Part of me thinks it would be deeply irresponsible to cut and run from Iraq, especially since we quite literally broke the country. In this regard, I think it is our obligation to provide them with a reasonably stable country that, at the very least, isn’t ravaged by constant bloodshed and sectarian violence.

Problem is, the people you refer to as “we”, the ones who broke Iraq, are the same people who would be responsible for overseeing any effort to make it right. Iraq isn’t going to hold tight for two or three more years and wait to see if a Democrat wins the White House, and if so, whether they will be capable or willing to fix anything, whatever that may entail.

If by “our” you mean people like the readers here – well, sure, we’d like to make things stable and prosperous, but I don’t think we need to point out what a pipe dream that is due to our lack of power.

And please don’t say “cut and run”. Propaganda term. Leave it for the dittoheads.

I agree. We owe Iraq a stable country. I just don’t see any way to provide it, that could actually happen.

Brad would never say “cut and run” unless he was joking. Or trying to escape a bad date.

While it’s true that we broke Iraq, it’s also true that our continued presence isn’t helping much. Time to start kicking the money that’s currently being pissed away at Halliburton et al. toward multilateral organizations (that’s right, the UN and its minions), with a hell of a lot more transparency. While I feel for the Fijians and New Zealanders who’ll be getting shot at, they aren’t wearing the Stars and Stripes, and therefore won’t have quite so much ill will directed their way. Peacekeeping and reconstruction by the US military and US corporations isn’t working. Time to hand it over.

“Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.”

— Satchel Paige

There’s no civil war. That’s just a photoshopped picture.

Has anybody noticed the creepy sort of resemblance between Donald Rumsfeld and Robert McNamara?

Tell me what you think:

http://www.militaryfactory.com/generals/detail.asp?general_id=7

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Robert-McNamara.jpg

Just sayin’.

We’re spending how much a day there? (Said funds gong right into the pockets of well connected kleptocrats.)

Meanwhile, New Orleans is being left for dead. Hey, let’s rephrase the question. Who decided to cut and run from a hurricane?

Nope. Ain’t buying it. There’s not a damn thing we can do to help. Our military presence just fans the fire. And once again, using these incredibly lethal modern weapons like aerial bombs, artillery and 25mm chain guns in densely populated residential neighborhoods is criminal and stupid. There’s not a thing that an infantry or armored infantry unit can do to keep the Sunni and Shi’a operators from killing each other. Yeah, we broke it, and the Shi’a have a hundred years of anger to work thru, and the Sunnis have the anger of recent deposement to work thru, and the kurds have a country they’d like to administer, the Turkmen are fucked from every side, Turkey’s gonna roll on the PKK, the US is either gonna have to fight them or stand down, Iran owns the south and there’s just nothing to be done, it’s a completely lost cause. American troops make NO positive contribution. Tell me some tactical approach you can think of that we could employ to stop the sectarian and ethnic killing. Read Riverbend lately? The entire middle class is leaving. She calls it the “Summer of Goodbyes”. Everybody but bush/cheney/rumsfeld knows the game is up, and they don’t feel like there’s anything to lose if they just keep poking the hornet’s nest with a stick. They’re sick fucking murderers…

mikey

Howzabout we give it back to that fella they found in the spiderhole?

“Securing the capital.â€? Troops can tower terrorists for a while but once the steam sizzles, the troop presence dwindles, the terrorists will transport their boom right back. Meddling in civil war is like inserting your head under the guillotine – willing decapitation. On the flipside, we in part quickened the guillotine’s construction so surely we can buff up and tolerable our toxin?

I have to at the very least giggle at the concept that this government, all Republican controlled, is now or has ever been anything other than irresponsible. If you, Brad, have any influence, use it, otherwise recognize that your hopes are dashed.

Even a senile coot like Reagan knew better than this administration when it was time to get out of the china shop, rather than trying to glue vases back together with hooves instead of hands.

Reconstruction’s done, folks. We stopped paying out reconstruction contracts months ago. All the money being pissed away now is being used solely to make our soldiers into moving targets. Of course, Johnny Boy will get a tremendous sendoff after his corpse is shipped back in secrecy and buried in a lack of notice, with all the reichtwingbloggers swearing eternal fealty to the ideals they died for, orange stained index fingers pointed toward the sky.

