"His [Sheik Ali Bapir's] bestselling memoir has gone into a second printing and has been translated into Arabic. He leads a large political movement with its own satellite channel, news publications, six seats in the Kurdistan regional parliament and a plush compound on the outskirts of this predominantly Kurdish city...."'I took the occasion to study Islam with my fellow prisoners,' he says during a rambling chat with a reporter he first met before the Iraq war. "I held Koranic classes. I succeeded in teaching them to recite the Koran by heart." -- from this news article
Meanwhile, the American soldiers who removed Saddam Hussein, thus making possible the publication of Ali Bapir's "bestselling memoir," and his "political movement with its own satellite channel" and "news publications" and "six seats in the Kurdistan regional parliament" and a "plush compound" on the outskirts of Irbil, do not, in Iraq, or before they go to Iraq, learn a thing of use about Islam.
Oh, now, a few years into the Iraq war, they are being told that there are "Sunnis" and "Shi'a." And they are taught a little of what is called demurely "cultural sensitivity" having to do with knocking down doors when there are women inside, and what hand to eat with when you are with Arabs, and so on. But that's it.
They are given no real understanding of what it is that suffuses the societies of the people they will meet, but that they cannot see. There is no discussion of what fills the minds of men in the country they will remain in for so long. Yet they are there risking their lives for a goal that they would see to be impossible if they actually were taught about Islam. They should be taught what the unshakeable Muslim view of Infidels is, and that any expressions of friendship or loyalty are purely temporary. These are alliances of very limited convenience, designed -- by the Anbar sheiks, for example -- to win American money and above all, weaponry. They mean nothing about a long-term alliance, which is impossible.
The biggest failure of the Iraq War was and remains a failure of intelligence. There has been a failure to intelligently understand the need for those making policy, and for those soldiers who have been asked to execute without questioning that policy, to learn about Islam, the threat of Jihad, and the instruments of Jihad that go far beyond acts of terror. More than a million have been in Iraq, and the chance to educate them was heaven-sent, and was completely muffed.
Ossas of idiocy piled on Pelions of ignorance. That's the story, the continuing story, of the Iraq war.
And its opponents? They have yet to offer the deadliest criticism, the unanswerable criticism, the criticism offered here. They cannot formulate a criticism that attacks the declared goals not only as unattainable, but as making no sense, for we have no stake in the future stability of Iraq or of the area, but can defend ourselves most successfully against the global jihad not by trying to ease tensions but by allowing them to play out -- even the nightmare, for both Iran and Saudi Arabia, of continuous Sunni-Shi'a hostility and even warfare.
If the Americans leave, will the Shi'a give the Sunnis what they want -- and what they have no right to demand, given the long record of Sunni discrimination, persecution, and murder? No. Will the Sunnis be able to take back Iraq? No. But they can try to preserve their presence in, and take back, fabled Baghdad, the loss of which will stick in Sunni Arab craws. For it was, for 500 years, the most important city of Islam (and for 400 of those years the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate). Money, men, and war matériel should come from both Sunni neighbors, and from Iran, and be a permanent source of unsettlement and expense. Is that a bad thing? Is it bad because Gates and Rice and others in the government are told, by Saudi and U.A.E. and Egyptian and Jordanian diplomats and rulers, that there will be "chaos" and "catastrophe" and they apparently believe what the people who tell them this say, without analyzing what lies behind those words, what those words mean?
It is with great reluctance that I review my support for the invasion of Iraq. The way I remember it was we had those U.N. sanctions on him, and rightly or wrongly we were being blamed for 10,000 Iraqi babies dying each and every month. Saddam was ruthless, unpredictable, and sometimes did irrational and destructive things. He was building that huge mosque and had a Qur'an written in his own blood for it. He still held a deep grudge and desire for vengeance against the U.S. for the first Gulf War; we needed to act in the Middle East and could hardly trust him to watch our backs. The 4 years he had the inspectors kicked out of his country left nothing but huge questions about his various weapons programs and he refused to answer about it or provide the required documentation. He was continually threatening Israel with fiery destruction -- with the WMD's everyone knows he didn't have? What was going to happen if he managed to wriggle off of the sanctions regime? I think it's a safe bet he would have gone back to trying to build a nuke, etc.
