September 25, 2004
Iraq: Reality Check Please
Can any rational, reasonable person even keeping half an ear on the news out of Iraq possibly believe that the country is on the road to democracy? Violence grows on a daily basis with U.S. military official announcing that four Marines, from the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, were killed Friday in three separate incidents while “conducting security and stability operations,” in al Anbar province, while at least seven Iraqi’s lost their lives in the ongoing battles in and around Al- Falluja.
How can elections be conducted under such an umbrella violence? Would Americans given similar circumstances turn out in large numbers to vote?
Meanwhile, President Bush praised interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and detailed his plan for stabilizing Iraq during his weekly radio address Saturday, stating, "[I]n less than three months, Prime Minister Allawi and his government have accomplished a great deal, despite persistent violence in parts of Iraq." What have the Iraqi’s been able to accomplish Mr. Bush? Has the violence lessoned, are the Iraqi people any closer to democracy then they were under Saddam’s rule. How long before the country fractures and Civil War bloodies the Iraqi people even more?
And consider this from yesterdays Washington Post:
BAGHDAD, Sept. 25 -- Less than four months before planned national elections in Iraq, attacks against U.S. troops, Iraqi security forces and private contractors number in the dozens each day and have spread to parts of the country that had been relatively peaceful, according to statistics compiled by a private security firm working for the U.S. government.Attacks over the past two weeks have killed more than 250 Iraqis and 29 U.S. military personnel, according to figures released by Iraq's Health Ministry and the Pentagon. A sampling of daily reports produced during that period by Kroll Security International for the U.S. Agency for International Development shows that such attacks typically number about 70 each day. In contrast, 40 to 50 hostile incidents occurred daily during the weeks preceding the handover of political authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 28, according to military officials.
Reports covering seven days in a recent 10-day period depict a nation racked by all manner of insurgent violence, from complex ambushes involving 30 guerrillas north of Baghdad on Monday to children tossing molotov cocktails at a U.S. Army patrol in the capital's Sadr City slum on Wednesday. On maps included in the reports, red circles denoting attacks surround nearly every major city in central, western and northern Iraq, except for Kurdish-controlled areas in the far north. Cities in the Shiite Muslim-dominated south, including several that had undergone a period of relative calm in recent months, also have been hit with near-daily attacks.
I think its time for a reality check.
Well, if we’re going to call a “reality check” a link to an article from the hard-left Center from American Progress, maybe we should have a little balance around here. So here goes.
Posted by: Martin at September 25, 2004 02:57 PMMartin—
The fact speak for themselves, the Center for American Progress didn’t make them up. People are dying and Iraq is spiraling into an orgy of daily violence. Again these fact are not made up, they happen…
Just as World War II didn’t have a name when it first started, the fighting that is raging in Iraq still does not have a proper name. Some call it “Persian Gulf War II”, some call it “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Some call the initial invasion “the War” or “the Invasion”, while calling the current situation “the post war occupation” or “the reconstruction”.
I suggest that we call the current situation what it is, because it will become a chapter title in future history books.
The Iraq War (2003-?)
These are the truths that our President should tell the American people. Our policies towards Iraq should begin by acknowledging these truths:
- Is the Iraq War still raging? Yes.
- Is it raging more feircely than ever before? Yes.
- Is the transition to a democratic government going well? No.
- Is the situation in Iraq going to get better anytime soon? No, it will get much worse before it gets better.
- How long will it be before the region is safe for civilians? Many, many years.
The Spectator’s Baghdad correspondant reports that Westerners live in constant fear, and that DVDs of beheadings are selling on the streets of Iraq by the thousands.
Journalist Phillip Robertson has spent the last 5 months in Iraq. He describes it as a breeding ground for insurgencies (a “constellation of allied militias”), with even the Iraqi security forces often sharing loyalty to insurgent groups. He says that reconstruction has pretty much stopped, with the funding going to security instead of rebuilding.
The Christian Science Monitor assesses the situation as a “classic guerrilla war”, in a long and very insightful military analysis of the situation on the ground in Iraq.
Being an Iraqi civilian isn’t easy.
Iyad Allawi himself acknowledges that in the last 5 months alone, 3,600 civilians have been killed by terrorist insurgent attacks, and more than twelve thousand have been injured (and many of them probably went on to die).
Knight Ridder reports that “operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents”.
The Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau cheif Rajiv Chandrasekaran says that the people of Baghdad think Allawi is not being honest when he describes the security situation. He describes the literally dozens of daily attacks on coalition forces, Iraqi security forces, and, most of all, on innocent Iraqi civilians, occurring in record and still-increasing numbers. Just last week, Chandrasekaran said “I used to jump in a car and drive out to places like Fallujah and Baqubah to write about attacks, to get a sense of what was really happening on the ground. No longer. The roads are too dangerous, the threat of kidnapping too great.”
And they want to hold elections in this climate?
Donald Rumsfeld and Iyad Allawi recognize that elections will not take place in many parts of Iraq due to the dangerous and violent situations in those regions.
The Iraqi people themselves are skeptical that the elections will be fair.
[attaining] credibility will prove difficult in a country where anti-U.S. sentiment runs high, most people distrust the key players in Iraq’s postwar politics and many tend to routinely blame the United States for everything that goes wrong.
Additionally, there is a widespread expectation that large and well-funded political parties — with tacit U.S. patronage — will trounce smaller anti-American groups.
The future for Iraq - and for anyone seeking to keep the peace there - is dark and bloody, no matter how you look at it, unless there is a radical change of strategy.
The CIA envisions several scenarios for Iraq, ranging from “lousy” (a tenuous unending occupation) to “bleak” (civil war). Commenting on it, President Bush merely “shrugs off” the report.
David Gergen says that Bush needs to be more honest about Iraq. Gergen is a Republican, and he praises certain fellow Republicans for being realistic and frank about the Iraq War. He cites military veteran Senators Chuck Hagel (“No, I don’t think we’re winning.”), John McCain (We’re not winning”), and Richard Lugar (“The lack of planning is apparent,” … “this is incompetence in the administration.”) for having a frankness and honesty about the Iraq War that is entirely missing from the Bush Administration.
There are some relatively radical plans out there, however. There’s the “hand it over” plan: Some are starting to discuss the possiblity of breaking Iraq into peices, acknowledging that the transition was a failure and that regional civil war might be inevitable.
The United States faces a near-impossible dilemma in Iraq. If it withdraws prematurely, it risks leaving behind a weak government unable to cope with the chaos that is the breeding ground of terrorism. By staying in Iraq, the United States undermines the legitimacy of the Iraqi government it wants to support, while US military action produces more recruits for its enemies. The advantage of a strategy aimed at loose federation is that it can create powerful regions and thereby a possible escape from our dilemma. The current strategy, if it can be called that, offers no way out.
And of course, there’s the “cut and run” plan. Robert Novak has already infamously reported that the Administration is considering a pullout for 2005 no matter how bad the ground situation is. Time Magazine reports that the US is now in talks with Syria (!) about working on a sort of military collaboration to maintain order in post-War Iraq, adding legitimacy to Novak’s story. Is the Administration planning a possible pullout? If so, why aren’t we talking about it?
In the end, was the Iraq War worth it? Pakistani President Musharraf (and supposedly our close ally) says that the war in Iraq has made the overall terrorism problem worse:
ZAHN: Is the world a safer place because of the war in Iraq?
MUSHARRAF: No. It’s more dangerous. It’s not safer, certainly not.
ZAHN: How so?
MUSHARRAF: Well, because it has aroused actions of the Muslims more. It’s aroused certain sentiments of the Muslim world, and then the responses, the latest phenomena of explosives, more frequent for bombs and suicide bombings. This phenomenon is extremely dangerous.
ZAHN: Was it a mistake to have gone to war with Iraq?
MUSHARRAF: Well, I would say that it has ended up bringing more trouble to the world.
Perhaps we can gain some wisdom from the President himself, who in “A Charge to Keep”, writes:
My inclination was to support the government and the war until (it was) proven wrong, and that only came later, as I realized we could not explain the mission, had no exit strategy and did not seem to be fighting to win.
He was talking about the Vietnam War, but the same wisdom can and should be applied to our Iraq War.
-Cf
Posted by: Christopher Fahey at September 26, 2004 02:21 PMCF—
Thank for the more then sobering comment. It is clear the no what spin the Bush Administration tries to put on this “War,” the lessons of Vietnam were not applied and thus we find ourselves in yet another quagmire repeating history yet again. Intelligent men should know better and a true leader would pay close attention to the lesson of history.
