SHOUTING DOWN THE WALLS OF THE WHITE HOUSE
Attempting to describe the enemy, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, the DIA director, listed "Iraqi nationalists, ex-Baathists, former military, angry Sunni, jihadists, foreign fighters and al-Qaeda," who create an "overlapping, complex, and multi-polar Sunni insurgent and terrorist environment." He added that "Shia militias and Shia militants, some Kurdish pesh merga, and extensive criminal activity further contribute to violence, instability and insecurity."
--"Violence in Iraq Called Increasingly Complex," Walter Pincus, Washington Post, November 17, 2006.
In the predominantly Shi'ite south of the country, rival militias conduct their own version of gang warfare. In the Sunni Arab areas of western Iraq, there is mushrooming mayhem among foreign jihadists, local insurgents, criminal bands, and tribal fighters…
Because the resistance against foreign occupation has largely been transformed into a sectarian vendetta that hides a struggle for power, there is little chance that an increase in U.S. troop levels or more aggressive tactics could defeat the insurgents or even produce a tolerable level of security.
--"Lost Illusions in Iraq," editorial, Boston Globe, November 19, 2006
What has changed, military experts and intelligence officials say, is that the insurgency of Baathists and foreign jihadists is no longer the greatest enemy the United States faces in Iraq.
--"A Shifting Enemy: U.S. Generals Say Civil War, Not Insurgency, is Greatest Threat," Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, November 18, 2006
Contrary to all the cute White House slogans about how if we "quit" in Iraq and bring the troops home, that the terrorists will follow them to our front yards, the vast overwhelming majority of violence that we are seeing in Iraq right now has nothing to do with terrorists. It has to do with a country--brutally held together by a maniacal dictator for 30 years--coming completely apart.
In order to understand what is happening in Iraq today, you have to imagine a jigsaw puzzle--say it pictures a map of Iraq--that is alive, and each one of the pieces is busy attacking the other pieces. With the possible exception of the Kurdish area, which has been its own little country ever since the Gulf War anyway--the whole puzzle is pretty much on fire.
Areas that the White House has touted as great success stories--Basra, to the south, for instance, in which the Brits handed over control to the Iraqi army some months ago--is a cauldron of mayhem now. In fact, the least-reported story of this war is that the day after the big ceremony just before the British soldiers pulled out of Basra, the post where they had been living and which had been turned over to the Iraqis, was looted and stripped while Iraqi forces stood by impassively.
So the whole fear-mongering election-year tactic of this war-mongering administration, that catchy little slogan that the terrorists would follow us home if we left Iraq and, as that genius-in-his-own-mind Bill O'Reilly rather hysterically pointed out, "would be fighting us on every street in America"--that mushroom-cloud hype was just so much bologney.
Here's the thing about the Anbar. If we pulled out, what would happen is that the new majority, the Shi'ites, who dominate the Iraqi army and outnumber Sunnis by an 80% to 20% margin, would swarm into the Anbar and massacre the Sunnis, who they've long hated even before they were called terrorists. They think the reason the Sunnis have gotten away with the insurgency is that the Americans have not been as bloodthirsty as they should have in getting rid of them.
(Of course, if the Americans HAD annihilated the Sunni insurgency like the Shi'ites want, the bloodshed would have been spilled all over al-Jazeera television 24/7. So we can't win for losing.)
In the used-to-be calm south, rival factions WITHIN the Shi'ites are jockeying for power, invading one another's towns, kidnapping and murdering at will without any interference from all those well-trained Iraqi army and police forces. On one day, one Shi'ite government ministry invaded another government ministry that happened to be mostly Sunni, kidnapped all the men in broad daylight, and drove straight through "police" checkpoints.
When prime minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered the Americans out after they had secured a violent neighborhood of Baghdad--because it was a stronghold for Muqtada al-Sadr, whose support Maliki needs--as soon as the Americans left, bombings, kidnappings, torture, and murder of mostly-Sunni neighborhoods returned with a vengeance.