These short-term, tactical problems were overshadowed by a longer-term problem, which is to drain the swamp of terror-fueling misery in the Islamic world by removing their most brutal and repressive dictator, which if replaced by a Western-style representative government committed to human rights and equality, should have improved their lot in life and served as an example to the rest of the Middle East. It might have worked...
BUT -- I am forced to admit that I was incredibly ignorant in assuming that under their Iraqi exteriors beat hearts that yearned for our type of freedom and self-determination. Also, with the Left in this country determined to sabotage any good in the world that Bush tried to bring about, we were doomed from the start to lose the propaganda war, which is even more important than the physical one. The Left routinely and gratuitously reaffirms and reinforces the worst prejudices of Muslims against Americans: the war was only to steal their oil, we like torturing people, we are bloodthirsty war-mongers eager to rape the daughters and wives of Muslims, we are the new Imperialists, etc. And the Left's steady drumbeat of 'we can't win' could not have fallen on deaf ears over there; it must have been a source of aid and comfort that the West is so divided on itself, along with simply being told they'd win, it all adds up to a loss for us.
In summary, we had a tiger by the tail, we had to be extraordinarily careful about how we let it go -- damned if we do, damned if we don't. Perhaps in retrospective, damned if we don't would have been the better choice -- but the leader of the Free World does not have the comfort of hindsight to aid in decision-making.
Hopefully we all have learned something. I'm sorry to have been so far behind the curve.
The biggest failure of the Iraq war ?
The failure in Intelligence ?
No, it's a shortcoming of the West, which thanks to Jihadwatch and others will be rectified, or we will lose.
And we're winning in Iraq.
Just gotta help show our people on how to defeat islam.
And it's not by leaving or losing, or positing defeat solutions as ones presumably leading to victory (a la Murtha).
Winning is winning (and peace only follows victory).
Anything else is merely like the song of the sirens leading to destruction.
We got Liberalism.
All military officers study history--especially military history--philosophy, law, and ethics in relation to the application of military force in the settlement of international disputes. Intelligence officers in particular also study ideology, sociology, and humanities in order to try to understand the mindset of potential and actual enemies.
In this wider effort, all officers, who through division of labor must focus chiefly on the art and science of warfare, rely heavily on the educational services and the professional integrity of our academic institutions.
The story of our age will be how the scholars of Western academia abandoned academic integrity, turned on their own civilization, through malicious educational malpractice crippled the leadership, military and political, of our once noble and just society, and set up the conditions for a brutal and bloody world war, in which millions of our fellow citizens needlessly perished at the hands of primitive and implacable ideological Islamic monsters.
That's what I think.
Winning in Iraq...I Am not sure what that means. Fewer Americans killed, more terrorists killed or captured, is a good thing, but they are battles. You can win lots of battles and not win the war.
What does winning in Iraq actually consist of? A free people? Politically allowed to vote their preferences, in a democratic manner? A stable and peaceful country, with a stable and peaceful people?
This aintagunna happen anytime soon, Mahdi won't allow it. He needs chaos to get him to come out of his well. In order to actualize a 'peaceful country', America will have to stay forever, unless driven out, or find a way other than surrender to 'get out'. Throwing ones hands up in disgust, and vacating the premises would be acceptable.
It was over for winning in Iraq when the Iraqi gov made Islam/Sharia a part of it's new 'democratic' structure. Thats how the winners got defeated.
Bush should have won the war when he won it, which was to remove Saddam, round up criminal Saddamites, and then get the he-- out. About two months after Saddams statue was knocked over.
