HOW DO YOU CLEAN UP A KATRINA'D IRAQ?
Those familiar with the (civilian Iraq Study Group) panel's work predict that the ultimate recommendations will not appear novel and that there are few, if any, good options left facing the country. Many of the ideas reportedly being considered…have either been tried or have limited chances for success.
--"Panel May Have Few Good Options to Offer," Michael Abramowitz and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, November 13, 2006
In a closely held effort, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has assembled a team of some of the military's brightest and most innovative officers and told them to take a fresh look at Iraq and Afghanistan.
--"Military Team Undertakes a Broad Review of the Iraq War and the Campaign Against Terror," Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, November 11, 2006
"Senior military officers in Rumsfeld's watch felt their counsel was only welcomed when it was congenial to Rumsfeld's view, and they now want the whole story, good and bad, to be reflected in whatever strategy the administration pursues," said Loren B. Thompson, a national security expert at the Lexington Institute, a public policy think tank.
--"Pentagon to Reevaluate Strategy and Goals in Iraq," Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, November 11, 2006
Essentially, the commission looks set to bring the two parties together by asking each to swallow a bitter pill.
--"Talking About Iraq," by conservative columnist David Brooks, New York Times, November 12, 2006
In order to understand what is taking place in the public discourse about the war in Iraq, it is essential to use your imagination and to picture a big dam during a great flood, with millions of tons of water backing up against the dam.
Cracks appear in the concrete. Those who live near the dam know that it is about to burst, and they quickly pack up a few things and move out--in spite of the administrators for the dam and the local politicians telling them that everything is under control; the dam is stout, not to worry.
Then, with a mighty crash, the dam gives way, and tons and tons and tons of water pour forth and spread out over the countryside.
Now, picture this: painted in bright red, white, and blue and spangled with stars, on the front of the dam, are the words: Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld. When that dam breaks, the words vanish beneath the tons of crashing concrete and floods of water.
Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld believed that they could run this war in an autocratic, iron-fisted way that brooked no debate, no questioning or "disloyalty," no alternative proposals--indeed, to dare suggest such was to be tarred, feathered, and run out of town under the mocking word: UNPATRIOTIC. To back up the point was the patriotism propaganda of cheering troops welcoming their plastic turkey during a surprise Thanksgiving visit and yellow ribbons and flags draped prominently all over that dam in order to hide those ominous cracks and the body bags bumping up against the back of the dam with the toxic flood waters.
If any of the dam's administrators tried to warn Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld that a terrible flood was coming, they were quietly but very quickly fired. Some of them went on to write books about the dam and the ominous flood waters. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld referred to their books as "cotton candy."
But when the dam burst, and the flood came…then right along with it came all those pent-up objections and questions and alternate proposals that had been dammed up with the flood waters.
The problem is this. Had Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld ALLOWED those proposals to be put forth in the first place; had they WELCOMED suggestions from their staff rather than firing them for disloyalty…well, they might have been able to SAVE THE DAM.
After all, that's what flood-gates are for.
You open the flood-gates gradually and let out the pressure of the accumulating flood waters and that protects the countryside from flood and keeps the dam from bursting. But they wouldn't listen. And now the dam is gone and the countryside is flooded, and NOW they say…Okay, what are your ideas? Seriously.
One of the most despicable displays of many despicable displays to come out of the Bush White House was the day after the election, when Bush posed on the steps of the White House with his entire Cabinet and challenged the Democrats to put forth sincere solutions to solving the problems in Iraq.
This was not a genuine attempt at bipartisanship. For one thing, he'd spent the entire campaign yelling SHOW US THE PLAN in front of hand-picked supportive audiences, which was galling enough since HE HAS NO PLAN OF HIS OWN.
But I'm an old Bush-watcher from years of living in west Texas and watching him botch up Texas before he moved on to Washington, and what THAT was, was a sort of raspberry to the Dems, as if to say, "Fine then. You say I'm doing such a bad job. We're all eager to see how you'd go about saving the damn dam."
But the dam already burst, you see. There is no way to save it now. And he knows that.
I've spent several days seeking out whatever I can find about what the Iraq Study Group is likely to propose, and I was most excited to hear about the Pentagon Study Group.
