Sunday, January 07, 2007
Defeat by many cuts
From the RoundTable blog
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Norb Weckstein
Weckstein, of Roanoke, was a combat infantryman in World War II.
It's well known that those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. Here's a new one: Those who ignore the lessons of nursery rhymes are in big trouble. Let's consider Iraq.
Thanks to George Bush's pre-emptive invasion, Humpty-Dumpty has fallen off the wall. It should be very obvious by now that all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put Humpty together again.
We've sacrificed the lives of 3,000 U.S. servicemen, with many thousands more permanently disabled, and are spending some $8 billion per month in Iraq -- but the situation there continues to worsen. You just can't unscramble a scrambled egg.
King George's stay-the-course is an unrealizable dream. The damage has been done, and there's no virtuous way out. Before our Iraq adventure, Iraq and Iran had been at war. The Sunnis who ruled Iraq and the Shia who ruled Iran hated each other. This kept the Iranian extremists tied down militarily and financially.
Bush fixed that. He destroyed the Sunni military, and effectively turned over control of Iraq to the Shia. The Iranian ayatollahs rejoiced. They celebrated by sending secret troops to Iraq to help destroy the Sunni. They could now form a Shia alliance with Iraq to spread their vitriol over the rest of the Middle East.
Now they can work on atomic bombs to threaten the world. Control of Arab oil is within their grasp.
Al-Qaida also rejoiced. While Saddam had kept them repressed in Iraq, they now are free to recruit and train terrorists to fight the infidels who had invaded an Arab country. The recently released National Intelligence Estimate concludes that the war has helped create a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
A poll for the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes found that almost four in five Iraqis say the U.S. military force in Iraq provokes more violence than it prevents, and two out of three approve of the terrorists' attacks on U.S. troops.
Morally, we don't want to outright quit Iraq because it could lead to a slaughter of the Sunnis by Iranian and Iraqi Shia. Yet, the Iraqi self-defense forces we are training are almost entirely Shia and harbor many death squads. So our good intentions are delusionary.
Negotiations deserve a serious shot. These will require us to collaborate with Russia and China in discussions with Syria, Iran and Turkey. But finding common ground would be tough, and allowing these to drift limitlessly would just extend the quagmire.
One of these days we are going to have to pull out -- sooner, better than later. When you step into quicksand, you don't stay and fight it -- you get out. An all-out civil war, also involving other Arab countries, is likely when we leave -- no matter how long we delay it. The hypothetical question becomes: Is it more painful to cut off your leg all at once, or just one inch at a time?