Saphire, thanks for that. “Securing the capital”. Great phrase. Everybody that’s reading this thread, I want you to do me a favor. Hell, it’s summer. Go out your front door, right now, and walk out to the sidewalk. Look around your neighborhood. Imagine gunships, AC130s and Apaches, circling overhead, firing rockets, anti-tank missiles and automatic cannon. Imagine an Abrams tank over there on the corner, firing 120mm HEAT rounds into those apartment buildings or those houses. Bradleys and Strykers firing 25mm canon rounds into specific apartment windows. Every now and then, an F16 comes out of nowhere and drops half a ton of modern, high velocity explosives one street over. An infantry platoon, fully armed and supported suddenly appears on YOUR street, shouting at you in a language you don’t understand and pointing weapons at you. Your uncle, with his pride and honor, stomps out to chastise them and he takes a burst of 5.56 in the chest. Now rounds are fired, and everybody’s blood is up. The captain calls targets for the gunship. Your little sister is sick and they kick thru your front door, making her get out of bed…

Jeezus, people, think about what the fucking words “Securing the capital” mean. And ask yourself if this is the best we can do…

mikey

I try to take my mind off it by thinking about how hideously they’ll mangle things when our troops finally do have to bug out.

{

What we need is a way to get our troops out silently and quickly, before anyone realizes they are gone. And leave recordings of voices playing in the Green Zone to make it sound like it’s still occupied.

Then in a couple years when Big Chief Pretzelchoker is safely back on his dude ranch we can have someone serious take a look at the mess that’s left and see what can be done for the Iraqis. Sorry, dudes.

Juan Cole over at Informed Comment has a great post up that at least suggests a possibility for why were stuck in Iraq.

A good read, I highly suggest it to anyone confused about our national’s recent crack addict-esk actions in the Middle East.

Problem is, the people you refer to as “we�, the ones who broke Iraq, are the same people who would be responsible for overseeing any effort to make it right.

“We” paid the taxes that bought all those bombs. “We” are indeed responsible for it.

If you, Brad, have any influence, use it, otherwise recognize that your hopes are dashed.

Yeah, I know.

But I’ll put it to you like this: I find it very difficult to advocate leaving a country that we blew up, and leaving it in tatters. Maybe there’s nothing we can doo about it, but it shouldn’t sit well on any of our consciences. Like I pointed out to Mordant, it’s our tax dollars at work.

Brad is right. We bear collective responsibility. If you identify as an “American”, you are responsible for America’s actions. But you also offer the salvation. Tell your congresscritter you’re voting in November for the “Withdraw Now” candidate.. Tell Diane, Joe, Hillary, every one of these fucking criminal wafflers to take a position, and live or die politically on the basis of that position…

mikey

Sorry Brad, but your on the crack smoking side of the fence on this one. There isn’t a damn thing that we are doing over there that’s helping out. Our mission is to what, stand around and tell these people not to shoot and kill each other? Fuck, we don’t even speak the damn language…people are dying there and people will continue to die, doesn’t matter what we do. The Shia will continue to allow Sadr’s folks free reign to execute Sunni muslims and the Sunni muslims will continue their side of the violence. I’m guessing you’ve been watching tweety bird again…

Sorry Brad, but your on the crack smoking side of the fence on this one. There isn’t a damn thing that we are doing over there that’s helping out. Our mission is to what, stand around and tell these people not to shoot and kill each other? Fuck, we don’t even speak the damn language…people are dying there and people will continue to die, doesn’t matter what we do. The Shia will continue to allow Sadr’s folks free reign to execute Sunni muslims and the Sunni muslims will continue their side of the violence. I’m guessing you’ve been watching tweety bird again…

So basically the strategy is to leave and let everyone die anyway.

I’m looking for some kind of option here that doesn’t suck, people 🙂

Horseshit.

I don’t recall being asked in my tax forms “hey, you mind if we buy bombs with your tax? Yes? Oh, okay then.”

Consider we are at risk of jail if we don’t pay taxes. Consider that none of us have the ability to dictate to what our taxes go towards purchasing. Considering that, how can one actually dictate that “we” are responsible for what cretins in office, cretins that were elected people not-“we”, decide to purchase with the money wrung from us on threat of imprisonment?

The people purchasing the bombs are responsible, not the people they’ve taken the money from, who oppose every act they undertake, knew the Iraq mess was a mistake before we’d even been told the Administration wanted to invade, and knew that this civil war was going to happen, that they’d fuck up, that they’d just ruin the nation of Iraq and “our” nation as well.

I’m not the Administration’s fucking sin-eater.