This is what I figure happened. Rummy was resentful that Congress stepped over his inert body and appointed this bipartisan civilian study group to figure out just how badly he screwed up the war and what--if anything--can be done to fix it.
So, in order to maintain his stamp of control, he told Pace to pick out his OWN STUDY GROUP and then we'll show them, the little fairies. He kept it secret because he does everything in secret, but like all other Rumsfeld-controlled entities, nothing much was being accomplished because all he wanted to hear was what he wanted to hear.
Then the dam burst and he lost his job.
Suddenly, Gen. Pace and the others have been given a get-out-of-jail free card, and overnight, they started using it. I have no doubt they are working their asses off to do the best they can, not only to come up with solutions, but to dovetail with the Iraq Study Group, something I'm sure Rumsfeld would never have allowed, because then he would not have been able to take credit.
General Pace has put together an outstanding panel:
Col. H.R. McMaster, the army officer whose 2005 operation in Tal Afar has been cited as a textbook case in how to wage counterinsurgency in Iraq
Col. Peter R. Mansoor, the director of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan, who previously commanded an Army brigade that fought the Mahdi Army militia in 2004 at Karbala
Col. Thomas C. Greenwood, the director of the Marine Command and Staff College, who oversaw efforts to train Iraqi security forces in Anbar.
And others, all of equal sterling caliber.
This review reflects the recognition that military efforts need to be part of an overall approach that includes all aspects of American power, including diplomatic and economic, according to the article in the New York Times by Michael Gordon, their military correspondent and author of the landmark book, Cobra II.
Even conservative columnist David Brooks--and other ranking conservative commentators, at least the ones with brains, like Bill Kristol and George Will--are agreeing that this election served, as Brooks put it, as "an intellectual release."
In other words, a dam-buster.
Even good and decent Republicans felt completely muzzled by this divisive, Rovian campaign, and only those with secure seats dared question the White House on the war.
The American people changed all that; the dam burst, and now everybody has his or her own idea on what to do to clean up the debris, dead bodies, and nasty flood waters of Iraq.
And everybody seems to be ignoring the ignorant commander-in-chief who keeps yodeling about VICTORY and WINNING when, as Gen. Pace put it, "You have to define 'winning.'"
The bottom line of what everybody seems to be saying is this: OUR TROOPS WON'T BE COMING HOME ANY TIME SOON.
Liberals have to get that through their heads; military families have to get that through their heads; servicemen and women have to get that through their heads.
But, on the other hand: neither party wants to be stuck in Iraq come 2008.
This is where it gets sticky. Events on the ground are going to decide what happens in Iraq, not any study group or military panel.
For example. A full year or more ago, Democratic Senator and presidential hopeful Joe Biden wrote a NY Times op-ed in which he proposed breaking Iraq into partitions like what we did in the Balkans in the 90's. They wouldn't be separate countries, but they would be self-governing and would all share oil revenues under the umbrella of a central government in Baghdad.
Nobody paid any attention to him for months and months, and then more and more people started looking at the sense of it: A Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd partitioning. Like Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia.
Now it has become fashionable to state, flat-out, that such partitioning is a bad idea and just won't work. There's still this snobby sniff to the air by Republicans who refuse to do anything the Clinton administration did even though, in just about everything, it has been proven to have been right, from balancing the budget to finding peace in the Balkans. But that's another subject. The point is that many commentators are saying we can't partition Iraq, bad idea, period.
Tell that to the 350,000 Iraqis who have fled their homes since the bombing of the mosque in Samara in February, Sunnis moving out of Shiite areas, Shiites moving out of Sunni areas--now, to the tune of 50,000 every month. Those who don't move out, get run out or murdered by opposing sects.
Not only that, but Iraq's OWN CONSTITUTION sets up a federalized form of government very similar. So you can talk logically all day long about how that idea is a bad one, but on the ground in Iraq, it's already happening.
In fact, as soon as we get police and army trained in Iraq, they either move into areas of different sects and proceed to murder anyone of the opposite sect who won't move out, or they refuse to leave their home areas to be deployed elsewhere in the country.
Sending more troops is another option. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you can actually COME UP WITH thousands more troops to deploy to Iraq. Let's even say that, in the short term, it is effective and the violence is greatly reduced. At least, the Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. Deaths to American troops will, of course, spike.
What are you going to do then?
