that a government can build an economy. A side issue is using our military to perform their military job (which they did very well) and then use them to police a country. We don't feel that works in our own country; why should it work in a foreign one?
So the second stage of the reasoning was what we should have done that might have had a chance of working (assuming that deposing Saddam and imposing regime change was necessary). To reconcile the two it became apparent that we should have swooped in and won the military victory and then left the Iraqi people to fight it out as to how they want to run their country (which they're essentially doing now) and threatening to return if we don't like what they came up with. Propping up a country's government with foreign aid doesn't work either, but at least it doesn't involve ground troops.
The difference with that scenario as well as our options now is what Pape's thesis addresses. He's not concerned with the inability of a government to form a country's government and run its economy. He's studied what motivates terrorist tactics and specifically suicide bombing. Like the recent intelligence study in the news, Pape concludes that it's not radical Islam that's the problem. Religion is the excuse, not the fundamental problem. The problem is power, politics, and nationalism (or tribalism) and the biggest motivator to recruit people to die for the cause is the presence of US and Europeans in the Middle East and specific Muslim/Arabic countries.
It doesn't matter what the US does at home or even so much what's it's done in the past. The motivator is the presence of US and other foreign troops. Even the Jews and Israeli troops are viewed this way (as foreigners). Not only are we encouraging terrorist attacks on our troops but we're not going to get anywhere when our very presence drives terrorist recruitment.
So Pape suggests even now that we do what I was contemplating and that's to sit offshore and in the air and threaten but not try to run things on the ground unless the situation becomes unacceptable and then we use the military to do its job again. We can't prop up a government we like. We can only intervene to overthrow the existing power structure and then physically move out and try to use threats, financial, and unprotected humanitarian support to keep things from returning back to a dictatorship that threatens its neighbors.
Kind of a combination of "the beacon on the hill" and "speak softly and carry a big stick" policy. |
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