The fat lady’s not warming up in the Iraqi wings anymore; she’s in full voice under the hot spotlights onstage. The entire planet can hear her wailing song… so if the war is lost, why are we still there?
Some folks are still hoping to find a genie in a lamp — someone to grant a wish and make it all better:
The cause of that failure is rooted in an Iraqi political culture that makes it as yet impossible for enough of the political leadership to act with a sense of national consciousness. We should nonetheless make a last effort to change the composition of the government and assemble a new one composed of those — Kurds, moderate Sunnis, secular Shiites and some of the religious Shiites — who might be capable of reaching a grand political settlement.
If wishes were fishes…
Others see the situation being overwhelmed by confusion and partisanship:
In the cacophony of competing plans about how to deal with Iraq, one reality now appears clear: despite the Democrats’ victory this month in an election viewed as a referendum on the war, the idea of a rapid American troop withdrawal is fast receding as a viable option.
So many options, so little time…
The Saudis, though, know exactly why we’re letting that song go on — why we can’t possibly move to the final coda yet:
Both the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite death squads are to blame for the current bloodshed in Iraq. But while both sides share responsibility, Iraqi Shiites don’t run the risk of being exterminated in a civil war, which the Sunnis clearly do. Since approximately 65 percent of Iraq’s population is Shiite, the Sunni Arabs, who make up a mere 15 to 20 percent, would have a hard time surviving any full-blown ethnic cleansing campaign.
The reason we’re still in Iraq, folks, is really pretty straightforward at this point. If we leave — when we leave — full-on ethnic cleansing is likely to churn in our wake. Genocide.
You thought we were having national pangs of conscience now? Just wait until that lady’s done singing.
Spot on. Which is why we aren’t going to be leaving anytime soon. At least, not until something is in place to prevent that ethnic cleansing from taking place. Maybe that is an improved (or even new) Iraqi government along with the police/internal security force needed to prevent it, maybe it is a multinational peacekeeping force (similar to what NATO has in place in Afghanistan and Kosovo), maybe it is something the nature of which we don’t know yet. However, we don’t need another Darfur, or another Kosovo, or another Lebanon, Cambodia, Soviet Union, occupied Europe…
Is the problem solvable? I think we all had better hope so, otherwise we are really setting our future generations up for something that they would prefer not seeing.
~EdT.
Something I forget to mention: we could have been in the “same fine mess” in Europe and Japan at the end of WWII, except for two men named “Eisenhower” and “MacArthur”, and the political establishment which supported them. These two men (MacArthur especially) implemented policies that some weren’t happy with, but which had the effect of accelerating the ‘rehabilitation’ of a defeated enemy.
Would that we had a MacArthur in Iraq these days…
~EdT.
It’s gotten harder, rather than easier, to write about Iraq. The situation is SO bad — so beyond redemption.
The 2 am bartender refrain of , “Don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here” has been playing in my mind lately. We can’t pull the troops out or there will be either genocide or a massive regional war that could (probably would) go global.
We can’t leave them there to die, either.
What a terrible mess…. and I don’t actually think that even a MacArthur could do much at this point.
Yes… Saddam may yet live to see “The Mother of All Battles” he so wanted during GW1.
I am afraid that what we will have to do is go in there and simply clean out the insurgents – accepting the casualties (both among our troops and ‘collateral damage’ among the civilians). We must find and eliminate their leadership/command structure, and basically break the will of the people there to resist (which is actually what made the post-war rehab in both Germany and Japan so much easier.) We have the military capability to do this, but I don’t know that we have the political will (and I am not just talking about Congress – I am not sure the American people have the stomach to take down an entire population like that.)
The other option is to invent a time machine – fast! – and go back and do it right (which might just mean not doing it at all.)
~EdT.