Topic: Iraq
Sunday, Bloody Sunday... Events beyond Fallujah
Matt comments from up near Canandaigua -
Well, in the middle of last week I thought the Fallujah episode was the tipping point in the war, as did so many others. What were we to do now?Fallujah is the graveyard of America...
Or as political commentator Mark Shields put it - "Fallujah in '04 is not Paris in '44."
It seems to me there is only one principled stance with regard to Iraq: US troops should get out.
We are an invading and occupying force. Straightening out the mess we have made there should be turned over to the UN. The US should pay for it. More particularly, Cheney, Bush and Halliburton should pay for it.
But that won't happen.
What I fear will happen is that John Kerry will get elected. He won't have the nerve to pull US troops out. It will become his war. It will be the reasons he is unable to cement a left-center coalition in this country. And he will serve one term.
We are now in the process of cordoning off the city - a cordon sanitaire, allowing only food and medical supplies to pass trough. Seems we are soon going to go in "in force" and clean up the place, whatever that means. I guess we'll create a number of new martyrs and many more angry insurgents. And I mentioned I did come across a letter to the editor in the Los Angeles Times (not available on the web) that argued that we incinerated hundreds of thousands of civilians in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and we fire-bombed Tokyo killing maybe even more civilians that we did with the nuclear weapons, and we fire-bombed Dresden, and, well, after all, we WON. Why not do the same to Fallujah? A lot of that talk is floating around the web, particularly over at TWONHALL.COM and other "right" sites.
To repeat myself... These are options? The first - the cordon sanitaire - won't satisfy our need for closure, as it is often put. Closure? Vengeance? Whatever. The second, suggested by that fellow from Santa Monica in the Times seems a bit over-the-top. And there would be, with that apocalyptic response, some diplomatic fallout (no kidding!) and further calls for revenge from the bad guys.
But then there was this last weekend - Bloody Sunday. We lost eight or ten more guys. What's that about?
Well, the business in Fallujah was the Sunni folks trying to suggest we get out of town, now. We expected that, really. But this last weekend was the Shiite folks, an entirely different crew, suggesting we get out of town, now, or sooner. And the Shiite folks were, up until this weekend, being halfway reasonable. Their leader, Sistani, was a pain in the ass at times, but trying to work things out with us. His rival, Moktada al Sadr, with a private army - the Mehdi Army of ten or twenty thousand - gave us this weekend's uprising. The whole southern half of Iraq was (is) rising up. Damn.
With three months to go before sovereignty is handed over to a provisional government, things spiral further out of control. It was clear that elements in the Sunni minority would resist the reconstruction in one way or another - and we were told by the Bush crew this Sunni Triangle was unusual, an anomaly, the single part of Iraq where there would be trouble. But we could handle it.
Now we also have the extremists among the Shiites, under Moktada al Sadr, unleashing a war of resistance against the occupation. Riots nationwide. And this morning we announced we plan to arrest Moktada al Sadr for murder, if we can find him. Last week we shut down his newspaper for being anti-American. Now we have an APB out to get him.
Isn't putting any Islamic cleric in jail and humiliating him somehow... counterproductive?
All choices now seem counterproductive.
And if this is the state of affairs now, what will happen to "civil order" when our military guys take an even more passive role after June 30?
As one commentator says, and that would be Andrews Sullivan, a right-side Bush guy most of the time ...
Yep. Joe Biden and Richard Lugar - the Democratic and Republican senate foreign affairs heads, are saying send more troops and screw then June 30 deadline. Bush this afternoon said the June 30 deadline is firm. He won't change his mind on that.More and more, it seems hard to avoid inferring that we made one huge mistake: not in liberating Iraq, but in attempting to occupy it with relatively few troops. You have to have unquestioned security before any sort of democracy can begin to function. But, under the Rumsfeld plan, we never had the numbers or resources to do precisely that. So the extraordinary gains that have been made since the invasion are constantly at risk of being overwhelmed by violence.
So we apply more brute force.
And as I commented here regarding Fallujah on Thursday, 1 April 2004 -
Yeah, well, this from a fellow writing from Baghdad this afternoon...Perhaps there are other, non-military options...
I'm not sure we do those any longer - that political, diplomatic stuff. We don't believe in that any longer, or at least our government doesn't believe in such things any longer. Just as Ariel Sharon has brought peace to the West Bank and Gaza, and made the Palestinians love and respect him and leave Israel safe, so we will do the same in Iraq.
