Democrats & Liberals: Archives

Stephen,

I can appreciate the fictional references, unfortunately they extend to the labeling and fictionalizing of the ideology of your political opponents. In the liberal lexicon neo-con’s are meant to conjure Senator Palpatine’s plotting the overthrow of the Republic and the establishment of an oppressive empire. “Everything that has transpired has done so according to my design.”

I agree with many of your points. In real life ‘the enemy’ have families, freinds, and a culture. They are human beings just as we are. They have every human right that we have. They deserve self-determination and freedom as human beings. Which is why the invasion of Iraq was not a war on the Iraqi people but a war on the Baath Regime. Many of the criticisms you have leveled against the invasion of Iraq as failures in ‘winning the peace’ stem from this focus on avoiding damaging or killing the civilian population and in fact returning Iraq to it’s people.

Obviously you do not hold neo-cons in high esteem. I think what you have defined is a caricature of neo-con positions. For instance, why do neo-cons think that Iraq is a part of the war on terror? Racism? Jingoism? Watching too many hollywood movies?

Najaf is a very good example of why some Neocon thinking on this subject is dangerously off base. The Neocons love a good battle, love historical figures who love one. They like all the things that characterize a good movie battle- Good vs. Evil, epic scale, persistence despite odds, heightened emotions, all sympathies with the good guys, nothing but death and destruction for the bad guys. Isn’t that the way it should be? But in Najaf, the plot thickens, and we have a building that’s not so disposable, one which Shiites across the world will not forgive the destruction of easily. Our wars can have pretty permanent effects on the real world, and not all of them are desireable.

This is an interesting example. Because it illustrates exactly the opposite of what you are saying neo-cons are. What are we doing in Najaf? We are in fact doing everything we can not to flatten a ‘holy site’ that Iranian shiite insurgents are using as a firebase and weapons cache to kill not only US and coalition soldiers but Iraqi civilians as well. How many times have we given Al Sadr, who has taken up arms against the ‘US oppressors’, a second, third, fourth, and fifth chance? All in deference to precisely what you say we have no concept of.

Lo and behold, what have the Neocons created? Combination Nazis and religious cultists, known as the Islamofascists. With this label, the war can be taken alternatively to terrorists or to some government we don’t like. That government doesn’t even have to be real high on the list of terrorist supporters. All they have to be is muslim, maybe Islamist, and have a non-democratic government. Presto-Digitalis! Cannon fodder! An enemy that can be slaughtered without giving the public much pause.

Islamofascist aptly describes the enemy. The Taliban is the form of government preferred by Bin Laden and all those who would follow him. The disagreement we apparently have is how we turn those who would follow him into those who would rather not follow him. This is the war on terror. It is a fact that we cannot prevent every attempt at terrorism everywhere around the globe or even in our homeland, or fatherland if you prefer. (That’s sarcasm.)

Iraq is a part of the war on terror, but it is not a part of the war on Al Qaeda. Iraq was unfinished business, an effort to put right both what we should have done in 1991, and the removal of a dictator who persued WMD and would have used them or more likely passed them to someone else to use them against us. Is the middle east more likely to hate us in the long run with Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq or with a democratically free Iraq?

In another step towards a democratic Iraq; yesterday the national assembly successfully held the elections to form the Iraqi national council in an atmosphere that is entirely new for Iraqis. For the first time we saw free discussions with the absence of fear. No one man talking and the rest just listening and nodding their heads in approval. Many members were so eager to talk and show their opinions, interrupting each other many times and of course this is all natural as a result of being forced to silence for such a long time. This led to a mess many times but it didn’t last for a long time. Objections and the existence of many different points of view in the same place are things that no one dared to do or even think of before.

What happened was huge indeed and people should realize that this is the fruit of toppling Saddam’s regime. The effects of democracy and free speech must not be underestimated but some people are not able to show enough patience to see the results and they are very anxious to judge the whole issue as a disaster whenever some difficulties appear. Some of these people just want us to fail, others are shortsighted and some are just worried about success and want it to happen tomorrow. iraqi blogger Ali

We have argued this endlessly here, with each believing we proved our points back and forth, but without convincing each other of anything. But at least we have had the opportunity to exchange our points and at least hear what the other has to say about what it is they believe.