What did the Sunnis do?
Blame the Americans because we actually LISTENED to the prime minister.
In Baghdad, the Sunnis beg the Americans for protection. They say, flat-out, that if they must be arrested, please God let it be the Americans who arrest them. They figure if they are arrested by Baghdad police, they will be tortured to death.
But in Fallujah and Ramadi, the Sunnis can't kill Americans fast enough. I guess they don't talk to each other much on the cellphones they use to set off IEDs.
If we protect Sunnis, it means killing Shi'ites. If we protect Shi'ites, it means killing Sunnis.
Do we pick sides? Right now, we're trying really really hard not to, by rounding up Shi'ite death squads (until the prime minister lets them go) and by going after the Sunnis in the Anbar.
Our troops are walking a tightrope stretched across the Grand Canyon in a high wind without a pole or a lead wire.
So our sloganeering and clueless president says we will "stand up" the Iraqi police and army so we can stand down. Ahhh, sounds so stirring, doesn't it?
Meanwhile, the most recent military strategies put forth seem to say one thing: that we JUST NEED TO TRAIN MORE IRAQIS.
Nobody much asks…What happens to those troops who have been trained? DO they "stand up"? CAN they stand up?
For that answer, we need to ask the soldiers and Marines on the ground who are directly involved in that training. Like this one:
(According to Capt. Stephanie A. Bagley, who commands a military police company in Baghdad):
The local police force in her region, as in much of Iraq, remains undertrained, poorly equipped and unable to stand up to the rigors of this conflict. It offers little resistance to the relentless Sunni Arab-led insurgency and has at least partly come under the sway of wily Shi'ite militias. Casualties are high, morale is low, and many police officers do not show up for work….
"I just want to get everyone home," she said. In the past several weeks, Captain Bagley, 30, barred her troops from foot patrols in the most violent neighborhoods and eliminated all nonessential travel. "I'm just not willing to lose another soldier," she said.
--"A Captain's Journey from Hope to Just Getting Her Unit Home," Kirk Semple, New York Times, November 19, 2006
The article goes on to describe how the Iraqis beg the Americans not to make them go out on patrol, how high the desertion rates are, and so on. This is a company of American military police who are EMBEDDED with the Iraqi police they are training. And it has gotten so dangerous for them--for the Americans, that is--that they don't even go out on foot patrols any more. When they do, the Iraqis beg them not to make them go along.
I am sick and tired unto death of hearing these kinds of "solutions" put forth as if nobody has the slightest idea of what the reality on the ground really is. Ask any military family who's had a loved one deployed to Iraq. Ask them what they think about the well-trained Iraqis. Well, for one thing, they can't tell them where they're going on patrol each day because IT COULD GET THEM BLOWN UP.
This would be a joke if it weren't a nightmare.
And I haven't even touched on the fleeing Iraqi middle class who are leaving the country in droves. Professors, doctors, lawyers and other professionals who have not yet been killed are getting out because they can afford to. The poor pack up what they can carry and hurry by the hundreds of thousands to congregate with their own tribes and sects.
This, my friends, IS A FULL-BLOWN CIVIL WAR. We have not prevented it. We have only been caught in the crossfire.
So if we pull out gradually, then what?
Hardliners all say that a terrible regional war will break out between Sunni nations like Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia and Shi'ite nations like Iran.
Haven't we heard this doomsday scenario somewhere before?
Oh yeah. Back during the Vietnam war. That old domino theory. Vietnam falls to communism and all of Indonesia and then Asia follow.
How soon before Hawaii, eh?
So, here we are. Thirty years later.
And the President of the United States is where?
In Vietnam. (His very first visit! How apropos, eh, Vietnam vets?)
Making trade agreements.
So the truth is that if we pull out of Iraq, Iraqis will be so busy killing other Iraqis that they won't really have much time to set up a terrorist stronghold and launch attacks on American soil.