As Mikey said, we ARE the ones that are responsible for the people that are in power today. If folks don’t actively voice their opinion on these matters, then the wingnuts that you do such a wonderful job of covering WIN. Hell, I read where there was a poll that basically said that 50 percent of the people in this nation still believe that there was WMD in Iwreck. And if these people get their news from the wingnuts, then we are eventually damned since there are more of them than there are of us. Of course, you all could do what I did and move to a red state!!! Ok, so I didn’t move to be all political and junk, but at least I get to get ahold of these idiots and try and talk some sense into them…

And there is no positive solution, Brad.

The administration commited this country to something, that resulted in a broken, failed nation-state that should fragment into three seperate countries any fucking day now. And everytime someone says “well, we can’t just leave it like that” I’m reminded of the folk who after every American death recommitt so “they did not die in vain”. All death in war is vanity. You can’t have them come back from the dead, so they’re dead. In vain.

Unless you’re like, at war with Haiti or something.

Same thign goes for failed nations. If they break, they’re fucking broke. And all the outward assistance isn’t going to fix the internal problems of the nation. So you have to let human nature take its sick, depressing course and hope that they stop sticking the fork into the electrical socket eventually.

It’s not the prettiest option, but it’s the only one that ever seems to work.

And I don’t remember the people VOTING for a civil war either. These ARE our tax dollars and we have a say in a representitive democracy.

Brad, you want an option? Break up the country like we should have done to start with. Break it up into the north for the Kurds, the south for the Shia and the middle for the fucked Sunni’s. Follow the model the NFL uses for revenue sharing to split up the oil revenue and call it a day.

Brad, your hearts in the right place. The question is, is there anything the American Military can do to mitigate the civil war we unleashed in Iraq. My answer is no. If you’ve got a plan, let’s have it now. ‘Cause otherwise, the war is gonna happen and we can neither slow it down nor stop it. Pulling out all American troops is the kindest, least evil approach we can take. More firepower can NOT prevent a civil war. The events are well and truly beyond our control. But maybe, if we stop OCCUPYING the fucking country, just maybe they will have to find a way to make it work. Will it include partitioning the country? Absolutely. But lets try to get to the end game quickly as opposed to slowly, y’know?

mikey

Al-Maliki is the guy Bush hand picked after he kicked the other guy out for not being pro-American enough. Another clear example of the Bushies ceaseless attention to detail.

Consider we are at risk of jail if we don’t pay taxes.

Thoreau went to jail in mid-1846 as punishment for his individual antislavery tax boycott;
“Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

Uh huh. I don’t live my life according to quotations of the guy who wrote Walden. You want to go to jail, hey, knock yourself out. I’m sure you’ll only go to minimum-security prison, and will only face the merest of consequences of the prison institution that dehumanizes all that reside within it.

The system is fucked, folks. I go to jail, nothing gets solved except I get a criminal record. The tax doesn’t suddenly stop being unfair. The system doesn’t suddenly stop being unflawed and dedicated to screwing the minority opinion. Martyrdom is not my best quality.

Maybe we could pull out and just give the money we’re spending on it to someone competent who can actually do something? It solves only half the problem, not even that really since everybody who died is still dead, and I can think of a lot of stuff we could have spent that money on (well, the original money, since we’re now spending money we *don’t* have) but we *did* break it.

Disclaimer: I still don’t have my migraine drugs and I am not an international policy expert. Mock or ignore at will.

Iraq’s prime minister sharply criticized a U.S.-Iraqi attack Monday on a Shiite militia stronghold in Baghdad,

Isn’t the more significantly unbe-freaking-believable point here that Iraq’s PM is “sharply criticizing” an operation by HIS OWN ARMY???

How can we expect the Iraqi people to rely on their army for security, rather than their ethno-religious militia of choice, when that army isn’t even under the control of their own Prime Minister???

I’m with Mikey on this. We’re gasoline on the fire. More pointedly, we’re not just who “broke Iraq”, but we’re among the ones who are still breaking Iraq, and we’re the gang that’s using the heaviest fire power to do so. So while it’s all nice and noble to want to stay and make sure something awful doesn’t happen to Iraq, we need to be honest enough to admit that our military was something awful that happened and still is happening to Iraq. Clucking that unimaginable chaos will ensue if we leave would be a helluva lot more convincing if we weren’t directly responsible for as much of the chaos as we are.

(And re-reading the original post…
If the prime minister is going to get upset every time we go after Shiite death squads…
With planes. Planes. In Sadr City. Dense urban slums. There would be something pretty horribly wrong with the Prime Minister if he didn’t get upset about this. Look. You want to go after miscreants? Fine. Do so in a manner that doesn’t involve excesive and fairly indiscriminate force. That’s how we got where we are now. And if we’re not willing to bear the causulties that less devestating tactics would entail, well… how was it that we were supposed to be doing good by sticking around again?)