Great article Stephen. You’re totally right that slapping a label on Muslims dehumanizes them. That seems to be a hallmark of the right. Putting a label on a diverse group of people makes it easier to talk about them in black and white terms.

And in an “I told you so” way, I’m also amused by the recent Iranian rhetoric. They’re telling the world, “The United States is an imminent threat that must be dealt with. We reserve our right to make a pre-emptive attack on them before they or their terrorist allies (Israel) can strike us.” Where have I heard that kind of talk before?

We still have to deal with them, of course. Britain, Germany and France have taken the lead so far. It’ll be interesting to see how far they can go before we have to step in and take the lead. I’m hoping they’ll do better than they did in the Balkans.

Wow, I actually agree with Eric here. Amazing.

Islamofacist is a properly descriptive term in my opinion.

I think invading Iraq was a misstep which has involved us in an intractable situation that has put us in a weaker military position and will lead to another fallen regime or dictatorship upon our withdrawal. I think the “Neocons” must share the fault with this policy even though many are now attempting to separate themselves from the Bush administrations execution of the preemptive action.

Eric continues to be hopeful, as do I, but reality has yet to produce any real light. I find it interesting that Eric at least acknowledges what the Bush administration to date has not. That being that Iraq had nothing to do with persuing Al Qaeda and little to do with the war on terror. It was about revisiting Iraq I and about goepolitical dominance of the middle east.

SD
Informative and fun to read.
ES
It seemed wrong at the time, but #41 did the right thing stopping the assault on Iraq in 1991. The precarious balance of power between Iran and Iraq is now broken, with Iran likely to shape Iraq’s future in ways we will not like.
Things are getting worse in both Afghanistan and Iraq, which does not bode well for our war on terror. The Bush approach has given binLaden the best rallying point possible for what would otherwise have been a completely disenfranchised character after 9-11. Bush has lost his moral authority by stooping to totalitarian ways of handling war prisoners and criminals. How can we take the WMD story seriously when we have so many ourselves, to use and sell ruthlessly. How can we accept the lame excuses put forth by Bush for freedom and Democracy and health care for the Iraqi people? We know that BushCo did not respect the principle of one man one vote in Florida, we know that he is against universal health care and price negotiation on prescription drugs at home. #43 has failed to respond to binLaden’s crimes in smart cost effective ways. Al Qaeda is sprouting a new plan while the neocons spend billions responding to their last move. But they never do the same thing twice. Bush promised that the war on terror would not be a war against Islam, but he has lost his way again. Is there enough money in this country to quell 1 billion true believers? Going back to cost-benefit issues we need to understand that every year 24,000 to 32,000 people die every year from both murder and traffic accidents. WWII cost $350 billion total. We have already spent $200 billion invading Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9-11. People need to realize that a central reason for these horrendous costs is that traditional Defense functions are being privatized, with war profiteering for BushCo cronies. At the same time BushCo has tried to cut the wages and benefits of ordinary working Americans (with mixed results). How low will BushCo go in his war on terror?

Eric, I’m not trying to convince you that there are no people in the Middle East that might need killing, nor am I trying to demonize you. This is more a critique of two things- seeing war as a gloriously uncomplicated way of solving things, and using the wrong frame of reference, the wrong story, if you will to describe our opponents in the various confrontations we have in the world.

The real problem in going after the insurgents, whoever they may be, is not that we held back. Killing civilians en masse would hardly endear us to the population. Heck, we did bad enough promising that our fighting wouldn’t get innocent people killed. We should have never made the promise that this would not happen, because it set up an expectation we could not help but fall short of, and it also kept the civilian population in place while we were taking the cities of Iraq, ensuring, rather than preventing large numbers of civilian casualties.