Will other nations rush to finance their factions in the civil war?
They already are.
There is no solution, boys and girls, that is without cost.
And I think the United States and her allies have paid enough.
It's not just me and a few wacky liberal Democrats who feel this way. Here is commentary from two retired army generals, Barry McCaffrey and William Odom, as quoted by Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo on November 21, 2006:
The quotes were taken from an Army Times interview. (That liberal rag, don'tcha know.)
"The country is not at war. The United States armed forces and the CIA are at war. So we are asking our military to sustain a level of effort that we have not resourced," General McCaffrey told Army Times.
"Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake," said General Odom. "The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president's conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq, creating democracy there, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, making Israel more secure, not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain, and others.
But reality no longer can be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shi'ite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq.
These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can't be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years."
This election sent a message, loud and clear, to this administration that the American people have had enough. But the White House still holds the lives of our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan in their blood-stained hands--there is only so much an oppositional Congress can do. They can pass all the laws they want, and Bush can sign statements setting himself free from whatever the law requires. They can appoint commissions to perform investigations, but if he does not have to heed the recommendations. They can even demand accountability with subpoenas, all of which can be tied up in legal wrestling matches until the day he leaves office. Dick Cheney has already stated, flat-out, that he will absolutely not testify before Congress, for any reason.
So what do we do?
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, contrary to what they may believe, do not work for themselves, boys and girls. THEY WORK FOR US.
Remember that old Bible story about the impenetrable walls of the city of Jericho? How impossible it was to scale them and take the city in battle? Joshua, Moses's brother, prayed to God and heard the answer.
Remember how the city fell?
I say, for all of us--not just those of us with a vested stake in what happens with this terrible war--
SHOUT. LIFT UP A MIGHTY ROAR TO THE HEAVENS OR AT LEAST CNN AND FOX NEWS. BRING DOWN THE WALLS OF THE WHITE HOUSE WITH OUR COLLECTIVE VOICES.
If you've got a trumpet, blow it. When the walls of the White House finally fall down, even the Oval office will be forced to listen.
--"Violence in Iraq Called Increasingly Complex," Walter Pincus, Washington Post, November 17, 2006.
In the predominantly Shi'ite south of the country, rival militias conduct their own version of gang warfare. In the Sunni Arab areas of western Iraq, there is mushrooming mayhem among foreign jihadists, local insurgents, criminal bands, and tribal fighters…
Because the resistance against foreign occupation has largely been transformed into a sectarian vendetta that hides a struggle for power, there is little chance that an increase in U.S. troop levels or more aggressive tactics could defeat the insurgents or even produce a tolerable level of security.
--"Lost Illusions in Iraq," editorial, Boston Globe, November 19, 2006
What has changed, military experts and intelligence officials say, is that the insurgency of Baathists and foreign jihadists is no longer the greatest enemy the United States faces in Iraq.
--"A Shifting Enemy: U.S. Generals Say Civil War, Not Insurgency, is Greatest Threat," Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, November 18, 2006
Contrary to all the cute White House slogans about how if we "quit" in Iraq and bring the troops home, that the terrorists will follow them to our front yards, the vast overwhelming majority of violence that we are seeing in Iraq right now has nothing to do with terrorists. It has to do with a country--brutally held together by a maniacal dictator for 30 years--coming completely apart.
In order to understand what is happening in Iraq today, you have to imagine a jigsaw puzzle--say it pictures a map of Iraq--that is alive, and each one of the pieces is busy attacking the other pieces. With the possible exception of the Kurdish area, which has been its own little country ever since the Gulf War anyway--the whole puzzle is pretty much on fire.
Areas that the White House has touted as great success stories--Basra, to the south, for instance, in which the Brits handed over control to the Iraqi army some months ago--is a cauldron of mayhem now. In fact, the least-reported story of this war is that the day after the big ceremony just before the British soldiers pulled out of Basra, the post where they had been living and which had been turned over to the Iraqis, was looted and stripped while Iraqi forces stood by impassively.