To stay longer and expect more, was a result of 'intelligence', or lack thereof, both of a material kind, and a mental kind. Bush and the Bushmen have not achieved 'enlightenment' on these subjects yet, and still expect more than can 'realistically' be achieved. Unless the whole thing is one huge lie, and we are in Iraq for reasons totally unexposed to anyone but close Bushmen, that has nothing to do with popular theories about why we are there. For all I know this could all be one big proxy war between Rupert Murdock, and Geo Soro's. But I doubt it.
Allahs role is much bigger...and he always knows best...
"Ossas of ignorance" --from above
So we are to forgive the current misdirections of foreign policy on the basis of assonance?
It beggars belief that the administration, even this administration, is so empty of experience so bereft of resources that it couldn't have got informed ahead of time. But wait a minute. They probably believed themselves to be informed at the most important levels. Didn't they have access to the advice of Prince Bandar bin Sultan, that scotch-drinking fan of American football, the guy who was a frequent house guest of the Bush family, indeed considered "like a member of the family?" Surely his counsel concerning the Mideast, its culture and mores could be considered trustworthy?
Or how about that other icon of Middle eastern progress, Salem bin Laden, member of the board of the Carlyle Group. He discretely vacated his seat on the board a month following a certain indiscretion by his black sheep little brother, you perhaps remember: the one who was "disowned" by the family due to his beliefs hijacking the great religion of Islam? Surely before his departure he had an opportunity to prepare his American colleagues for such anomalous behavior and could have tutored them on how best to combat it. Heaven forbid Salem would ever raise a finger to combat it himself.
No. I don't think pleading ignorance is an excuse. Most courts of law wouldn't accept such a plea, so why should this be offered as an out to this group of (ahem) elected officials? I think it's more likely to be a Nuptse of knavery because "stupidity" of the kind demonstrated by this administration is more along the lines of criminal negligence, much as Dubyai revels in the image of the average Joe.
It has been reported in the news recently that al Qaeda has been set back significantly in Iraq. My first reaction was: Okay, so now the Shiites and their Iranian allies will have an easier time. Given that, we will now have to battle the other side we just helped.
Wouldn't it be easier if we just stood back and let the two sides batter each other for a while? Works for me.
Speaking of intelligence. Here is a wonderful website. Foggy bottom doesn't get everything wrong.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html
It is interesting to rank order the nations of the world by fertility rate. Mali (90% Muslim) 7.38 children born per woman all the way down to Hong Kong .98. Perhaps we should deny visas or immigration to anyone from a nation with fertility rate above 3.
"What does winning in Iraq actually consist of?"
-- from a poster above
Winning in Iraq for the Americans (the "Iraqis" are quite another matter) should be defined as a result, or a situation, that weakens the Camp of Islam. Bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in Iraq, hopeless as that effort necessarily is, if that "freedom" is defined as anything like what the advanced Western democracies offer their citizens, and what was created over the centuries by successive generations of the progressively enlightened (their achievements largely under-appreciated, or even ignored, by the current inheritors of that political legacy)is an unattainable and pointless goal, unless it can be demonstrated that such "democracy" necessarily weakens the hold of Islam, politically and socially, on those in thrall to it.
But what would even a cursory glance at Islamic states reveal? It would reveal that those who were best at constraining Islam were despots, enlightened despots, but despots. They include Shah Reza Pahlevi of Iran, who greatly improved the treatment of non-Muslims in Iran, and who tried, fitfully, to emphasize the pre-Islamic past of Iran, so that even his self-celebration at Persepolis, that spectacle in which so many foreigners took part(the English director Peter Brook, I recall, may have been the guest metteur-en-scene), mayn be less deplored, for its extravagance, today, and seen as one more element in the attempt to excite the popular imagination with that pre-Islamic Persian past.