Which brings me to the real problem- we only had enough soldiers to invade, to strike, not enough to police the areas well, to seal the borders, or to provide space for refugees. For want off soldiers, we stood by while Baghdad was looted. For want of soldiers, we could not mount effective patrols immediately. For want of soldiers, we could not seal the border of the countries to preserve our monopoly of force.

Not only this but our soldiers were given no solid plans or contingencies of what to do to begin the reconstruction, to begin our occupation. We assumed way too many things about what we could get the Iraqi army to do, and we let many of the police and army officials just melt away, resulting not only in an underground army, but also a lack of labor and law enforcement to keep things running. We paid for the chaos that sowed ever since. This is what we mean by losing the peace. We went in their, we hit a military homerun, but we didn’t follow through, and as result, our successful invasion has turned into a problematic occupation. Civilian deaths are only a part of that. Mostly it’s that we told ourselves the wrong stories.

What would I suggest is the cause in the Neocon psychology? A thirst for glory. A need to confront and wield power over potential rivals, a need to convince yourselves that strong, aggressive military responses are justified and will do the job. Trouble is many Republican policy positions have taken on the aura of theology, where one has faith that a certain policy is guaranteed to work, instead of believing more tentatively that it might work, and going at things more pragmatically.

In short, I think your people are too idealistic, too faithful to your own theories to treat them with the skepticism that all theories deserve. That’s why I made the connection to the movies, because as often as not, filmmakers want to provoke just such an unskeptical, idealistic response in an audience, to get them fully on the hero’s side. There’s a funny conversation in the Kevin Smith film Clerks about whether the contractors who were building the Second Death Star deserved to die along with all the imperial soldiers. The joke naturally hinges on the fact that few people really thing about that, that most people just cheer as the planet destroying monstrosity is blown to smithereens. My problem with your philosophy, is that it takes the idealism that’s suited to idealized, intensified, and glorified events of a story, and try and apply it to real life, a proposition that has been seen as foolish and immature throughout much of history.

I agree with many of your points. In real life ‘the enemy’ have families, friends, and a culture. They are human beings just as we are. They have every human right that we have. They deserve self-determination and freedom as human beings.Which is why the invasion of Iraq was not a war on the Iraqi people but a war on the Baath Regime.

Eric, I think this is where one of your primary mistakes comes into play. You assume that these people are going to say, “Hey, they’re shooting at the Baathists”. It doesn’t occur to you that these people might not look at our invasion as simply an attack on their government, but also an attack on them. We embraced an illusion that had us believe that we could invade as we did an not confront the nation of Iraq as well as its government. We fooled ourselves into believing that Iraqis would stay on the sidelines, and that we would not encounter interlopers. We failed to assert ourselves, and make it clear to the Iraqis that we were now in charged, and that we would not be trifled with. By failing to stem the looting, we also failed to show them that we would not tolerate lawlessness and insurrectional behavior.

My rule of thumb in dealing with any group is to understand and recognize the story they tell themselves about the world. By lumping people into a huge collective of Islamofascists, we deny ourselves the ability to look at their specific attitudes, their specific allegiances and alliances. We imagine intentions they don’t have, picture threats they don’t pose.

The worse part about the Bush Doctrine is that it short circuits the processes that prevent us from going to war on such uncritical grounds. It encourages wars of aggression, wars meant to assert strength and power, rather than restrict us to just those wars where our intervention is made necessary or compelling.

Because the burden of proof is most heavily on us, it makes it more politically hazardous to admit fault. If Iraq had really presented us with a causus belli, we would not have needed or sought such a high standard of evidence. Hell, I remember wondering why Bush was taking so long to go after the Taliban in Afghanistan! Because we had been attacked, all the messy philosophical questions had melted away. if your people had stuck to going after Al Quaeda and associated groups of that kind, Liberals would have few complaints, because we recognized Al Quaeda as our enemy unequivocally.

