Things in Iraq = still crap

I purchased a book of Iraq's history while I was in transit in Dubai. Iraqis have virtually never been ruled by the same entity for more than 50 years at a time. I am not optimistic that this will change. This is their history, their way of life. If not one side resisting, the other will. The soliders I have seen seem to lack heart. Iraqis in general seem to be passive. They are different from American's. If someone steps on my shoe, we will look at that person and say "WTF - watch where you are going" Iraqis tend to nut up a little like they are scared. Thats just my observation though. The only winning scenario in my mind is if the International Community had been here the WORLD would be able to help. That is not going to happen, so I am not optimistic about the Iraqis well being after we leave.

 

Leave and let em duke it out.

DD

 

I fear its a double edged sword. Having another nation's soldiers all over your home will make you feel uneasy, if not because you don't trust them, then because you feel that their presence is an indication that violence is around you and will happen. When you put people in that mindset, they cannot be happy.

It's kind of like guys with machine guns in camo at the airport. While on the one hand I am supposed to feel safer, in fact, I feel less safe because if there are military guys around that means there is a higher chance something bad will happen. I actually feel more safe when the thought of 'threat' isn't present in my mind.

However, if they are gone, some are going to take advantage of the lack of presence. We need to set some realistic goals on what we are doing there, it changes every month that I really don't know what we are doing there anymore and what we have gained out of it.

 

We need a different plan.

 

Two reasons.

We are still confident WMDs will be found in Iraq.

We are fighting terrorists over there so we wouldn't have to fight them over here.

Therefore, we stay.

 

It really has become a clusterfuc.

Just last week the US threatened to pull all funding for the government if they don't form the government of our choosing. Pissing off the new Iraqi government with them basically telling the US to fuc off.

This morning across Iraq 50+ people are found executed including imams and journalists.

Iraq is imploding on itself! Our people are caught in the middle of it. And the no exit strategy president is apparently in the dark.

 

As long as American companies like Halliburton and KBR are making tons of cash in Iraq while people die, why leave? After all, money is more important than human lives. Doesn't everybody know that?

 

I heard an interview with a British journalist who apparently has won a lot of awards for his overage of wars ranging from Algeria to Kosovo and to both Iraq wars. He basically said that the environment of Iraq is worse than any war-torn nation he has covered. He further said that most Western journalists don't even leave their hotel complexes in Bagdad because it is too dangerous. They essentiall live in their fortified bunkers and send out locals to get information. He also said that once you leave Bagdad the police and military checkpoints have all been abandoned and there are blown up cars everywhere.

He was very anti-Bush, anti-Blair, and anti-war (he said that anyone who has really seen what war does would be) so he obviously had an agenda. But he sounded convincing at the least.

EDIT: I forgot the point - he was basically saying that outside of metropolitan green zones Iraq is fully controlled by insurgents already.

 

Whether we stay or go, they will fight, Laurence of Arabia tried and failed, and this will fail too, the region over there is far to fractured among religious lines to have complete peace.

They won't have peace until people are tired of all the killing and dying, let them go at each others throats, they need to define their own destiny.

DD

 

Well a leading conservative intellectual, Francis Fukuyama, one of the original proponents of the war, has now admitted that it was a mistake.
The rats are fleeing the sinking ship.
************
'Leninists!' Cries Neocon Nabob, Suing for Divorce
by Jim Lobe

The Washington foreign policy elite finds itself on pins and needles this week awaiting a response from the neoconservative heavyweights at the Weekly Standard magazine to a scorching denunciation by one of their most venerable fellow travelers, Francis Fukuyama, in Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Fukuyama, best known for his post-Cold War essay proclaiming the historic inevitability of liberal democracy, "The End of History," argued in the Times article that neoconservatives so badly miscalculated the myriad costs of the Iraq war that they may have empowered their two foreign policy nemeses – realists, who disdain democracy-promotion; and isolationists, who oppose foreign entanglements of almost any kind.

Even more provocatively, Fukuyama called the Standard's editor, William Kristol, his ideological sidekick, Robert Kagan, and their neoconservative comrades who led the drive to war in Iraq "Leninist" in their conviction that liberal democracy can be achieved through "coercive regime change" or imposed by military means.

"[T]he neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was … Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will," according to Fukuyama. "Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States."

"Neoconservativism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought," he went on, "has evolved into something I can no longer support."

Fukuyama's break with the neoconservatives marks the latest – albeit among the most spectacular – fracture in the ongoing splintering of the Republican foreign policy elite that has included aggressive nationalists, such as Vice President Dick Cheney; the Christian Right; traditional realists in the mold of former President George H.W. Bush; as well as neoconservatives

His divorce from the movement is particularly remarkable given his long and close friendship – dating back to his college days – with former deputy defense secretary (and now World Bank President) Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps the neoconservative movement's most idealistic luminary. He also played a role in the development of the unilateralist Project for the New American Century (PNAC), an organization founded in 1997 by Kristol and Kagan and designed to forge an alliance between the neoconservatives, the Christian Right, and aggressive nationalists in the run-up to the 2000 elections.

Along with Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Fukuyama was one of just two dozen PNAC charter members. He also signed a 1998 PNAC letter to then-President Bill Clinton urging him to "undertake military action" aimed at "removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power."

Indeed, as late as Sept. 20, 2001, nine days after 9/11, he signed another PNAC letter to Bush that also called for Hussein's ouster "even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack." Anything less, the letter argued, "will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism."

Despite those hawkish antecedents, Fukuyama had second thoughts even before the Iraq invasion, particularly about the democratic messianism and unilateralism with which the "war on terror" was being conducted.

