Iraq

[Craig234]

The situation in Iraq is getting very dangerous.

From the reports I've heard, the Prime Minister has been very hostile and violent to the Sunnis, and now a group so radical Al Queda reportedly disowned them has organized the Sunni resistance to the point that they have taken control of Iraq's second largest city with their sights on Baghdad.

This isn't a simple issue, looking for 'take this side and next topic'.

It opens a lot of cans of worms we've never really addressed, such as how we can't get involved in every injustice in the world, but we can't, sorry tea party, get involved in none either and meet our moral obligations, how to draw that line, and how the issue of 'our interests' versus 'humanitarian interests' is dealt with - when we tend to try to pant every situation based on 'our interests' we get involved in as based on humanitarian interests ('they're taking babies from incubators!') and only make excuses for the actual humanitarian crises. There are no clear lines, just fresh debates for every situation and the same arguments make to justify the policy.

Looking for how to draw that line, the government seems to be trying to use the line of 'not allowing permanent bases for terrorists', and this can be argued for this situation.

Unfortunately, one pattern these things can follow politically is the pendulum where the 'peace President' Obama has political pressure for less involvement, and that opens the way for a demagogue to run on both the real and manufactured costs of that policy and offer pie in the sky victory and win and be a monster. Think Reagan's appeal to 'make American strong again' and the implementation of death squads and illegal terrorist armies in Central America among other things (and Grenada and Lebanon and...)

The messiness of the factions who do not cooperate for peace in Iraq, and how the situation does not fit into Ameircan political solutions, is getting very visibile and will get moreso.

Obama does not seem particularly talented at these things - his fix to the Economic crash was to bring in 'experts' who had caused it - and he has some hard choices what to do.

By which I mean, in his political situation, whether to use air power, which may or may not have much effect, but won't solve the problem.

There is zero space in the American political culture it seems for things like 'dialogue' even though that's how Patreus obtained the peace he did, making deals which reportedly were then reneged on by the Shiite Prime Minister. when we left. So, I'm suspecting we're in a situation of Obama using limited measures, failing in diplomacy because the parties are not interested in it, and making it ripe for a right-wing demagogue in 2016 as the disaster unfolds and becomes a Republican message of 'see, Obama failed and messed up Iraq'.

Without saying what's needed here, it is sad that it seems we're so good at getting involved when we shouldn't and not when we should - it reminds me a bit of how strongly the US public was to getting involved in WWII, to the point of both parties in 1940 campaigns having to promise to stay out, and the likely engineering of a Japanese attack to get that changed.

We did really, really badly at how we ran post-invasion Iraq causing much of the problems going on to this day. Those people are out of power, but how much can it be fixed?

There seems to be a consenses that the Prime Minister needs to go.

There are short-term issues - the military crises now going on - and longer term issues. Nevermind things like the millions of Syrian refugees in the region.

Just a situation to be aware of I think is likely to get a lot more visible.

 

[PowerEngineer]

I don't disagree that there are issues in the Middle East that have been simmering below the surface for a very long time (some of them inherent and some exacerbated by colonialism and the "blessing" of oil). While not by any means defending Hussein, Bush's decision to remove him from power lifted an oppressing force that had kept the Sunni/Shiite tensions (and the Kurds) in check. Whatever thoughts we had at that time about a post-Sadam Iraq were unbelievably naïve. Short of establishing an equally repressive regime in Bagdad, the rise of ethnic/religious fighting in the region has been only a matter of time. And the "Arab spring" with its messy stalemate in Syria has made matters much worse.

With the American public so completely against committing forces on the ground (because of our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan), there's not much that Obama can do to stop aggression by factions in the Middle East (or the Ukraine).

 

[Craig234]

I don't disagree that there are issues in the Middle East that have been simmering below the surface for a very long time (some of them inherent and some exacerbated by colonialism and the "blessing" of oil). While not by any means defending Hussein, Bush's decision to remove him from power lifted an oppressing force that had kept the Sunni/Shiite tensions (and the Kurds) in check. Whatever thoughts we had at that time about a post-Sadam Iraq were unbelievably naïve. Short of establishing an equally repressive regime in Bagdad, the rise of ethnic/religious fighting in the region has been only a matter of time. And the "Arab spring" with its messy stalemate in Syria has made matters much worse.

With the American public so completely against committing forces on the ground (because of our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan), there's not much that Obama can do to stop aggression by factions in the Middle East (or the Ukraine).

The political side of this is pretty unfortunate. Obama is basically painted into a corner on use of force - I'm not saying whether he should do so - yet the issue is ripe for use by the right in attacking him as a 'weak president' (they use the Ukraine situation for the same purpose) while their promises of 'strength' will very much appeal to many voters.

It's a bit like the Jimmy Carter issue - nevermind that under Carter we didn't have war as a good thing, all that matters is that the hostages - safely released - made the US look 'weak' in a way that let Reagan use the 'make America strong' issue politically and effectively. Nevermind what the actual options for Carter were, if he actually did the best that could be done, nevermind the disastrous change for the worst Reagan brought (just one early example being our 'strong' deployment of the marines for Israel in Lebanon).

Unfortunately the issue like 'strength' just works politically this way, it's not easy to get through a better understanding to many voters, demagoguing works well.

On the issue - first, I've always had some sympathy for the issue that Saddam was a really bad person running Iraq, and that there's a hole in international policy about how to deal with that issue. In theory, perhaps the Hague war crimes court - an excellent court - might have some ability to charge Saddam - but really, how able would they be to take him into custody for trial? And the US hasn't even supported that court except when convenient.