Instead, your party took us astray from that enemy, leaving a war unfinished in Afghanistan. If this were WWII It would have been like the U.s. Army peeling off from Normandy and attacking Franco’s regime in Spain. The target wouldn’t have been sympathetic, but the timing and the choice of targets would have left something to be desired. As wonderful as being rid of Saddam, and having democracy in Iraq may be, it could turn out to be, for America, a thing bought at too high a price.

In my lessons in screenwriting, an interesting concept was posed: that drama does not come from choices between good and evil. When that’s the case, a hero’s internal debate about the subject is simple vacillation. The drama, the important parts of a story, come when one is forced to chose between two equally undesireable evils or two irreconcilable goods. These dramatic points are of great value because they echo the same kind of choices we have to make in real life. Even in Star Wars, in the end, this comes into play, after the opposing goods and opposing evils of killing or not killing the Emperor Palpatine or Vader come into play. We had a choice between continuing the pursuit of Bin Laden to the end, and reforming Afghanistan so it would never again become a failed state haven for the likes of Bin Laden, or invading Iraq and conferring those benefits. Most people who know something about the region say that by Invading Iraq we let the greater of the two evils go, and gained the lesser of the two goods. In addition to that, we have fostered an even greater evil against ourselves, by playing right into the hands of our greater enemy in the actions we’ve taken.

If you wonder why I continue to defend nuance, its in part because I’m a writer, and I am very aware of the effect nuance has on the stories we tell. Such nuances can mean the difference between a bright future or a darker one. We can afford to apply glosses like the label “Islamofascist” on the stories we tell ourselves, because the nuances are important to the choices we make, and the methods we use.

You talk about theatrics; well WE are the props, the extras, in the radical’s play. Before 9/11, the terrorists made no specific demands. There was nothing we could have done to dissuade them from attacking, short of stop being the United States. What objective did they hope to accomplish? If you make threats, you have to at least imply a “do it or else”. There was no “or else”. That is because the destruction was part of their drama, mostly played for their audiences back home. The thousands of Americans and others killed were extras. The U.S. stands in the way of almost everything a radical Muslim holds dear. Islamic states are not compatible with liberal democracy, women’s rights, free markets, separation of church and state etc. The list of things we should refuse to give up goes on and on. A fundamentalist Christian state would be similarly incompatible, but I rarely need to point this out to liberals who seem to understand this very well already. So why don’t we just leave “them” alone to live as “they” want, like the South before civil rights or, a more extreme case, Nazi Germany. We can’t. We saw how well appeasement worked with the Nazis. The Osama bin Ladens of the world can reach out and touch us, and they will. Is it nice to believe we have no enemies, but sometimes we don’t get to choose our enemies. They choose us. In the case of radical terrorists, for example, we are the enemies, not because of anything we do, but because of what we are. Better to fight the battle in Mesopotamia than Minneapolis and unless we want to give up our freedoms, we have to win in Iraq and most Iraqis will be better off and freer ten years from now as a result. Think again of the Nazi analogy. A poll taken in Germany in 1945 would not have turned up too much support for the U.S. In both cases, our enemies chose us and we had to respond where they were.

Excellent article, Stephen.

Speaking of movies - I read somewhere a while back that the “insurgents” in Iraq have been influenced by the movie “Braveheart”. Dark Irony, huh? A movie produced in Hollywood and made by a guy who follows a radical form of Christianity has inspired these guys to keep fighting and killing American soldiers.

Eric wrote:
“Iraq is a part of the war on terror, but it is not a part of the war on Al Qaeda. Iraq was unfinished business, an effort to put right both what we should have done in 1991,{“

But unfinished business from 1991 was the least of our worries in the aftermath of 9/11. I think that putting all our money and resources into dealing with Bin Laden and the Taliban from start to finish should have taken presidence over anything having to do with Iraq. And when I think of the billions we have/will pour into that country at a time when our intelligence community needs to update in every single capacity in order to deal with Al Qaeda, it stuns me. This administration shot itself in the foot from the moment they decided to go to Iraq - and our soldiers are paying the ultimate price for that complete and utter stupidity.