In Morocco , Mohammad V, as a Sherifian monarch (descendant of the Prophet), did not have to prove his Muslim bonafides, and could afford not to be fervent in his faith. In Tunisia, the hero of the nationalist movement, Habib Bourguia, established his one-party rule -- the party being his creation, the determinedly secular Destour Party -- and his inheritors run what many do not realize is a police state, but a benign police state that makes Tunisia safe for advanced secular thought. Finally, the most successful of these despots determined to limit the power of Islam is, of course, Ataturk, who put in place a series of measures designed to systematically constrain Islam. His successors found it useful to create a Cult of Personality around Ataturk, and the figure of Ataturk clearly replaces Muhammad just as the cult of "the Turk" replaces, or acts as a brake on, full-throated and therefore dangerous Islam.
All of these cases were ignored by the Bush Admnistration, for sentimentality about "democracy" is a useful arrow in the quivre of those who are mostly, at home, defenders of privilege. That the Administration was prepared to ignore the demonstrated wishes of the Framers on the role of Congress in war-making, and to continue a war that is opposed by at least 70% of the public, in a runaway-train scenario (with Bush as engineer, stoking the engine, and intimidating Congress, preventing it from stopping him even as the very same misguided war, that in Iraq, prevents Bush from acting, as he should, on the matter of Iran's nuclear project).
The only result that constitutes "winning" in Iraq is that which will weaken th Camp of Islam. And the only way to obtain that result is to leave promptly. Forget all that stuff that the rulers of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan keep prating about -- of course they want the Americans to stay, and to shore up the Sunnis. Of course many of the Shi'a still want the Americans to stay as long as staying means more tens of billions in aid, and the likelihood that the Americans will leave behind all kinds of military equipment to be inherited by the Shi'a-dominated government of "Iraq." And of course the Kurds want the Americans to stay as long as possible, because ever since 1991 the Americans have protected the Kurds, and allowed their incipient state, now an autonomous and successful region, to flourish. But what this or that group of Muslims want, for their own obvious purposes, is not what a sensibl Administration should want.
It should be thinking, everyone should be thinking: how do we weaken the forces of Jihad? How do we halt and reverse the demographic conquest, slow but speeding up, and if nothing is done inexorable, of the countries of Western Eruope? How do we constrain the use of the Money Weapon, by Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, Qatar, and other rich Arab oil states? How do we diminish the amounts available to be used to pay for Muslim propaganda, the buying-up of so many well-placed Westren hirelings and apologists, the financing of so many Western academic "centers" like the infamous Esposito operation, the paying for mosques and madrasas everywhere, seen rightly as beachheads of conquest, as signs of increasing dominance, not merely as quiet places of private worship (the Western notion of "religion" does not fit Islam), the funding of lawyers to suppress or threaten or intimidate with lawsuits all who stand in the way of this well-financed Muslim effort, the campaigns of Da'wa that target the psychially and economically marginal, including the literally captive audiences of certain prison populations? All of this has nothing to do with the expensive effort, with its squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale, both civilian and military (for that is plummeting, and the resuls can be seen in the rates of re-enlistment, and the quality of the officers and men who leave, not to mention the loss of trust between the Army and its civilian soldiers who have been treated so badly, misused with such arrogance and such contempt by those who think they can take whatever advantage can be taken of people who had no idea of what, in joining the National Guard and the Reserves, how badly they would be misused and how indifferent was the Army to that misuse).
And yet here is Iraq, which offers on a platter two of the three great fissures in Islam: the Sectarian (Sunni and Shi'a), and the Ethnic (Arab and Non-Arab Muslim), and yet the Administration lacks the wit, and possibly the necessary intelligent ruthlessness, to see its opportunity and to take it. It need not do a thing for those fissures to grow and grow. It need only stop doing things, stop the squandering, stop the posturing, stop being so confused about Islam and the nature of this war. Yet those who prate about World War IV do not convince by their statements, when they immmediately show, in their unshakeable enthusasism for the war in Iraq, that they have not analyzed the problem, have decided that they will remain Bush loyalists and loyalists of a policy that does not makes sense, and that, if such policy were successful, if somehow Iraq could be held together and made the recipient of anothre 50 or 100 billion in what is so mistakenly called "reconstruction" aid by the long-suffering, unrepresented American taxpayer, who has no desire to shell out tens of billions or Iraq or other Muslims anywhere, it would do nothing to weaken the Camp of Islam.
