Is it too late to save Iraq? While things are bad, have all potential outcomes have been squandered? To suggest Iraq is unsolveable compared to say, the break up of Yugoslavia, doesn't make sense.

Most of the recent Iraqi on Iraqi violence has been Iraqi Shiite militias going after Iraqi Sunnis. Payback for three years of Zarqawi's madness (and decades of Saddam brutality). Al Qaeda and Sunni extremeists have been targeting Americans in the hope driving them out and creating a civil war. While the bloodleting of such a conflict would be enormous--do Sunnis really believe this is a war they can win? If Shiites and Kurds had the chance for real payback against the Sunni extremists and al Qaeda, they would probably slaughter them. That is paradoxically what al Qaeda wants.

Would leaving help? Probably not. That is what the extremeists want, they dream of this escallating into a broader regional conflict. Would the idea of partitioning the country more--at least federally, with the oil wealth shared proportionally help? I think so. I also think a large American presence in Kurdistan would make sense to avoid any possibilities of Turkish interference at this point.

Posted by: Joe at November 12, 2006 06:56 PM | Permalink to this comment

I don't follow -- are you implying "Baker interjected with the comment, 'Well, you can't expect the president to do anything until after the election.'" was previously just conspiracy-mongering among 'wacky' liberals, or something you wouldn't think this admin [or probably any flailing administration] would actually do?

I may be more cynical than many but this just seemed a plain obvious fact; certainly a dispiriting one in that it puts politics ahead of, well, everything, but not especially surprising it seems to me. Or are you questioning the wisdom of that play calling?

Posted by: TG at November 12, 2006 07:36 PM | Permalink to this comment

Concerning the part of the post on Kristol, have a look at this video:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5700675849076518858&q=kristol+shepard+smith

Posted by: Reader at November 12, 2006 07:37 PM | Permalink to this comment

Of course this is what we are fighting. Have what we done in Iraq made this trend worse? Would abandoning the effort help help the fundamentalist forces? I do not accept that Iraq is unwinnable. It might not be a Western democracy soon, but it still could be a functional state with civil rights. . .

TAWFIK HAMID [Andrew Stuttaford]

Via Michael Coren in Canada's National Post this disturbing, fascinating interview is worth reading in full:

Dr. Tawfik Hamid doesn't tell people where he lives. Not the street, not the city, not even the country. It's safer that way. It's only the letters of testimony from some of the highest intelligence officers in the Western world that enable him to move freely. This medical doctor, author and activist once was a member of Egypt's Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Arabic for "the Islamic Group"), a banned terrorist organization. He was trained under Ayman al-Zawahiri, the bearded jihadi who appears in Bin Laden's videos, telling the world that Islamic violence will stop only once we all become Muslims.He's a disarmingly gentle and courteous man. But he's determined to tell a complacent North America what he knows about fundamentalist Muslim imperialism...His analysis is fascinating. Muslim fundamentalists believe, he insists, that Saudi Arabia's petroleum-based wealth is a divine gift, and that Saudi influence is sanctioned by Allah. Thus the extreme brand of Sunni Islam that spread from the Kingdom to the rest of the Islamic world is regarded not merely as one interpretation of the religion but the only genuine interpretation. The expansion of violent and regressive Islam, he continues, began in the late 1970s, and can be traced precisely to the growing financial clout of Saudi Arabia. "We're not talking about a fringe cult here," he tells me. "Salafist [fundamentalist] Islam is the dominant version of the religion and is taught in almost every Islamic university in the world. It is puritanical, extreme and does, yes, mean that women can be beaten, apostates killed and Jews called pigs and monkeys.

Hamid is infuriated by the Western reponse to this challenge: "Stop asking what you have done wrong. Stop it! They're slaughtering you like sheep and you still look within. You criticize your history, your institutions, your churches. Why can't you realize that it has nothing to do with what you have done but with what they want."
Posted at 2:32 PM

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTJmZGEyZWZkYjMwNzMwOWVhZGIyOTcwMTBjYWVmZmM=

Posted by: Joe at November 12, 2006 09:02 PM | Permalink to this comment

To suggest Iraq is unsolveable compared to say, the break up of Yugoslavia, doesn't make sense.

How many times must it be said? NATO has the troop strength for effective security in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Coalition doesn't have the troops to do that for the much larger population of Arab Iraq, and it never will.

