Posted on 09/03/2009 9:36:13 AM PDT by JWR_Editor
General Bowtie should stick to baseball and cocktail chatter.
“In the case of Iraq, US forces are the central governments ultimate resource and guarantee against both external and internal aggression, just like it was in South Korea in the later 1950’s.”
The difference, of course, is that there is no central government or even, in some cases, shared heritage to support...the argument is not historically unsupportable...it is unprecedented. The amount of tribal and intra-national strife between not just two differing governments but entirely different cultures and peoples such as you have in Iraq and Afghanistan make this far different. Afghanistan is tribal and Iraq is balkanized.
If we don’t do the job now we will have to come back in later and do it all over again. The job will be tougher the 2nd time around. Some of you can stick your head in the sand like an Ostrich but that will not solve a thing. We are in a war with radical Islam in case some of you have forgotten.
At least the mass graves South of Baghdad are no longer being filled. There is a reported 300,000 men women and children buried there. I still have nightmares over what I saw there.
Isn't Will a minority owner of the Orioles? If so, he should be confined to cocktail chatter, as the Orioles are a basket case.
LOL. As a Padres fan, I can’t say much this year though.
I know what your problem is...our boy genius GM has learned from his mistakes, and isn't trading away our prospects any more. Y'all got Adrian Gonzalez and Chris Young for a couple of box tops.
Rangers future is the brightest it's been for a decade. It'll be even better if Nolan Ryan heads the ownership group that buys the team from Tom Hicks.
BS
There has been a US presense in the ME since 1943.
I was there many times before Iraq invaded Kuwait and know plenty that were there in the 60s and 70s.
Just because the press claims something, does not make it so...
This “Paultard” continues to be amused at how all the neo-cons are now singing the cut-n-run Surrender Monkey chorus
I wholeheartedly agree.
Having lived/worked in Iraq going on six years now, I can certainly imagine such a scenario and I never want to see anything like what you describe again.
Staying the course and remaining vigilant is the right thing to do at this point. We now have a tenuous but strategic ally in a dangerous region. How can anyone not see the value in that?
Here’s the deal on George Will: years ago when there were very few conservative writers he was like the one eyed man in the valley of the blind. We really could only read him and “Make drugs legal Bill” Buckley. Now that we have a choice, Will is just an ash hole will a bow tie and old fashion glasses.
Iraq does not have entirely different cultures and peoples, save perhaps the Kurds.
Arab Sunni/Shia have coexisted there for centuries and are for the most part rather inextricably mixed. Until two-three decades ago they did not have a hard power split along the religious axis. Glubb Pasha for instance, in the 1920’s, did not consider the religious divides in Iraq proper a particularly significant factor in the sense of destabilizing the state. The problems he was dealing with were raids by the fanatical Wahhabi Ikhwan from Saudi Arabia. One can say that Iraqs real troubles these days are a modern variation of the same thing.
As for Afghanistan, before the 1970’s destabilization of the place by the Soviets, the various peoples there, though primitive, got along reasonably well with each other and with their neighbors also. The Afghan kingdom was a quite stable arrangement for forty years, and would probably have remained so if it weren’t for the Soviets.
I suggest the only real impediment to a similarly long-lasting arrangement in Afghanistan are those same Wahhabi-influenced and supported troublemakers that are the root of all present troubles in Iraq.
Well, yeah EXCEPT the kurds. I suppose they can become the half assed Republic they have now, and then have their Civil War. Others have done that...
The Afghanis are a tribal people and lived in co-existence, not subject to each other. They may have "gotten along with each other" but they have NEVER had a solidified governing structure. Their first allegiance is to tribe; not to country.
I doubt that the "peace" in Iraq will hold. We will have to go back in if we want them to hold it together. It is sad but true. We will not be able to pull out for many many years. It may be worth it; only time will tell.
Staying in Afghanistan is preposterous on the face of it and will always be so. We should make the poppy fields infertile forever and leave. They are a seventh century tribal people. Period. They will not be any form of any manner of democracy ever.
Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution, writing in The National Interest, notes that although...
George Will sure likes to quote from scumbag Democrat sources these days.
Correcting George Will on Iraq [Frederick W. Kagan]
In his latest column, about Iraq, George Will writes:
“More than 725 Iraqis have been killed by terrorism since the June 30 pullback of U.S. forces from the cities.”
That’s an annual death rate, on the Iraqi population of 28 million, of about 15 per 100,000, assuming it’s accurate — such figures vary widely and are not generally verifiable. Nevertheless, using Mr. Will’s number, we should note that according to the FBI, the U.S. national average for murder and manslaughter in 2007 was 5.6 per 100,000. On the other hand, the Louisiana average for 2007 was 14.2 per 100,000. Steven Lee Myers put the problem in excellent perspective in an August 28 blog post for the New York Times:
August is already the bloodiest month for Iraqis since April 2008 . . . And yet the number of security incidents — defined as all manner of attacks, from sniper fire to roadside bombings — is lower than it has been for much of the year, according to statistics released by the American military this week. . . . One conclusion: fewer attacks are having deadlier results. Does it mean violence is worse or better than before?
The terrorists conducting these attacks are in large part al-Qaeda members attempting to restart the sectarian conflict and prove their continued relevance to the international militant Islamist cause. They have thus far failed to reignite sectarian conflict — we have seen no reprisal attacks against Sunnis by either the Iraqi government, Shi’a militias, or Iraqi citizens. The attacks have focused on the security forces, including the Sunni Sons of Iraq, and have killed both Sunni and Shi’a. The security forces have stood their ground and fought back, including the Sons of Iraq. In other words, Iraq continues to wage a determined struggle against al-Qaeda, spending its own blood to defeat our common enemies. Again we should note that more Iraqi soldiers and police have been killed fighting al-Qaeda than those of any other country in the world, including the U.S.
The Kurds already have a semi-independent status and I don’t see why they can’t keep it. They also have their own military. What you have there is a need for a tacit arrangement. This sort of thing has been done for centuries and can be stable if neither side perceives that they have more to gain than to lose.
Afghan intra-ethnic co-existence is a perfectly acceptable outcome to everyone involved. We don’t need them to have a solidified governing structure, or to conform to western cultural standards. All we need is for them not to be dominated by enemy nutcases. That is a very modest goal, that has been achieved in the past.
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