“and the removal of a dictator who persued WMD and would have used them or more likely passed them to someone else to use them against us.”

The information about WMD was cooked by Tenent, Dubya and Friends. Many people in the intelligence community were saying this from the outset, but no one listened.

“Is the middle east more likely to hate us in the long run with Saddam Hussein in control of Iraq or with a democratically free Iraq?”

Will it matter if one or several of Al Qaeda’s dirty bombs goes off in an American city? I think that in the event of thousands or millions dying in another terrorist attack in this country, martial law will be declared and we will forever kiss our own American freedom and democracy goodbye.

God help Bush, and God help us all, if Collin Powell resigns. Stephen your analysis and Eric’s position point to the relationship between the DoD and State Dept. The DoD is all about tactics and strategy to wipe out numbers of the faceless, nameless, and virtually non-human enemy. The State Dep’t. under Collin Powell is also about tactics and strategy, but, they are designed around recognizing the enemy as humans, and trying to use that human recognition as common ground for diplomacy and mutual conciliation where possible.

The role of both is indispensible in a difficult military conflict with no ready exits. In a guerilla war where unlimited enemy replacements are a factor like in Viet Nam, the ultimate answers to conflict resolution are perpetual war based on repeated annhiliations of replacement armies until there are no more replacements, or, a diplomatic conciliation resulting from both sides electing to make other issues a higher priority (the way the Viet Nam War and Korean War were finally concluded.)

To give some credence to Stephen’s labels of neocons, I would bet Las Vegas that conservatives value the DoD higher than the State Dep’t. and doves value the State Dep’t. higher than the DoD in measures of respect and importance in resolving conflicts. The truth is, both are needed to end conflicts once begun; and to the extent that they remain coordinated and maintain an open dialogue about timing and options, the more likely we are to conclude conflicts earlier than later.

God help Bush, and God help us all, if Collin Powell resigns.

Why? If the guy felt that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do, he should have threatened to resign rather than just click his heels and salute.

And Jack, you need to make a distiction between the estimated 18,000 Islamic radicals who threaten the US and the 1.3 billion Muslims who just hate Bush.

We have argued this endlessly here, with each believing we proved our points back and forth, but without convincing each other of anything. But at least we have had the opportunity to exchange our points and at least hear what the other has to say about what it is they believe.

Well said Eric. I’m really inexperienced at interacting online.(I type with 2 fingers) So I’m really impressed with all these typed words.I am hooked on this site now (even though it leans to the left! waaah) But it’s much more stimulating and informative than the normal chat around the trucks & forklifts at work! (” **** the shrines, blow em all up.” “We need to break out the BIG bombs & level all them countries.” To just isolating ourselves. I really enjoy hearing all of you alls (I’m from N.C.) views & have a much better understanding of the feelings and beliefs
of real liberals & not the repetitive parrots on tv. Once you hear the first one talk, you already know what is coming out of the rest of their mouths! Both sides. Boreing :-O Thanks all.

Not only this but our soldiers were given no solid plans or contingencies of what to do to begin the reconstruction, to begin our occupation. We assumed way too many things about what we could get the Iraqi army to do, and we let many of the police and army officials just melt away, resulting not only in an underground army, but also a lack of labor and law enforcement to keep things running. We paid for the chaos that sowed ever since. This is what we mean by losing the peace. We went in their, we hit a military homerun, but we didn’t follow through, and as result, our successful invasion has turned into a problematic occupation. Civilian deaths are only a part of that. Mostly it’s that we told ourselves the wrong stories.

I’m willing to concede the point that post regime change planning was insufficient and/or did not account for contingencies it could have. But, I do not think that this is a fatal flaw that now dooms Iraq. There is the possibility that any occupation, no matter how many troops you have, would be problematic. In that, the more troops you have the more targets you present. But it is certainly a good point to say that sufficient troops might discourage insurgency.