Posted by: David Tomlin at November 12, 2006 10:55 PM | Permalink to this comment

Would leaving help? Probably not. That is what the extremeists want, they dream of this escallating into a broader regional conflict.

Is there anything we're doing in iraq that helps keep this from escalating into a broader regional conflict?

If so, what are we doing in iraq that helps keep it from escalating into a broader regional conflict?

Suppose the conflict did turn bigger. Suppose that syria and lebanon and jordan all fell apart into shia and sunnis fighting. Would you argue that would be good or bad for the USA? What assumptions do you have to make to decide it's good or bad for us?

If I were a neocon, getting sunnis and shias to kill each other all over the middle east would seem like almost the best possible outcome. I'm not a neocon and it doesn't seem like the best possible outcome to me. What do you think?

Posted by: J Thomas at November 13, 2006 01:57 AM | Permalink to this comment

jonny

Posted by: jonny at November 13, 2006 05:11 AM | Permalink to this comment

Joe, I've long had views similar to Dr. Hamid's, and it is due to those views that I supported invading Iraq, despite being very pessimistic regarding the outcome. Absent a move towards self government by the population of the Persian Gulf, with the accompanying acocuntability that self government imposes, eventually, I saw the forces that Dr. Hamid's describes, eventually, given their access to oil wealth, being able to pull off some of their theology-driven tactical goals. Their success in achieving some of their tactical goals will jar the rest of the world from it's self deception, and the response will be strategic, and likely as deadly, as what the world saw in the middle of the last century.

No, Iraq was never the center of gravity, which lies to the south, but addressing the center of gravity directly was, and is, nearly impossible, politically and economically speaking. For now. That will change, and when it does, the blood will flow in rivers that make the current slaughter look like an extremely minor tributary.

The best chance, as slim as it was, to avoid this outcome was to have a large self governing Muslim population in the Gulf which engaged in prosperous interaction with rest of the world, thus providing a challenging counter example to the belief system Dr. Hamid describes. It was the challenging counter-example of the market economies, of course, which really cut out the supporting columns of the Soviet Empire, thus leading to it's collapse. In this instance, a Muslim, oil rich, self governing population is needed as a counter example, and to makes things more difficult, it is unlikely that there is the luxury of forty or fifty years to obtain it, given the increasing ubiquity of destructive technology , and the extraordinarily parochial and Faith-driven views of those entities Dr. Hamid describes.

My biggest complaint regarding the current Administration has been it's unwillingness to be completely frank about the stakes, and the difficulty of the challenge. I suspect that Bush's relatively weak position resulting from the 2000 election played a role in this, in that it made him reluctant to be the bearer of even more bad news, in the wake of the horrible news of that day in September five years ago. A better politician may have pulled it off, if he was also willing to more quickly risk whatever political capital he had. Such political leadership is quite rare, however.

I take no pleasure in being so pessimistic, and I sincerely hope that I am wrong.

Posted by: Will Allen at November 13, 2006 05:14 PM | Permalink to this comment

Re too late to end the violence:

Wars usually end roughly when the stronger side gets what it wants. The stronger side in this case is Shi'a militias aligned and supported by Iran. After decades of control over this majority, Sunni militias don't appear willing to accept that reality or it's main consequence: that negotiated power sharing under the aegis of U.S. force is the best they're likely to get. Sunnis are supported in this delusion by Syrian logistics, Saudi money, and Al Qaeda expertise (A-Q also acting as a agent provocateur). So it seems to me the question about whether winning is still possible should be reframed: is it still possible for the U.S. to impose enough pain on the two sides to get them to, as an alternative, accept a negotiated settlement that doesn't split the country and doesn't subjugate the Sunni? If this line of reasoning is accurate, then the answer is no - we can't or aren't willing to apply enough pressure for either side to be willing to give up their goals.

My sense, though is that, if this war means anything to the U.S., it's as a battle in the (badly named) war on terror. All this discussion about a new strategy for Iraq (do the Dems have one? Will the Baker Hamilton report provide one?) is inappropriate. The main question isn't about strategy, it's about goals. Our main goal in Iraq is to prevent it from becoming or staying as a safe haven for terrorists, and to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons or WMDs.