Are you going to stay and turn Iraq into a colonial conquest? Or are you going to eventually leave?
Then what do you think will happen?
Yeah, all hell will break loose.
Sure, there will be a meltdown when we leave, but that will occur if we leave now or if we leave in 2020.
Given the grave predicament the group faces, its focus is now as much on finding a political solution for the United States as on a plan that would bring peace in Iraq…the White House might find in the group's plan either a politically acceptable exit strategy or a cover for a continued effort to prop up the new democratically-elected government in Baghdad, writes Thomas Ricks, author of the masterpiece study, Fiasco, in the Washington Post.
Ahhhhhh. Now we're getting closer to the truth.
Do these various panels hope to actually clean up the toxic flood waters in Iraq, or do they just hope to prettify the political landscape enough that the American people can live with the debacle, as long as the troops do, eventually, come home? Probably in time for the heat of the presidential campaign in 2008?
I don't mean to imply that I don't think these groups are serious braintrusts, the best minds in our whole country, to deal with this terrible situation. Or that they are doing their dead-level best to find answers.
I do believe that, thanks to the common sense of the American people who sent a very loud and powerful message that they were not going to put up with any more partisan politicizing of patriotism or the war, that they wanted everybody to shut up and to put up, then there is now a concerted effort to work this out.
But their proposals will have to be filtered through that whole VICTORY OR ELSE mindset of the commander-in-chief who, as insiders to the White House privately admit, believes we'll be there for DECADES.
And the sad truth, for all of us, is that it's just too damn late to save the dam or the horrific damage its terrible collapse has done to this country and to Iraq.
We can't pull out, and we can't stay. We can't divide up the country and we can't keep it from coming apart. We can train troops but they can't do the job to protect their own country. (Most of them identify more with militias and sects and tribes than with "Iraq.")
So, ultimately, this whole intellectual exercise isn't about actually fixing the dam. There' s no more money to rebuild it, for one thing, and even if you did, the flood waters have already destroyed the countryside. You just can't fix the dam after it has burst. You can't stop a flood that has already happened.
Iraq has been Katrina'd.
The only thing you can really do at this point is find a way to live with it where as few people have to die as possible until we can get the hell out.
That's the bottom line. That's what we all know. God help us as we do our best to figure out how.
--"Panel May Have Few Good Options to Offer," Michael Abramowitz and Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post, November 13, 2006
In a closely held effort, Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has assembled a team of some of the military's brightest and most innovative officers and told them to take a fresh look at Iraq and Afghanistan.
--"Military Team Undertakes a Broad Review of the Iraq War and the Campaign Against Terror," Michael R. Gordon, New York Times, November 11, 2006
"Senior military officers in Rumsfeld's watch felt their counsel was only welcomed when it was congenial to Rumsfeld's view, and they now want the whole story, good and bad, to be reflected in whatever strategy the administration pursues," said Loren B. Thompson, a national security expert at the Lexington Institute, a public policy think tank.
--"Pentagon to Reevaluate Strategy and Goals in Iraq," Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, November 11, 2006
Essentially, the commission looks set to bring the two parties together by asking each to swallow a bitter pill.
--"Talking About Iraq," by conservative columnist David Brooks, New York Times, November 12, 2006
In order to understand what is taking place in the public discourse about the war in Iraq, it is essential to use your imagination and to picture a big dam during a great flood, with millions of tons of water backing up against the dam.
Cracks appear in the concrete. Those who live near the dam know that it is about to burst, and they quickly pack up a few things and move out--in spite of the administrators for the dam and the local politicians telling them that everything is under control; the dam is stout, not to worry.
Then, with a mighty crash, the dam gives way, and tons and tons and tons of water pour forth and spread out over the countryside.
Now, picture this: painted in bright red, white, and blue and spangled with stars, on the front of the dam, are the words: Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld. When that dam breaks, the words vanish beneath the tons of crashing concrete and floods of water.
Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld believed that they could run this war in an autocratic, iron-fisted way that brooked no debate, no questioning or "disloyalty," no alternative proposals--indeed, to dare suggest such was to be tarred, feathered, and run out of town under the mocking word: UNPATRIOTIC. To back up the point was the patriotism propaganda of cheering troops welcoming their plastic turkey during a surprise Thanksgiving visit and yellow ribbons and flags draped prominently all over that dam in order to hide those ominous cracks and the body bags bumping up against the back of the dam with the toxic flood waters.
