The great Bait and Switch
The remnants of Bush’s remaining Iraq policy are now becoming clear: “six more months,” “six more months” until he’s out of office and can pass this unmitigated fiasco to some other sucker. Only six more months until things REALLY get better..just a few more months until we can DRAW DOWN those troops! Draw them down, of course, back to their original levels.
We hear from Petraus that Iraq is “improving”–tell that to the grieving relatives of the 250+ people mowed down by a truck bomb in August. And while we’re on the subject of Iraqis, what do THEY think about the success of the “surge” and the American presence generally?
Funny you should ask. ABC News did, in one of its recent polls (PDF). Iraqis themselves, who aren’t subject to the spoonfeeding of biased propaganda the military is feeding American news outlets, seem to think that there hasn’t been much if any improvement at all. When asked how things were since the surge, 31% said worse for their local area than before the surge and 45% said the same; when asked about Iraq as a whole, 61% said things had gotten worse overall. Other tidbits: 63% believe the US invasion was “wrong”, 47% believe coalition forces should leave immediately, and 57% believe attacks on US forces are acceptable!
Petraus points to a decrease in violence in Baghdad, without pointing out that most neighborhoods have already been ethnically cleansed, and that tens of thousands of people have had to flee their homes and even the country. The exodus of Iraq’s intellectuals and elites bodes particularly poorly for those who remain.
Iraq is a victim of failure to find a political solution, not a military one. Bush sent in the troops just barely knowing the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni, without any plan for a reconstruction that would cause reconciliation between the various ethnic factions. We now have the incompetent boob Al-Maliki leading a puppet Parliament to nowhere, relying on the fact that US forces are guaranteed to stick around in the face of a feckless Congress. With the US military in their pockets, the Iraqi government can feel free to continue doing what it does best–engage in petty squabbling, bitter rivalries, and otherwise do everything except to serve their countrymen. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson these people are not.
A political failure will not be cured by a military surge or presence of any time or magnitude. Our presence there is serving only to extend the process of non-reconciliation.
Pull the troops out, seal the borders, let the Iraqis have the civil war they seem bent on having in the absence of the American crutch, and let them murder each other into submission until they get tired of it and and either exhaust themselves or get their act together with a government and police force that work. It is horrible and barbaric, but nothing could be more horrible than this gross miscarriage of a war that has now dragged on longer than our involvement in World War II.
Time for it to end, already.
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