Posted by: Matt at November 13, 2006 05:25 PM | Permalink to this comment

So, this administration knew that there was not much time left. Knew that time was a factor to success. Then they waited till after an election, while Iraqi, Americans and Coalition were dying, to make a change they knew they had to make.

That stinks of a (morally) high crime to me!

Posted by: Chris at November 13, 2006 06:04 PM | Permalink to this comment

I wish Baker had taken a moment to explain why Rumsfeld could not have been right-sized during the Congressional recess in August - Bush would have shown he "got it" on Iraq, and the fall campaign season would have unfolded quite differently (one might think).

Instead, the "Don't bother complaining I am out of touch, I can't here you" message fell a bit flat.

Posted by: Tom Maguire at November 13, 2006 06:53 PM | Permalink to this comment

The main question isn't about strategy, it's about goals. Our main goal in Iraq is to prevent it from becoming or staying as a safe haven for terrorists, and to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons or WMDs.

Matt, thank you for this clear and dispassionate explanation. This is a great step forward.

Most americans who take a firm stand about our goals hypocritically claim we owe something to the iraqis. Like, we're supposed to turn iraq into something that's better than before we broke it. They say we're responsible for what happens to iraqis and we have to fix our mistakes. You quite reasonably list none of that.

So let's consider your goals. Iraq now is quite definitely a major safe haven for terrorists, the main safe haven for terrorists. How much good does it do for our military to repeatedly take iraqi cities? None. The terrorists just hide or move away to other iraqi cities, and then do it again when we take those cities in turn. Or every now and then they attack our troops when they think they see an advantage. Unless they're wrong tactically, what good is that for us? They attack us, we respond, they think they come out ahead -- that's hardly good for us.

We would do better to remove iraq as a safe haven for terrorists using bombing runs. Cluster bombs, UAVs with hellfire missiles, that sort of thing. Cheaper, and without our soldiers as targets the terrorists would have less reason to go to iraq in the first place.

We would do better to keep nukes etc from iraq using inspections. Anywhere they don't allow inspections, bomb them just in case. Far easier and cheaper than occupation.

Problem solved. Tough on iraqis, but they aren't our problem and bein easy on iraqis isn't one of our goals.

Once we accept your reframed goals then our path is obvious. Get out fast, but be ready to do air raids and inspections.

I'm not sure I agree with your goals but I tend to agree with the actions your goals suggest.

Posted by: J Thomas at November 13, 2006 06:53 PM | Permalink to this comment

J Thomas,

Sounds a lot like Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam doesn't it? Get our soldiers out of harm's way and bomb like hell to keep the commies on their side of the DMZ. May have worked too, without Congress taking the money away.

But no, I'm not quite so cold blooded as that. I think we do have a certain moral obligation. We hosted this, well, let's not call it a "descent," this "sidestep" from tyrannical kleptocracy to civil war. We have some obligation to help the Iraqis emerge from it. But it's, at least, unclear whether our current efforts are part of the problem or part of the solution. It looks to me like while we suppress the Sunni insurgents, Sadr's militias take advantage of the opportunity to do ethnic cleansing in Baghdad. The least bad solution I've heard so far is Peter Galbraith's.

Posted by: Matt at November 13, 2006 09:41 PM | Permalink to this comment

Troop levels committed to the prosecution of the war in Iraq is a specious debate in the aftermath of the debacle that we have seen there. Once again we have discounted the internal dynamics of nationalism, the crooked timber of humanity from which nothing straight can be made. More troops would have merely provided the insurgents with a more "target-rich environment," to borrow one of Rumsfeld's favorite phrases and resulted in more KIAs and WIAs for the American soldiers.
Iraiqis are enaged in their own great debate over the direction that their country will pursue in the future. The sectarian violence in the civil war, primarily along the Sunni/Shiite/Kurdish fault line, will continue unabated despite a cosmetic increase in Amreican troops. Iraq requires a political solution not a military one, demonstrated by the timely formation of the Iraq Study Group and finger-pointing and recriminations among the neocons in that piece in Vanity Fair.
Americans suffer from a grand national delusion believing that democracy is the greatest gift we can give to the unenlightened masses abroad. Like our intervention in the Vietnamese civil war, our political leaders, writers and public intellectuals have misread the signs in Iraq according to their own intellectual, political and individual deformities. Now we are finally waking up like sleepwalkers, who have suddenly realized that they are on the edge of the abyss.
War separates the men from the boys. We are at last witnessing that great divide in the blogosphere, as you point your finger at Glenn Reynolds in your post. But be honest and also point your accusing finger at yourself to see how you have supported the worst foreign policy debacle since LBJ's quagmire in Vietnam.