The terminal stupidity of the Administration, and of the kagans and kristols who have a personal stake, the stake of careerists, "career conservatives," in pursuing this madness should now be clear to everyone, not least to those, perhaps especially to those, who are alarmed, and also well-informed, about the nature and permanent menace to Infidels everywhere, of Islam.
Bush and Rice and the Adminstration's loyalists in the so-called "conservative media" are not among them. They, you see, have too much at stake, because the size of the mistake that has been made is too colossal for them to own up as to how wrong they have been. They just can't do it. Their careers, you see. Their lecture fees, you see. Their everything, you see.
Excellent and thoughtful analysis Goob. Refreshingly free of accusations of idiocy on the part of certain Yale graduates, which tend to fog (in the extreme) the discussion of our national circumstances.
Question is, where do we go from here? A wholesale retreat from Iraq would have predictable and disastrous consequences both for the U.S. and for the larger struggle against Islam.
So do we baby-sit the new Iraqi republic until it is self-sufficient and try to guide it to a more “Western” entity – or do we search for the new Attaturk?
The breakthrough in the Sunni provinces is nothing shy of a miracle.
The Marines "banged their heads against the wall" long enough for a moment of clarity to seize the Sunnis of Anbar. Dismissing the Americans, they had placed themselves at the overlordship of al Qaeda, which Anbaris now understand to be takfiris even as we know them to be jihadis. The difference is largely in the eye of the beholder: maybe infidel in Connecticut, maybe contemptible "regular mom and dad" in some village outside Ramadi.
By either name they are purveyors of horror:
Toddlers baked in ovens.
Daughters forced into sexual slavery for clammy hands from Amman.
Meat-cleaver amputations.
Corpses left to rot in the desert.
The complete failure of everything from electricity to commerce.
In Anbar the locals--with help from Americans and largely Shia battalions--are routing al Qaeda.
Like romantics rooting for the murderous IRA from themed bars in Boston suburbs, Cairenes and Damascenes (and the enemies of privilege in Berkeley) cheer the jihadis lionzed by Al Jazeera in Iraq as heros of Islam, fighting the American invader: "let's you and him fight."
The Anbaris, battered to wakefulness, now know better. The Kurds always have. There are the first glimmers of evidence that the Shia would rather not surrender their American-bought independence to Iran, or even to their own militias and criminal gangs.
Iraq has behaved as one would expect a victim of prolonged, brutal abuse to behave: it succumbed to an uncontrolled, violent tantrum. America, and its handful of friends, held Iraq down, restraining it until the wave of violent spasms subsided. Much to the disappointment of those who would see Iraq become a butchery, the violence there is dropping off precipitously.
There are a number of things that must be done to defend America and the rest of emancipated humanity from Islam; things unthinkable in the fine light of 1997 but now starkly obvious: selective political deportations; a near-total prohibition of Muslim immigration, even of refugees from Iraq; regulation and monitoring of mosques; state-vetting of the curriculum at madrassas; bans on Sharia; the end of foreign funding of Muslim activities and organizations in the West. We have to abandon oil in an explicit act of war. We have to actively seek out and guard the Ayaan Hirsi Alis who have broken their chains and have the courage to demand that civilization not sleepwalk into those very same chains.
But none of this is to say that there is honor in abandoning Iraq in some pat Machiavellian jink whereby the killing fields get started in earnest. Nor is there gain to be had that way.
At last, the outlines of a three-way accommodation are starting to emerge in Iraq, and something like self-government at the local level is developing. It's nothing pretty, but maybe something livable, like Lebanon, where human misery is not in total control, even if Madison and Jefferson would see room for improvement.