Mao knew that power comes from the barrel of a gun, and Ariel Sharon knows peace comes from targeted assassinations, and we know that Jeffersonian democracy comes from the belly of a B-52 (The BIG Pacifier) whether you want it right now or not.
Well, perhaps these angry Iraqis will have an attitude adjustment. It could happen.
It is a reflection of my own bad attitude that I'm skeptical about such a change of heart.
But at the White House they have faith this could, maybe, possibly, perhaps happen. I guess you do have to admire their optimism.
Fallujah last Wednesday, and now much of the rest of southern Iraq is falling apart - and this fellow says chaos is near in Baghdad. Great. Did you see the shots of our helicopters doing strafing runs? Cool.A coup d'etat is taking place in Iraq at the moment. Al-Shu'la, Al-Hurria, Thawra (Sadr city), and Kadhimiya (all Shi'ite neighbourhoods in Baghdad) have been declared liberated from occupation. Looting has already started at some places downtown, a friend of mine just returned from Sadun street and he says Al-Mahdi militiamen are breaking stores and clinics open and also at Tahrir square just across the river from the Green Zone. News from other cities in the south indicate that Sadr followers (tens of thousands of them) have taken over IP stations and governorate buildings in Kufa, Nassiriya, Ammara, Kut, and Basrah. Al-Jazeera says that policemen in these cities have sided with the Shia insurgents, which doesn't come as a surprise to me since a large portion of the police forces in these areas were recruited from Shi'ite militias and we have talked about that ages ago. And it looks like this move has been planned a long time ago.
No one knows what is happening in the capital right now. Power has been cut off in my neighbourhood since the afternoon, and I can only hear helicopters, massive explosions, and continuous shooting nearby. The streets are empty, someone told us half an hour ago that Al-Mahdi are trying to take over our neighbourhood and are being met by resistance from Sunni hardliners. Doors are locked, and AK-47's are being loaded and put close by in case they are needed. The phone keeps ringing frantically. Baghdadis are horrified and everyone seems to have made up their mind to stay home tomorrow until the situation is clear.
I have to admit that until now I have never longed for the days of Saddam, but now I'm not so sure. If we need a person like Saddam to keep those rabid dogs at bay then be it. Put Saddam back in power and after he fills a couple hundred more mass graves with those criminals they can start wailing and crying again for liberation. What a laugh we will have then. Then they can shove their filthy Hawza and marji'iya up somewhere else. I am so disappointed in Iraqis and I hate myself for thinking this way. We are not worth your trouble, take back your billions of dollars and give us Saddam again. We truly 'deserve' leaders like Saddam.
We're screwed.
And check out this news report -
What's that - the Sunni and Shiite guys are hooking up? And Sadr last Friday had announced that he was opening Iraqi chapters of Hezbollah and Hamas. One big happy party.Immediately after the Kufa firefight, representatives arrived to consult with Sadr officials from the Badr Organization, the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and a delegation from the Dawa Party, the two most prominent Shiite parties represented on the U.S.-appointed Governing Council.
But armed men from Fallujah and Baqubah -- centers of resistance in the Sunni heartland west and north of Baghdad -- also appeared at the mosque, offering support.
Yep, George Bush told us he was a uniter, not a divider.
Now what?
Pull out now? Let them be happy we're gone, then later fight it all out in a giant civil war among themselves - while the Kurds sit up north and laugh their asses off? We'd look bad, and not get the oil.
Bring in the UN? They've already said no, we should get things stabilized first. They lost enough people last year, and one of their best, when we couldn't protect their Baghdad headquarters building. Boom. No thank you.
NATO? They've already said no, as they're close to being overcommitted in Afghanistan, helping us out there. That well is dry. They don't have the warm bodies to lend us.
It doesn't matter. Anyone can suggest anything. Bush has committed us to pacifying Iraq by brute force and turning over the place to someone or other on June 30 of this year. And that man does NOT change his mind. He calls that leadership.
Kerry may win, and he's already said we cannot walk away from this. But he may be able to build an international coalition - a real one this time - to try to figure out what to do now. And he may be a slightly more flexible man, willing to consider all options, willing to listen to others without sneering at them. We'll see. If he wins.
Right now. Buckle up. This will be a rough ride.
Posted by Alan at 19:41 PDT
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