Posted by: george hoffman at November 13, 2006 10:32 PM | Permalink to this comment

Matt, I see no reason to think that approach would have worked for vietnam. The air force guys promised they could cut off NVA supplies to the south, and they didn't manage it. 300,000+ US troops could only manage a costly stalemate. We didn't pull out because we thought vietnamization had worked, we pulled out because we'd lost. But we couldn't bring ourselves to admit it. As for cutting off the funds -- it looked like over a third of the money we were giving south vietnam was getting siphoned off by corrupt officials of one sort or another. We could have increased the funding 50% to make up for it. But if the vietnamese officials were selling their country short, why should we be more faithful?

It wasn't all that long ago that we were floating the idea of setting up shia death squads to punish sunnis. One theory was that sunnis weren't suffering any retribution for failing to turn in insurgents; they had to learn that failing to support the USA had a cost. Another theory was that what we were doing wasn't working and we had to do something different, and this was something different. If you're interested, google "salvador option". I don't know that there was ever any follow-through on that. Maybe somebody sane came in stopped them in time, and the thing we're seeing now -- which is exactly what they were talking about doing -- happened anyway and would have happened anyway whether or not they tried for it. But at this point it's too late to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Iraqis will stop fighting each other when they make a deal that they mostly agree is better than continued reprisals. What can we do to help them make that choice? At this point, I think the single thing we could do that would best help the iraqis stop killing each other, would be to leak documents which say it's our secret policy to get them to kill each other until the population is reduced by at least 50% and the infrastructure is shredded. if we can get them to unite against the common enemy then they'll put aside their differences. But I don't really want that to get out, it would have too many side effects.

Posted by: J Thomas at November 14, 2006 04:31 AM | Permalink to this comment

J Thomas,

My god, do we actually have to refight the Vietnamization argument? Finally the true horror of the Iraq war is threatening to hit policy wonks where they live.

I was actually wondering today whether a better historical parallel might be the India/Pakistan split. The big problem with the Vietnam parallel is that then, the U.S. was the third party trying to keep Vietnam in pieces; now we're trying to keep Iraq together. But is India/Pakistan and then Pakistan/Bangladesh an instructive precident? I don't know enough about South Asia to draw any lessons, do you?

Posted by: matt at November 15, 2006 07:20 PM | Permalink to this comment

Matt, I'm not clear that it makes sense to say we're "trying to keep iraq together".

Let's review. Bremer's idea was to run iraq ourselves. But then Bremer was gone.

The next approach was for us to run iraq under the approval of an elected parliament dominated by shias, and our military's job was to crush the sunni intransigents. Shia history back when it was the british occupying iraq was that they revolted and the british supported the sunnis -- that's when the sunnis got on top, and the sunnis had never been dislodged until now. So the shias wanted it to go the other way around, they wanted to be the ones we threw iraq to when we left after spending some years stomping on sunnis. But the shias ahven't been able to agree on much, and to some extent they've been fighting each other. They've been real good at not fighting us except back in Bremer's day we didn't want to let Sadr talk bad about us and we attacked his people whether they tried to avoid fighting us or not.

So that's pretty much what we've been doing. We've been wandering around stomping on sunnis like so many cockroaches and like cockroaches there are always more of them popping up. We haven't been at all careful about not killing shia civilians too, and the shias are sick of us. The death squad thing came up -- whether or not we planned it -- and so we've had the opportunity to offer a deal to sunnis -- we'll protect them from the death squads if they settle down and do what we say. But at this point there's no reason to think we can protect sunnis from death squads unless there aren't any death squads beyond the ones we trained. We can probably rein those in, but we can't even find the others.

So OK, anbar doesn't have oil and it doesn't have anything else we want except possibly location (location, location, Location!) so there's the question -- are we better off to keep stomping on them in anbar or are we better to put a wall arouind anbar and try to pacify the rest of the country?

"Keep iraq together" just doesn't sound like that to me.

I think maybe the better historical parallel is iraq under the british.

Posted by: J Thomas at November 15, 2006 10:15 PM | Permalink to this comment