OK, here’s what we’re dealing with here. Many of you have probably already read this quote, but since it is the single, stupidest thing that I have ever read, I though I’d point it out to all of you. Here’s Pretzledent Bunnypants on Iraq:

You know, I hear people say, Well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box.

You’d think stupidity on that scale would be fatal. Gah, that dumb tit makes my head hurt!

“I think it is our obligation to provide them with a reasonably stable country…”
Brad ‘we’ cannot provide ‘them’ with ‘shit’.
There’s only one valid policy… RUN AWAY!

“We� paid the taxes that bought all those bombs. “We� are indeed responsible for it.

Yes, and those same taxes also pay for valuable social services as well. It’s a tough call. But still, the point remains: the same crew that bears the lion’s share of the responsibility for this clusterfuck would be the same people to implement any plan designed to “fix” the situation, even granting that they would give a shit to do something about it. It’s. Not. Going. To. Happen.

“Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.�

Some of us consider our immediate responsibilities to our families a bit more pressing than our abstract responsibility for what a criminal government has done with the money we trusted them with. That’s really noble-sounding and all, but Thoreau could afford to be indulgent like that, and Emerson bailed his ass out immediately, so it’s not like he actually languished for years in prison. Most of us don’t feel like leaving our kids without a provider just to make a futile gesture against a government that would not be impressed at any rate. That would seem to be – what’s the word? – immoral in its own way.

If BushCo were seriously opposed to death squads in Iraq, I don’t really understand why John Negroponte was ambassador there for 2004-2005.

Mikey said: “Go out your front door, right now, and walk out to the sidewalk. Look around your neighborhood. Imagine……”

Guys, I gotta tell you, I do that. I do that everyday. I watch the news about Tyre and then I drive down Pacific Coast Highway and see the hills meet the sea and the apartment buildings on the bluffs and the palm trees and I think how it would look under bombardment.

The kids at the local high school did an Amnesty Int’l fundraiser by showing “Hotel Rwanda” in the school gym, and by the time it was over, I could imagine those horrors taking place in that very gym. Or the luxury hotel on Sunset Blvd.

I look at those photos of Beruit – both colors of smoke! – and the satellite photos, and they could be satellite photos of LA, or New Orleans flooded.

I read Scott Simon’s novel “Pretty Bird” about families living in Sarajevo under Serb snipers, and I thought about some of the ugliest right wing rhetoric, and how close it could come to that.

No one should think that this shit can’t come to us, too. We need to do what we can to keep the hatred and violence from escalating, instead of exacerbating it.

Martyrdom is not my best quality.

mine neither. but then I don’t think I have a right to sit in my house, eating my lunch, and typing on a computer, in peace, and think I have no responsibility for what our country has done.

Kathleen: I, on the other hand, think that if the only possible way to resist responsibility is to break the law, you’re fucked. I can’t stop supporting this administration’s criminal acts without going to jail for some trumped up charge. That the only reason I can say I’m not to blame is if I stop paying taxes and engage in civil disobediance, then get arrested, get charged, go to jail, get out, and do it all again because the system didn’t change for fuck all.

At that point, I’m not a citizen, I’m a hostage rotating between confinements.

I don’t support this administration in *anything* they do politically. The only means of support they get from me is the money they wring from me every year to keep this teetering republic alive for one more year.

I’m basically being mugged.

It’s practically un-American to say this, but sometimes there just ISN’T a good solution. The “you broke it, you bought it” proverb isn’t about fixing the smashed pot; unfortunately, the rapidly failing nation-state of Iraq and its suffering peoples are not a consumer good that can be swept up and neatly discarded. A better analogy would be that Iraq is a surgical patient, sliced open from neck to pelvis, bleeding out all over the OR. Sometimes the best thing the surgeons can do is just sew up and get their hands the hell out of there. We can argue endlessly whether the patient needed surgery for that ugly tumor in the first place, or whether the surgeons should at a minimum lose their licenses for kidnapping an unwilling subject, or whether the patient will ever get out of intensive care, where they’ll find hospice services, who on the waiting list will get any remaining organs that might be worth donating. But the FIRST step is to get those surgeons out, especially the one who just dropped a kidney on the floor, stepped on it, picked it up and tried to sew it to the patient’s colon. Because we’re way past the “do no harm” part of the credo, and cruising towards murder charges.

Damn, who’s this anne laurie? She has all of her shit in one sock. Just sayin…

mikey