One thing I’m pretty sure of Stephen is that Bush is not micromanaging this war. The commanders in the field seem to be making most of these decisions. Tommy Frank’s book is on my short list to get and read. Part of what Kerry has projected in this campaign makes me wonder if he would not be more personally involved in managing military operations. I think that would likely be a disaster.

What would I suggest is the cause in the Neocon psychology? A thirst for glory. A need to confront and wield power over potential rivals, a need to convince yourselves that strong, aggressive military responses are justified and will do the job. Trouble is many Republican policy positions have taken on the aura of theology, where one has faith that a certain policy is guaranteed to work, instead of believing more tentatively that it might work, and going at things more pragmatically.

In short, I think your people are too idealistic, too faithful to your own theories to treat them with the skepticism that all theories deserve.

The same can be said of Kerry ‘the internationist’. To have an ideology does not disqualify one’s positions.

You have hit upon a key phrase (or doctrine) though that is central to my thinking and ‘neo-con’ thinking in general. “A need to confront and wield power over potential rivals.” I think this is a core difference in how the left and right view the use of military power. Sometimes the best defense is a good offense. Obviously Bush isn’t on a country invading rampage. On the one hand you say neo-cons want to invade every country in the middle east and on the other use the fact of any reluctance to do so as proof of your belief that they do want to, but somehow can’t, and that somehow proves they are wrong. The characterization of the neo-con position as military adventurism is not accurate.

I think of it more along the lines of law and order. The police can’t say they can arrest some criminals but not others. Crime is crime and the police have a duty to arrest criminals. I don’t think we need to be a world empire to be the world’s policeman… I’m not sure I want us to be the world’s policeman in perpetuity. But, since 9/11 we have been at war. And I am convinced that part of that war means being something of a policeman in order to combat the enemy. The direct and immediate enemy is one group that struck us: Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda is only one group among many who share the same ideas, the same tactics, the same personel in some cases, as well as the same funding sources, and the same recruitment pool. Al Qaeda is a branch. Not the tree.

I don’t think of the middle east as a mass of faceless people who need to be killed. I see it as a place that is oppressed. I see a religion that has been perverted into something that is a cult of death. (And by that I am not saying every muslim. I think of the apostasy that was the south under the Klan.) I see entire nations and cultures that have been primed to self destruct. There’s a long history leading to it and the most recent tragedy was the adoption of western autocratic styles of government in vogue at the turn of the century without some of the more classical liberal influences that should go along with it. In fact at one time the Arab world actually held, protected, built upon, and added to much of the classical knowledge, wisdom, and science of western civilization while Europe fell into the dark ages.

My wife has an Iraqi uncle, who is very liberal by the way, and will probably be voting for Kerry. I literally love the man and would not want anything to happen to him or his family who are still in Iraq. I still hope to go to Iraq with him in a year or two. He opposed the war, and still opposes Bush. But he is happy that Iraq is free of Saddam Hussein. You can see it on his face. He is able to talk to his family whereas before he could not for fear of putting their lives in jeopardy. He was literally consigned to never being able to see his family or his country ever again. Now he is planning it.

It hasn’t made him a conservative or a fan of Bush, but it has given him something that wasn’t there before, hope. Of course, the future of Iraq is no longer known. It is no longer certain. That can be a source of hope or a source of fear. But I would choose a future of hope over a future of certain oppression any day. As I would choose it for any human being regardless of where they come from or what religion they may be. They can make what they wish of their lives. Yes, they may have to fight. Yes, there may be struggle and chaos for a time, but if they get the chance to live in freedom for the long term it will literally transform the middle east.

Holy cow! Rational discourse is in full bloom around here all of a sudden. Thanks Eric.

But, I do not think that this is a fatal flaw that now dooms Iraq.

I agree. That’s why Democrats picked the guy who said we’re going to stay in Iraq until the job is done. Or until a sovereign Iraqi government gives us the boot, more likely.

But Al Qaeda is only one group among many who share the same ideas, the same tactics, the same personel in some cases, as well as the same funding sources, and the same recruitment pool. Al Qaeda is a branch. Not the tree.