If any of the dam's administrators tried to warn Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld that a terrible flood was coming, they were quietly but very quickly fired. Some of them went on to write books about the dam and the ominous flood waters. Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld referred to their books as "cotton candy."
But when the dam burst, and the flood came…then right along with it came all those pent-up objections and questions and alternate proposals that had been dammed up with the flood waters.
The problem is this. Had Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld ALLOWED those proposals to be put forth in the first place; had they WELCOMED suggestions from their staff rather than firing them for disloyalty…well, they might have been able to SAVE THE DAM.
After all, that's what flood-gates are for.
You open the flood-gates gradually and let out the pressure of the accumulating flood waters and that protects the countryside from flood and keeps the dam from bursting. But they wouldn't listen. And now the dam is gone and the countryside is flooded, and NOW they say…Okay, what are your ideas? Seriously.
One of the most despicable displays of many despicable displays to come out of the Bush White House was the day after the election, when Bush posed on the steps of the White House with his entire Cabinet and challenged the Democrats to put forth sincere solutions to solving the problems in Iraq.
This was not a genuine attempt at bipartisanship. For one thing, he'd spent the entire campaign yelling SHOW US THE PLAN in front of hand-picked supportive audiences, which was galling enough since HE HAS NO PLAN OF HIS OWN.
But I'm an old Bush-watcher from years of living in west Texas and watching him botch up Texas before he moved on to Washington, and what THAT was, was a sort of raspberry to the Dems, as if to say, "Fine then. You say I'm doing such a bad job. We're all eager to see how you'd go about saving the damn dam."
But the dam already burst, you see. There is no way to save it now. And he knows that.
I've spent several days seeking out whatever I can find about what the Iraq Study Group is likely to propose, and I was most excited to hear about the Pentagon Study Group.
This is what I figure happened. Rummy was resentful that Congress stepped over his inert body and appointed this bipartisan civilian study group to figure out just how badly he screwed up the war and what--if anything--can be done to fix it.
So, in order to maintain his stamp of control, he told Pace to pick out his OWN STUDY GROUP and then we'll show them, the little fairies. He kept it secret because he does everything in secret, but like all other Rumsfeld-controlled entities, nothing much was being accomplished because all he wanted to hear was what he wanted to hear.
Then the dam burst and he lost his job.
Suddenly, Gen. Pace and the others have been given a get-out-of-jail free card, and overnight, they started using it. I have no doubt they are working their asses off to do the best they can, not only to come up with solutions, but to dovetail with the Iraq Study Group, something I'm sure Rumsfeld would never have allowed, because then he would not have been able to take credit.
General Pace has put together an outstanding panel:
Col. H.R. McMaster, the army officer whose 2005 operation in Tal Afar has been cited as a textbook case in how to wage counterinsurgency in Iraq
Col. Peter R. Mansoor, the director of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan, who previously commanded an Army brigade that fought the Mahdi Army militia in 2004 at Karbala
Col. Thomas C. Greenwood, the director of the Marine Command and Staff College, who oversaw efforts to train Iraqi security forces in Anbar.
And others, all of equal sterling caliber.
This review reflects the recognition that military efforts need to be part of an overall approach that includes all aspects of American power, including diplomatic and economic, according to the article in the New York Times by Michael Gordon, their military correspondent and author of the landmark book, Cobra II.
Even conservative columnist David Brooks--and other ranking conservative commentators, at least the ones with brains, like Bill Kristol and George Will--are agreeing that this election served, as Brooks put it, as "an intellectual release."
In other words, a dam-buster.
Even good and decent Republicans felt completely muzzled by this divisive, Rovian campaign, and only those with secure seats dared question the White House on the war.
The American people changed all that; the dam burst, and now everybody has his or her own idea on what to do to clean up the debris, dead bodies, and nasty flood waters of Iraq.
And everybody seems to be ignoring the ignorant commander-in-chief who keeps yodeling about VICTORY and WINNING when, as Gen. Pace put it, "You have to define 'winning.'"
The bottom line of what everybody seems to be saying is this: OUR TROOPS WON'T BE COMING HOME ANY TIME SOON.