In a December 2002 Wall Street Journal article, he warned that "the idealist project" of transforming the region may "come to look more like empire pure and simple" and that "it is not at all clear that the American public understand that it is getting into an imperial project as opposed to a brief in-and-out intervention in Iraq."

But by late 2004, he was writing that anyone – particularly neoconservatives – who believed that the situation in Iraq would become sufficiently stable after elections in early 2005 for U.S. troops to begin withdrawing was "living in fantasyland."

And one year later, Fukuyama was already warning that failures in Iraq were paving the way for a return to U.S. isolationism. He believed that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, coupled with Washington's failure to marshal international support for its efforts in Iraq and its incompetence in stabilizing the country, had largely destroyed its credibility as a "benevolent hegemon" to which the world, Kristol and Kagan confidently predicted, would willingly, if not eagerly, defer.

Fukuyama's latest article, "After Neoconservatism," is essentially an elaboration of these ideas in a more comprehensive form, as well as a plea for a more modest and classically "conservative" foreign policy that, without abandoning "the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights," will also be conducted "without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about."

To Fukuyama, as to foreign policy realists among both Republicans and Democrats, events of the past few months, particularly the victory of Islamists in elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, as well as their strong showing in Egypt, has bolstered his critique of the neoconservative project in the Middle East.

In his view, the way in which the Cold War ended created among neoconservatives like Kristol and Kagan "an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside" – and that Hussein's Iraq would be no different.

"The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform," according to Fukuyama.

He noted that that expectation helps explain "the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq."

The administration and its neoconservative backers also assumed, mistakenly, that the rest of the world would accept Washington's unilateralism, including preemptive war, because, as a "benevolent hegemon," Washington would be seen as both more virtuous and more competent than other countries.

These delusions have come at a very high cost, according to Fukuyama, who, notwithstanding the sweeping pro-democracy rhetoric in which both Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continue to indulge, "the neoconservative moment appears to have passed."

But Fukuyama is most concerned that these failures may spur an "anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians."

"What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a 'realistic Wilsonianism' that better matches means to ends," he wrote in what appears to be a bid to delineate a new foreign policy consensus – some already call it "neo-realism" – around which centrist Republicans and Democrats can rally.

Indeed, in the prescriptive part of his essay, he calls for "reconceptuali[zing] … foreign policy in several fundamental ways" that are broadly compatible with ideas put forward by critics in both parties.

These include "demilitariz[ing]" the "global war on terrorism" by focusing more on winning "hearts and minds;" relying less on "coalitions of the willing" and more in multilateral mechanisms "that can confer legitimacy on collective action;" and placing more emphasis on "rule of law and economic development," as well as democracy-promotion, which "in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power."

"Neoconservativism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism, and American hegemony," according to Fukuyama. "What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world."

http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=8591

 

It's hard to put incidents like this in context and figure out if this stuff signals a significant turn for the worse in Iraq, but it sure seems like the chaos and violence is hitting a new level. Imagine how cold blooded and brazen you have to be to set up these road blocks designed to target the people who were protesting the destruction of the shrine and then drag them from their cars and execute them by the side of the road. This is not just a random suicide bombing or IED attack.



Iraqi gunmen kill 47 at "checkpoint": officials 36 minutes ago



Gunmen at a makeshift checkpoint dragged at least 47 people from their cars, shot them and dumped their bodies in a village ditch near Baghdad on Thursday, Iraqi police, Interior Ministry and local officials said.

The bodies of the victims -- Sunni and Shi'ite protesters who had attended a demonstration against the bombing of an important religious site on Wednesday -- were discovered in the village of Nahrawan south of Baghdad, officials said.

The gunmen set up the checkpoint to capture the protesters as they returned home from a demonstration against the bombing of the Shi'ite shrine in Samarra north of Baghdad.

The victims were all dumped in a ditch beside the road, said Dhary Thoaban, deputy chairman of the Diyala local council.

Local Sunni residents of Nahrawan have previously accused Shi'ite militiamen of attacking them in the past.

(Reporting by Fares al-Mehdawi)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060223...se0A_Vg.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE-

 

Haven't you guys learned by now? Real Americans don't print facts when they aren't positive.

 

This is exactly my opinion, these people will fight regardless. No matter who is here. Reality is, there has been fighting on this land for the last 3000 plus years. Not even us The Mighty American's are able to stop this. You can spin it and say we won the "WAR" by getting Sadaam, but we will not be able to win the Peace. They will fight regardless. I say let them...

 

Not only is this incredibly naive (and ignorant of history) it shows how the neocons (as defined by Hayes) have been manipulated by the war-mongers in the white house and the corporate interests they represent.

That pretty much sums up my issues with proper "neoconservatism" right there. The ideology is - by it's very nature - hypocritical, naive, and open to abuse by those with exterior agendas.

 

Talking about Hayes, I think Fukuyama would peg him as an aggressvie nationalist like Cheney.

Fukuyama's break with the neoconservatives marks the latest – albeit among the most spectacular – fracture in the ongoing splintering of the Republican foreign policy elite that has included aggressive nationalists, such as Vice President Dick Cheney; the Christian Right; traditional realists in the mold of former President George H.W. Bush; as well as neoconservatives

 

Still? Yes, but probably getting worse.

Here's the headline in today's AZ Republic...

Civil war in Iraq feared after blast

 

What is wrong with you people?!?!? All you lying liars! Our own military says there's no civil war! Get with the program!

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US military denies Iraq on brink of civil war

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060223/pl_afp/iraqunrestus

 

I think that we need to continue to "stay the course" in Iraq.