We did have a messy situation - international law is pretty good sometimes about aggression - with exceptions like the US abusing the law to invade Iraq and Russia having the veto power over it being enforced against them for Crimea - but not about doing anything about tyrants much of the time, when at least one veto power country will protect them (Assad, North Korea, the US sometimes protects bad guys, and so on).

So, Saddam was poised to possibly be a brutal tyrant for generations to come - and the invasion did at least change that. But that's where the 'we did horribly post-invasion' comes in. We could have done so much better - it's not appreciated by many just how horribly badly that was done. It could have been a victory for Bush. The State Department had a detailed plan that was far better than what happened - but because of the power of Cheney and Rumsfeld it was completely ignored and Rumsfeld ran the policy, horribly.

The overly simplistic politics is working on both sides - 'strength' being abused on the right, and 'all that matters is keep our troops out' on the left. This happens again and again, the US wants to go to war for whatever reasons - from ideology to domestic politics to pressure from interests like the arms industry to economic inventives and whatever other reasons - and then tries to wrap it in bringing democracy to wherever (often there is a legitimate problem and a flawed solution) - and then the situation falls apart.

Vietnam. 1980's Afghanistan against the Russians. Both Iraq wars. Afghanistan. The list goes on. Part of it is our own corruption that hurts our policies for the nations. Part of it is the difficulty of our wanting some 'benevolent democratic leader' where none exists, only powerful and corrupt factions - such as now in Iraq where you can just pick, Sunni tyranny, Shiite tyranny, or a tyrant like Saddam tyrannical to everyone, but no benevolent democrat figure for all the factions, and then there's the Kurdish issue.

And somehow the US has so much power as to be involved - but with this horrible political culture of so many ignorant voters swayed by so many lies to get their votes.

When the US has a 'powerful president' who can 'do what he thinks is right' - think like a John Kennedy - it can help. For example, Kennedy challenging injustices like ones by Portugal that nearly infuriated them but which he could do. Unfortunately such powerful presidents can also misuse that flexibility - Johnson with Vietnam, Reagan on multiple policies, and so on.

But when the president has less power - as Obama is crippled by the obstructionist Congress, unlike FDR, Kennedy, Johnson with supermajorities - that tends to give 'intersts' even more say on policy that leads to pretty terrible results, since 'the right thing' has a pretty small lobbying presence with policymakers.

Obama seems to be painted into a corner where at best he can do the little he can and give a nice speech pretending it's the right thing while the right says anything he does is wrong.

The idea of a nice democratic situation exists only in the speeches of domestic and foreign politicians mostly, and doesn't seem to dominate the policies of either. Iraqi factions are pursuing their own factions' power, not a broad democratic culture. US politicians are using that democratic culture for wrapping around whatever policy they pick, which seems to be 'whatever Obama can do without Congressional approval, and the Republicans against it but not with any clear plan themselves'.

Chris Hayes tonight did a very good debunking of the attacks on Obama on this. He made several arguments against the attacks - suggesting that some US force remaining would made everything good - including that any force under consideration was a small non-combat force, that the incident that just happened with the 30,000 Iraqi troops fleeing from the insurgents involved those 30,000 being mostly Sunnis who felt little loyalty to fight for the oppressive Shiite regime and that wouldn't have changed, that it was the Iraqis who refused to sign the agreement for legal immunity for a remaining force that led to the complete withdrawal, and so on.

I still think something that would be good would be some sort of more neutral UN commission to plan a solution - but that gets strong opposition both from people who are ideologically opposed to the UN period, to the people with power who resent the solution simply to protect their power, even if it means worse policies. So that's off the table.

Once again, there seems to be little role for good planning for a solution, and rather events dictated by the force of arms - whoever wins militarily gets power, and that's it.

A pretty poor situation of not being able to do better on the policies as an international issue, not being able to turn the idealism of democracy and the UN into policy.

I'd like to see us do better somehow than just for this to be a 2016 campaign issue of Democrats defending and Republicans demagoguing attacks.

But the ship has long sailed on the idea for many Americans - mostly on the right - to 'put aside partisan interests to look for a good solution'. There was a stronger sense of national interests above politics that existed under a Roosevelt or Kennedy where people were expected somewhat to not only pursue power over the national (and global) interests, over what's right, that seems missing on the right today.

Whether it was blocking renewal of the treaty to collect stray nuclear weapons materials, blocking Medicaid expansion for their own citizens to have healthcare, shutting down the government, or foreign policy, everything seems fine to use for partisan attacks and obstructionism whatever the harm. And that's just our situation - Iraq is in no position for peace either.

There is an irony that Al Queda had no presence in Iraq before our invasion - but now is a huge presence threatening the country as a result of our badly handled post-invasion.

Before the invasion, the Bush administration tried to imply the invasion was connected to 9/11, that there was a Saddam-Al Queda connection there wasn't. And now, they are there.

 

[justoh]

With all due respect, http://www.ncte.org/library/nctefiles/involved/dayonwriting/organizingyourwriting.pdf

 

[JEDIYoda]

With all due respect, http://www.ncte.org/library/nctefile...ourwriting.pdf

That's the best you could do......care to comment on the subject matter??

 

[justoh]

That's the best you could do......care to comment on the subject matter??

I don't know. Was my point.