The dust-caked American infantryman in Iraq has "made a difference in the lives of normal folks," as terribly as that phrase (no doubt in a Southern drawl) may grate on certain refined ears more attuned to the high notes of domestic social justice.
Can we give him some more time?
Davegreybeard said
I'm uncomfortable with the US taking responsibility for playing the gameshow host of "Who Wants To Be A Strongman Dictator?" in every one of these failed states. Besides standing strong against Islam, these dictators usually have other appetites, for which we are eventually blamed.
I'd suggest there is a third, anti-Wilsonian, possibility. It would apply to Afghanistan better than to Iraq: when a government (or organized group within the country) presents an eminent threat to us, remove the threat. No road-building, no forced democracy, no picking sides in a millenia-old religious war, no smiling thumbs-up photo-ops, no candy for the children.
No babysitting and no strongmen. Let them have a government according to their culture and their values and their religion. And ignore the screams of horror that follow.
Counterjihadi,
Thank you for your very artful, informative and encouraging (to some of us) post.
I also strongly believe that we should give our troopers “some more time”. At the very least the ability of Jihadis to make mischief will be severely curtailed from THAT region, while they are there.
The only issue that I find in doubt is reducing our appetite for oil sufficient to affect the flow of cash to the Jihadis. This will not happen. Our economy is to married to oil and there is no alternative that will have a large enough impact to be noticeable. Yes we should cut back as much as we can and shift to alternatives when possible, but we will be unable to reduce consumption enough to have a noticeable impact on this conflict – unless we destroy our economy.
special_guest
I also am uncomfortable with promoting a “strong man” to assist us in our struggle, but some who post here have suggested this. I would be interested in hearing a cogent argument for this case – if one could be made.
Counterjihadi,
I belatedly clicked on your “abandon oil” link and NOW realize what you were referring to. I tend to think of coal as “oil”. Yes this might work.
I was employed by a major oil company for 31 years (now retired) so I am more familiar than most in how this industry works. The U.S. has more oil potential locked up in “oil shale” in Utah and Colorado than all of Saudi Arabia.
In the late ‘70s during the “oil crisis” this oil was planned to be tapped. We (our corporate management) bought land, engineered solutions to oil extraction, and moved personnel to Rifle (small town in CO.). I was to get a big promotion to fill the shoes of one slated to make this project happen. Well, oil problem was “solved” price of oil dropped, project was not commercially viable anymore – and I had to wait several years for my promotion.
But the oil is still there – waiting.
Iran is the real problem. It has always been the problem. It will always be a problem untill something is done about it.
The Iran Iraq War, one of those great inter-Relgious Islamic conflicts, Of the same nature as expoused here, Has already lead us to where we are now.
So by what measure should we take some arm chair Generals regergitation of the same ol same o.
If the WORLD was willing to stop sending Arms to all the potential advesaries in this grandly envisioned inner Bloodbath. Then there might be some chance it would burn itself out then the ammo is gone. But Pigs fly too.
Meanwhile,We will all be back to the Age of Columbus.
I wonder which conflict will cause greater American Casualties. The war in Iraq or Gas Riots in the US?
DaveGB,
You must be referring to the Permian/Green River Basin UT/CO/WY area. You're right.
The shale is reportedly even softer than that of the Athabasca sands we now get much of our oil from Canada, now #1 importer as per eia/doe.
If we get the eco-gestapo out of the way, watch it take off like a rocket-I know 3 companies sitting & waiting for the order (who also do the coal-to-oil liquefication: Headwaters, Syntroleum & one other I forgot the name of). Both operations are ready to go now.
Eco-nazis, there’s the rub! Allies of our treasonous left, they are!
Get THEM out of the way, and the problem is solved...TOMORROW.
Unfortunately, that's not an option to the 5th column enemy within (which really has nothing to do with the "environment" at all, once one sees who is behind them), as they never allow facts to get in their way.
Sad...but that's why we have the problem.