I took a lot of heat for yesterday’s TMV post about supporting the “surge” proposal. Much of it was expected and some was not (particularly the more personal attacks), but there was one response that’s really bothering me.
The commenter made several numbered points, but this first one is where I’m stuck:
What is the deal with all these people deathly afraid of withdrawing from Iraq? Yes, its a tragic end to a failed and contemptible execution of foreing policy but it also does several things that aren’t so bad:
1) It will leave the US as the sole world super-power. Still. A lost battle does not lose a war (especially this one which is so emphemeral and fluid in its focus). The Romans endured stunning catastrophes constantly in their conflicts and yet always managed to come out on top (well, for several centuries at least!)
And I saw another version of that today, in a (very heated) comment thread on a Jason Steck post at TMV:
it will get ugly while the countries inhabitants (remember them? There is an indigenous population there though one wouldn’t know it by our debates about whether to “surge” or “partition” the country is the best answer.) work out their differences one way or another. And when that day comes America will be what it was in 2001. The greatest power on earth, still.
I simply don’t know what to make of this. It strikes me as appallingly arrogant, even narcissistic.
It is because of the Iraqi people that I feel we cannot turn away without having exhausted every possible attempt to save them. That, above every other consideration, is why I chose to support the “surge” plan in Iraq.
To mentally dismiss the fall-out from Iraq’s collapse and ensuing mayhem as “ugly”, but they’ll “work their differences out one way or another” while we drive on as America the Great is incredible.
Please — tell me I’m misunderstanding something. Tell me that folks aren’t justifying the troop withdrawals or redeployment proposals in this way.
We lost our greatness the day we invaded a country without a plan… and on that very same day, we assumed responsibiity for the people whose lives we disrupted.
This war, for me, long-since stopped being about the United States. It’s all about them now. The people.
We’re not great if we walk away and let them die.
You hit the nail square on the head with this statement:
This really is no longer about who is/was right, or Bush, or WMD, or Saddam, or any of that other stuff. This is about the fact that we assumed a responsibility for a people when we destroyed their government (evil and reprehensible as that government was), and we have to honor that commitment and do our damndest to help stabilize and rebuild that country. It is similar to what has happened to other ‘allies’ in the past, where we convinced them to commit to fighting on our side, then jerked the rug out from under them (I am referring to our abandonment of the Hmong back during the Vietnamese conflict, and the Kurds and Shiites in the aftermath of Gulf War I.)
The problem is that the battle facing the military now is different than it was then. And, we don’t have an Eisenhower or MacArthur or Marshall (three generals who knew how to go about putting a defeated enemy back together after you kicked their teeth down their throats) – this is what really concerns me as we move forward.
~EdT.
Thank you for this, Polimom. Articulate, touching, and so very accurate. Thank you most of all for rising above the fray of simple-minded rants.
Thank you most of all for rising above the fray of simple-minded rants.
Ohhhhhhh……. but it was hard.
yes, we “broke it, we own it”. except for the iraqi people the best outcome is not readily apparent from here. our presence there is only escalating the violence. and pissing them off more towards US. both th innocent civilians and the fundamentalist freaks. of which we have plenty here too, and most of them are staying the course.
there is absolutely nothing wrong with leaving. for us, it will be a defeat, but one where we cut our losses and still have the capacity to fight another war, one that may come and be more justified. for them, they will have to take responsability, and we have to support them: financially, through open society education, through being a voice for them in international affairs, and through keeping their neighbors in reign (such as asking/making the turks not to eye kurdistan, the iranians not to interfere – or else, and by standing up to putin’s ambitions to destabilize the middle east and the oil markets further). these are all diplomatic and economic-social ways of fixing a war broken by the incompetent warmongers. so the argument that we have to stay or surge for the iraqis doesn’t fly either for me. nor are the others related to what would happen if the iraq goes to chaos. it is in chaos now. let’s move on. let’s move past the failed diplomacy of a president who can’t negotiate unless he has the upper hand as he said himself. diplomacy is about finding the best outcome in a given situation, with balanced advantages for all involved.
I agree that the comments are incredibly narcissistic. Unbelievable, really, worrying about whether or not we’re a super-power in the face of this mess. And I do understand your sense that we’re responsible for the people, it’s a good argument and one that I’ve had with myself. But as you know, I am a resident of New Orleans, and it’s still awfully hard to see Bush proposals for 1 billion dollar job training programs and sending 20K more of our kids to Iraq, when both of those proposals, not to mention the expenditure, would be such a great help to us here.
Couple all that with my inherent and hopeless view that killing doesn’t solve anything, and I’m really struggling with this. I know where my heart lies but your argument is a lucid and thoughtful one. I’ve rarely been among the “undecideds” on any issue, but on this one I’ll have to be among them for a while longer.
It’s not comfortable here.
one more thing. maybe the most important if you care about the iraqis: why dont you ask for them to be allowed to come here as refugees: tell them openly: look, we screwed up your country, the least we can do is to help you resettle here, and try and have a better life. if you stay there, we can’t help you much, our policymakers and the military were never good at nationbuilding. there are precedents, and we owe them this. if we let so many latin americans in just because they’re our neighbors, why not iraqis, who we owe…
even more far-sighted sci-fi proposal: why not offer all israeli citizens financial help and visas for relocating in new mexico (most similar climate), give them jobs and economic opportunity, and then stop supporting the state of israel? for example create a statewide-scale manhattan project for alternative energies, then abandon both israel and the military and financial support of any middle east adventures when successful. tell putin he can have it, and osama he can have the house of saud just for himself. anyone opposed? 🙂
i was told this sounds like an antisemitic workcamp proposal. i don’t think it is. it is about offering the israelis a choice and the same level of support to citizens personally that we are now giving their state in military support. and about defusing the ethnic conflict in the ME and our energy dependency to it at the same time.
and this strategy could apply to a number of nationalities and regional issues…
Westrom —
I played with something similar in my mind a few months ago. I even posted about it (here), but while I understand what you’re thinking, that’s as unworkable as everything else.
I have no idea how religious you are (or are not) — but if nothing else is true about the Middle East, including Israel, it’s that the grounds for all these hostilities and hatreds is religious, and ancient. The claim to Holy Lands, whether in Saudi or Israel, is the one hill people have chosen to die on again and again.
Slate (and Westrom, too, though it wasn’t mentioned in your comments) —
The posts I wrote last week about the crime there in Nola really bothered me, actually, in this context. There are some unnerving parallels between the situations, and the lack of security and infrastructure are near the top of the list.
But just at the moment, I don’t know what more to do for NOLA. $$ has been committed but not spent because it’s hung up at the state and local levels, and a federal intervention for the security issues would not only be badly received, they’d be unprecedented.
Yet withdrawing/redeploying from Iraq wouldn’t save a penny that could be redirected to help, even if there was somebody in charge there who’d be able to manage it, I don’t think. We’ll be financially committed to the ME region as a result of this incredible disaster, probably, until AC’s children are grown.
I got to thinking about if we were not involved in Iraq, and if the money we have been spending on Iraq in any way was simply redirected to Katrina related rebuilding.
It seems to me there would be more outrage about that much money being spent on rebuilding our own cities. This is because we are more accepting that the military and armed forces always take tons of our money to operate. But there are is no precedent for federal money of that scale being spent on an area because of a natural disaster. Maybe over a long period of time, but not in tens of billions of dollars every six months.
We are more willing to spend this money on people outside of our country than inside of it. I think this is mostly because outside of our borders, we either hate, or can’t picture anyone else legally giving that much of their resources to help. And inside of our borders the feeling is that ultimately you could just move to another state if its so bad.