Liberals have to get that through their heads; military families have to get that through their heads; servicemen and women have to get that through their heads.
But, on the other hand: neither party wants to be stuck in Iraq come 2008.
This is where it gets sticky. Events on the ground are going to decide what happens in Iraq, not any study group or military panel.
For example. A full year or more ago, Democratic Senator and presidential hopeful Joe Biden wrote a NY Times op-ed in which he proposed breaking Iraq into partitions like what we did in the Balkans in the 90's. They wouldn't be separate countries, but they would be self-governing and would all share oil revenues under the umbrella of a central government in Baghdad.
Nobody paid any attention to him for months and months, and then more and more people started looking at the sense of it: A Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd partitioning. Like Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia.
Now it has become fashionable to state, flat-out, that such partitioning is a bad idea and just won't work. There's still this snobby sniff to the air by Republicans who refuse to do anything the Clinton administration did even though, in just about everything, it has been proven to have been right, from balancing the budget to finding peace in the Balkans. But that's another subject. The point is that many commentators are saying we can't partition Iraq, bad idea, period.
Tell that to the 350,000 Iraqis who have fled their homes since the bombing of the mosque in Samara in February, Sunnis moving out of Shiite areas, Shiites moving out of Sunni areas--now, to the tune of 50,000 every month. Those who don't move out, get run out or murdered by opposing sects.
Not only that, but Iraq's OWN CONSTITUTION sets up a federalized form of government very similar. So you can talk logically all day long about how that idea is a bad one, but on the ground in Iraq, it's already happening.
In fact, as soon as we get police and army trained in Iraq, they either move into areas of different sects and proceed to murder anyone of the opposite sect who won't move out, or they refuse to leave their home areas to be deployed elsewhere in the country.
Sending more troops is another option. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that you can actually COME UP WITH thousands more troops to deploy to Iraq. Let's even say that, in the short term, it is effective and the violence is greatly reduced. At least, the Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence. Deaths to American troops will, of course, spike.
What are you going to do then?
Are you going to stay and turn Iraq into a colonial conquest? Or are you going to eventually leave?
Then what do you think will happen?
Yeah, all hell will break loose.
Sure, there will be a meltdown when we leave, but that will occur if we leave now or if we leave in 2020.
Given the grave predicament the group faces, its focus is now as much on finding a political solution for the United States as on a plan that would bring peace in Iraq…the White House might find in the group's plan either a politically acceptable exit strategy or a cover for a continued effort to prop up the new democratically-elected government in Baghdad, writes Thomas Ricks, author of the masterpiece study, Fiasco, in the Washington Post.
Ahhhhhh. Now we're getting closer to the truth.
Do these various panels hope to actually clean up the toxic flood waters in Iraq, or do they just hope to prettify the political landscape enough that the American people can live with the debacle, as long as the troops do, eventually, come home? Probably in time for the heat of the presidential campaign in 2008?
I don't mean to imply that I don't think these groups are serious braintrusts, the best minds in our whole country, to deal with this terrible situation. Or that they are doing their dead-level best to find answers.
I do believe that, thanks to the common sense of the American people who sent a very loud and powerful message that they were not going to put up with any more partisan politicizing of patriotism or the war, that they wanted everybody to shut up and to put up, then there is now a concerted effort to work this out.
But their proposals will have to be filtered through that whole VICTORY OR ELSE mindset of the commander-in-chief who, as insiders to the White House privately admit, believes we'll be there for DECADES.
And the sad truth, for all of us, is that it's just too damn late to save the dam or the horrific damage its terrible collapse has done to this country and to Iraq.
We can't pull out, and we can't stay. We can't divide up the country and we can't keep it from coming apart. We can train troops but they can't do the job to protect their own country. (Most of them identify more with militias and sects and tribes than with "Iraq.")
So, ultimately, this whole intellectual exercise isn't about actually fixing the dam. There' s no more money to rebuild it, for one thing, and even if you did, the flood waters have already destroyed the countryside. You just can't fix the dam after it has burst. You can't stop a flood that has already happened.
Iraq has been Katrina'd.
The only thing you can really do at this point is find a way to live with it where as few people have to die as possible until we can get the hell out.
That's the bottom line. That's what we all know. God help us as we do our best to figure out how.
posted by Deanie Mills at 4:01 PM
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