A Reply To Right Wing Nuthouse
Dave Price
Rick Moran has become pessimistic on the war, and says time is now our biggest enemy in Iraq. Ah, time.
I remember being told in 2004 Iraqis wouldn’t vote or wanted a theocracy. In 2005 we were informed by experts that the effort to liberalize Iraq was doomed because they couldn’t agree on a constitution, and in 2006 they couldn’t form a government. This year, most were confident the Anbari tribes were never going to join the police. There’s always something for defeatists to point to. Just pick up your morning paper and the MSM will be trumpeting the insoluble problem du jour.
Rick says he has reached his new opinon based on the many mistakes made in Iraq. Ah, mistakes.
Why was the fleet at Pearl Harbor caught unawares and defenseless? How did hundreds of slow-moving, obsolete torpedo bombers end up being sent into utterly hopeless and futile attacks on the Japanese fleet, attacks from which almost none returned alive? Who decided to send U.S. forces into battle with the underarmed and underarmored Sherman tank? Why did we continue to waste the lives of thousands of Marines in suicidal frontal assaults against fortified Japanese positions long after it was clear the tactic was ineffective? How the hell did military planners not anticipate Europe would have hedgerows? Surely such incompetence should have doomed our efforts — but of course it did not. Much of the prowess of the Western military tradition is the result of its ability to self-criticize and adapt, as is happening now in Iraq.
Also, apparently long-forgotten are the brilliant triumphs of 2003, the lightning three-week advance to Baghdad (itself described more than once as “bogged down,” and with at least one prominent retired general predicting disaster, saying “we didn’t bring enough armor to this fight”), the single glorious “thunder run” through Baghdad which was sufficient to cause the regime’s forces to collapse. One must weigh not only failures, but also successes, including the rise of democracy and basic freedoms.
I agree with Rick that Bush has not been a great communicator on the war, which is probably one reason why there is so much excitement about Giuliani in the GOP despite his social liberalism. With virtually the entire MSM arrayed against the effort, it takes a master orator to put things in their proper context and drive perceptions. But absent such inspired leadership, rational men and women must distill the truth from the morass of agenda-driven journalism themselves, and employ empiricism to draw conclusions. This is where I think those forecasting defeat fail.
In Iraq, if not in America, time appears to be on our side, not against us: in addition to the progress noted above, every day the ISF get a little stronger while the insurgents' relative position gets a little weaker. The tide has turned in Anbar. Petraeus is deFOBbing our troops into small, local garrisons that create security for Iraqis rather than security from Iraqis. Al-Sadr has fled the field and many Shia militias are apparently standing down.
Here’s a simple point that very few Americans understand: Aside from Sunni Arabs, most Iraqis don’t think the current situation in Iraq is that bad right now. Polling shows this over and over again, with a majority saying life is going fairly well. How is that possible, with the car bombs going off all over? Well, Iraq isn’t the U.S. or Europe: if you’re Kurdish or Shia, there’s a good chance you’re digging your relatives out of mass graves put there by the last regime, and you’ve certainly spent the last few decades without basic freedoms like assembly, speech, and press—or being allowed unrestricted access to things like cars, satellite dishes, computers, and cell phones.
Liberalizing Iraq was never going to be easy, that insufficiently foreseen reality the legacy of a brutal kleptocratic police state dotted with rape rooms and mass graves, where Sunni Arabs terrorized Shia and Kurd with arms bought by oil money stolen out from under those it oppressed. We should just be thankful the price of freedom for Iraq isn’t nearly as bloody as in South Korea, Japan, or Germany — or, as a commenter noted, the American South.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Addendum
- A Reply To Right Wing Nuthouse
This is fairly amazing to most people, who just assume things are awful.
But leaving that aside: public opinion shifts. People don't know this? Right now any attitudes expressed will have more to do with this exact moment in time, not some kind of hard kernel of inflexible belief.
I landed on my feet. I was very lucky and only unemployed for one day. The lesson I learned from this is to look at the big picture. Even in a total disaster, you can always find nuggets of good news, but the nuggets of good news don’t tell you what is going on. It is the big picture that tells how things are going.
There are nuggets of good news in Iraq, but the big picture has been slowly getting worse for the last four years and really hasn’t started to change yet. The big problem is that the whole purpose of the surge is to buy time for the Iraqi to create a unity government, but the Shia have no interest in compromising with the Sunni or creating a unity government. The Shia figure they are the majority and they won the election, so they should get to make the rules. Any compromises with the Sunni is just appeasement of terrorism. You don’t negotiate with terrorists. The Shia in the government think they will eventually have to fight a civil war with the Sunni anyway. Promising developments, like the Anbar tribal leaders that are working with the government and the US, will evaporate, if the government does not show some willingness to work with the Sunni and make compromises.
The American people have been listening to the stories of how we are making progress in Iraq for the last four years. They know that the situation has not really gotten any better. They have stopped believing that the nuggets of “good news” really mean progress. That is what Rick Moran is talking about. The administration and its supporters have said we are making progress in Iraq for the last four years, and things have just gotten worse. The administration is asking Congress and the American people for one more chance to get it right. The extra 20,000 troops are not going to help much. The switch to counter insurgency tactics will help, but at the cost of much higher casualty rate. We really don’t have enough troops, even with counterinsurgency tactics and the Iraqi Army to pacify the whole country. Our plan still relies on the elected Shia government doing what they simply don’t want to and have refused to do so far.
That is why time is running out.
The long-awaited compromises ending in a cessation of violence between the factions have not occurred as hoped, but to that end, in order to convince me that time is not on our side you would have to demonstrate that the desired result becomes less likely as time goes on. The turnaround in Anbar is evidence of the opposite, is it not? I understood it to be, until recently, the Sunnis we were waiting on more than the Shia. Anyway, as we're all aware, the Sunni/Shia divide does not accurately describe the cause of all the violence we are seeing.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.