So the whole fear-mongering election-year tactic of this war-mongering administration, that catchy little slogan that the terrorists would follow us home if we left Iraq and, as that genius-in-his-own-mind Bill O'Reilly rather hysterically pointed out, "would be fighting us on every street in America"--that mushroom-cloud hype was just so much bologney.
Here's the thing about the Anbar. If we pulled out, what would happen is that the new majority, the Shi'ites, who dominate the Iraqi army and outnumber Sunnis by an 80% to 20% margin, would swarm into the Anbar and massacre the Sunnis, who they've long hated even before they were called terrorists. They think the reason the Sunnis have gotten away with the insurgency is that the Americans have not been as bloodthirsty as they should have in getting rid of them.
(Of course, if the Americans HAD annihilated the Sunni insurgency like the Shi'ites want, the bloodshed would have been spilled all over al-Jazeera television 24/7. So we can't win for losing.)
In the used-to-be calm south, rival factions WITHIN the Shi'ites are jockeying for power, invading one another's towns, kidnapping and murdering at will without any interference from all those well-trained Iraqi army and police forces. On one day, one Shi'ite government ministry invaded another government ministry that happened to be mostly Sunni, kidnapped all the men in broad daylight, and drove straight through "police" checkpoints.
When prime minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered the Americans out after they had secured a violent neighborhood of Baghdad--because it was a stronghold for Muqtada al-Sadr, whose support Maliki needs--as soon as the Americans left, bombings, kidnappings, torture, and murder of mostly-Sunni neighborhoods returned with a vengeance.
What did the Sunnis do?
Blame the Americans because we actually LISTENED to the prime minister.
In Baghdad, the Sunnis beg the Americans for protection. They say, flat-out, that if they must be arrested, please God let it be the Americans who arrest them. They figure if they are arrested by Baghdad police, they will be tortured to death.
But in Fallujah and Ramadi, the Sunnis can't kill Americans fast enough. I guess they don't talk to each other much on the cellphones they use to set off IEDs.
If we protect Sunnis, it means killing Shi'ites. If we protect Shi'ites, it means killing Sunnis.
Do we pick sides? Right now, we're trying really really hard not to, by rounding up Shi'ite death squads (until the prime minister lets them go) and by going after the Sunnis in the Anbar.
Our troops are walking a tightrope stretched across the Grand Canyon in a high wind without a pole or a lead wire.
So our sloganeering and clueless president says we will "stand up" the Iraqi police and army so we can stand down. Ahhh, sounds so stirring, doesn't it?
Meanwhile, the most recent military strategies put forth seem to say one thing: that we JUST NEED TO TRAIN MORE IRAQIS.
Nobody much asks…What happens to those troops who have been trained? DO they "stand up"? CAN they stand up?
For that answer, we need to ask the soldiers and Marines on the ground who are directly involved in that training. Like this one:
(According to Capt. Stephanie A. Bagley, who commands a military police company in Baghdad):
The local police force in her region, as in much of Iraq, remains undertrained, poorly equipped and unable to stand up to the rigors of this conflict. It offers little resistance to the relentless Sunni Arab-led insurgency and has at least partly come under the sway of wily Shi'ite militias. Casualties are high, morale is low, and many police officers do not show up for work….
"I just want to get everyone home," she said. In the past several weeks, Captain Bagley, 30, barred her troops from foot patrols in the most violent neighborhoods and eliminated all nonessential travel. "I'm just not willing to lose another soldier," she said.
--"A Captain's Journey from Hope to Just Getting Her Unit Home," Kirk Semple, New York Times, November 19, 2006
The article goes on to describe how the Iraqis beg the Americans not to make them go out on patrol, how high the desertion rates are, and so on. This is a company of American military police who are EMBEDDED with the Iraqi police they are training. And it has gotten so dangerous for them--for the Americans, that is--that they don't even go out on foot patrols any more. When they do, the Iraqis beg them not to make them go along.