Can you elaborate on that? I agree that there are several groups that are only loosely affiliated with al Qaeda, but almost all of them cite bin Laden’s fatwa’s as justification for wanting to attack Americans, and most of them received (are still receiving) training at bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistsn.

Yes, there may be struggle and chaos for a time, but if they get the chance to live in freedom for the long term it will literally transform the middle east.

From your mouth to God’s ear. Unfortunately, my favorite neo-con thinker, Fukuyama, believes that Iraq is headed for disaster, “Increasingly, I find it hard to imagine a series of events that will lead to a good outcome. There’s a much easier path towards civil war than there is to a stable, democratic Iraq. In the long run, this has not made us more secure, it has made us less secure. It is appalling.”

I agree, Eric, that the bad planning isn’t necessarily going to be fatal for Iraq as a new nation, but I would submit that if we don’t get our act together, It could turn out that way, or at the very least become the source of some rather crippling problems.

In my experience, the use of force is always more problematic than the presence of the capability to use it.

When we do use it, we must be as surgical and circumspect in our planning and execution as we can, because when our plans hit reality, they will inevitably become more complicated, and the more direct and accurate our thinking is, the less these complications will multiply.

The inaccuracies for our case meant that we could not shame the international community into helping us. It also means that Arabs and muslims in the area can be tempted to think that our case was just a pretense to war, and we can’t use the truth as a defense to that charge. Additionally, it ensured rockier support back home, because a consensus was brought on across party lines to support this war. Many Democrats, rightly or wrongly, believe that they had been had, and recent evidence of the statements and attitudes of Bush administration officials have only served to reinforce that impression.

Our lack of planning, proper intelligence, and whatnot also resulted in an underestimation of forces needed, coupled with misdirection of what forces we had from necessary assignments.

We should have had a plan ready, as well, for maintaining the continuity of goverment there, for making sure law and order stayed strong, because, as I said before, the implicit threat is much more effective usually than the explicit. The question these people ask is, all things being equal, will I get caught in the normal course of things? Will there be a border patrol to alert the police of my entry? A police force patrolling the streets I wish to bomb, willing and able to pull me over? Will they have a network of snitches to run afoul of? Will there be a place I can hide in the cities and towns where their reach is dubious at best? Like everybody who stays in the criminal business long enough, the people we have to worry about are quite capable of weighing the risks. The good ones will bug out.

But without an effective police force- Well, why else have the police become such common targets? The lawlessness created opportunities for these people, and with their actions, they’ve managed to keep things fairly chaotic for the last year. We’ve had to keep more soldiers there longer, and given the world the image of the new Iraqi government as a dependent, a puppet.

If you really think about it, the opportunity created by the chaos doesn’t just benefit one kind of people. It can benefit the Sunni Al Quaeda extremists and Shia Al Sadr extremists alike without there necessarily being any less bad blood between the two groups. If you’re a Baathists and bandits can share the same chaotic state of affairs without sharing beliefs or techniques.

The distinctions exist, even if the violence and its affects remain the same.

I rather like the good analysis in this latest comment. I don’t necessarily think, though that these goverment primed to self-destruct- actually the problem is they are quite conservative and quite hard to shake. These are governments raised as bulwarks as part of the competition between the great powers earlier in the century and the cold war later on. They were meant to stay relatively stable for long periods of time, and they have. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, these autocratic governments, lacking the flexibility of democracies keep lids on people’s cultural needs and desires.

Al-Quaeda is not a sideshow to the main attraction. It is the future. It decentralized, not dependent on any one country that we may choose to bomb. They have successfully killed many Americans, and will do so again, givern the chance. They may not have a state to back them up, but really they did not need one to inflict damage on us. Remember, the hijackers did not use Afghanistan’s military equipment to do the harm they did.

I’m happy for your uncle in law. I just hope that the way Bush waged this war doesn’t make his dreams of return short-lived.