I am sick and tired unto death of hearing these kinds of "solutions" put forth as if nobody has the slightest idea of what the reality on the ground really is. Ask any military family who's had a loved one deployed to Iraq. Ask them what they think about the well-trained Iraqis. Well, for one thing, they can't tell them where they're going on patrol each day because IT COULD GET THEM BLOWN UP.
This would be a joke if it weren't a nightmare.
And I haven't even touched on the fleeing Iraqi middle class who are leaving the country in droves. Professors, doctors, lawyers and other professionals who have not yet been killed are getting out because they can afford to. The poor pack up what they can carry and hurry by the hundreds of thousands to congregate with their own tribes and sects.
This, my friends, IS A FULL-BLOWN CIVIL WAR. We have not prevented it. We have only been caught in the crossfire.
So if we pull out gradually, then what?
Hardliners all say that a terrible regional war will break out between Sunni nations like Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia and Shi'ite nations like Iran.
Haven't we heard this doomsday scenario somewhere before?
Oh yeah. Back during the Vietnam war. That old domino theory. Vietnam falls to communism and all of Indonesia and then Asia follow.
How soon before Hawaii, eh?
So, here we are. Thirty years later.
And the President of the United States is where?
In Vietnam. (His very first visit! How apropos, eh, Vietnam vets?)
Making trade agreements.
So the truth is that if we pull out of Iraq, Iraqis will be so busy killing other Iraqis that they won't really have much time to set up a terrorist stronghold and launch attacks on American soil.
Will other nations rush to finance their factions in the civil war?
They already are.
There is no solution, boys and girls, that is without cost.
And I think the United States and her allies have paid enough.
It's not just me and a few wacky liberal Democrats who feel this way. Here is commentary from two retired army generals, Barry McCaffrey and William Odom, as quoted by Josh Marshall on Talking Points Memo on November 21, 2006:
The quotes were taken from an Army Times interview. (That liberal rag, don'tcha know.)
"The country is not at war. The United States armed forces and the CIA are at war. So we are asking our military to sustain a level of effort that we have not resourced," General McCaffrey told Army Times.
"Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake," said General Odom. "The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president's conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq, creating democracy there, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, making Israel more secure, not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain, and others.
But reality no longer can be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shi'ite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq.
These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can't be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years."
This election sent a message, loud and clear, to this administration that the American people have had enough. But the White House still holds the lives of our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan in their blood-stained hands--there is only so much an oppositional Congress can do. They can pass all the laws they want, and Bush can sign statements setting himself free from whatever the law requires. They can appoint commissions to perform investigations, but if he does not have to heed the recommendations. They can even demand accountability with subpoenas, all of which can be tied up in legal wrestling matches until the day he leaves office. Dick Cheney has already stated, flat-out, that he will absolutely not testify before Congress, for any reason.
So what do we do?
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, contrary to what they may believe, do not work for themselves, boys and girls. THEY WORK FOR US.
Remember that old Bible story about the impenetrable walls of the city of Jericho? How impossible it was to scale them and take the city in battle? Joshua, Moses's brother, prayed to God and heard the answer.
Remember how the city fell?
So the people shouted, and the priests blew the trumpets and it came about, when the people heard the sound of the trumpet, that the people shouted with a great shout and the wall fell down flat, so that the people went up to the city, every man straight ahead, and they took the city.
--Joshua 6:20, New American Standard Bible
I say, for all of us--not just those of us with a vested stake in what happens with this terrible war--
SHOUT. LIFT UP A MIGHTY ROAR TO THE HEAVENS OR AT LEAST CNN AND FOX NEWS. BRING DOWN THE WALLS OF THE WHITE HOUSE WITH OUR COLLECTIVE VOICES.
If you've got a trumpet, blow it. When the walls of the White House finally fall down, even the Oval office will be forced to listen.
posted by Deanie Mills at 7:28 AM
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