Galbraith: How to Get Out of Iraq (Iraq "not salvageable" as a nation)

This is one of the saddest and more even assessments of the situation I've read so far; it basically confirms the average of what is said at DU and by the presumptive Democratic nominee. The invasion of Iraq was not itself a horrible thing, but it was badly bungled, a prime example of wasted opportunity. By trusting that a long-term solution would magically appear once Saddam was gone, the incompetent bush administration took an action more than 20 years overdue and turned it into a nightmarish foreign policy disaster. Bloody civil war is now the most likely outcome, much the same as if we had simply toppled Saddam's regime and left immediately.

The potential for a national identity of democratic Iraq beyond Saddam's totalitarianism has been crippled, because it arose not from revolutionary spirit within overthrowing an unwelcome dictatorship, but from imperial spirit imposed by outsiders rooted in a web of lies.

How to Get Out of Iraq
By Peter W. Galbraith

1.

In the year since the United States Marines pulled down Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square, things have gone very badly for the United States in Iraq and for its ambition of creating a model democracy that might transform the Middle East. As of today the United States military appears committed to an open-ended stay in a country where, with the exception of the Kurdish north, patience with the foreign occupation is running out, and violent opposition is spreading. Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more likely outcomes than a successful transition to a pluralistic Western-style democracy.

Much of what went wrong was avoidable. Focused on winning the political battle to start a war, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the postwar chaos in Iraq. Administration strategy seems to have been based on a hope that Iraq's bureaucrats and police would simply transfer their loyalty to the new authorities, and the country's administration would continue to function. All experience in Iraq suggested that the collapse of civil authority was the most likely outcome, but there was no credible planning for this contingency. In fact, the US effort to remake Iraq never recovered from its confused start when it failed to prevent the looting of Baghdad in the early days of the occupation.

Americans like to think that every problem has a solution, but that may no longer be true in Iraq. Before dealing at considerable length with what has gone wrong, I should also say what has gone right.

Iraq is free from Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party. Along with Cambodia's Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein's regime was one of the two most cruel and inhumane regimes in the second half of the twentieth century. Using the definition of genocide specified in the 1948 Genocide Convention, Iraq's Baath regime can be charged with planning and executing two genocides - one against the Kurdish population in the late 1980s and another against the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s. In the 1980s, the Iraqi armed forces and security services systematically destroyed more than four thousand Kurdish villages and several small cities, attacked over two hundred Kurdish villages and towns with chemical weapons in 1987 and 1988, and organized the deportation and execution of up to 182,000 Kurdish civilians...

more: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17103

and Suharto of Indonesia was a model for rightwing dictator-wannabes.

"The United States does not now have the military or diplomatic resources to deal with far more serious threats to our national security. President Bush rightly identified the peril posed by the nexus between weapons of mass destruction and rogue states. The greatest danger comes from rogue states that acquire and disseminate nuclear weapons technology. At the beginning of 2003 Iraq posed no such danger. As a result of the Iraq war the United States has neither the resources nor the international support to cope effectively with the very serious nuclear threats that come from North Korea, Iran, and, most dangerous of all, our newly designated 'major non-NATO ally,' Pakistan."

Let's face it, we've never been in the business of knocking down established dictators as long as they could be bought off or contained through sanctions, or -- in the case of North Korea -- if the potential cost was too high. (That's why I've long held that the WMDs were not any real excuse for invasion; if the administration had really supposed the existence of readily-deployable WMDs, they would have constituted some kind of deterrent.) Hell, we'll go out of our way to prop up the profitable dictators (e.g. Suharto, Pinochet, D'Aubisson, Samoza). The ouster of Saddam Hussein represents a major break from this policy, unfortunately it was done for the wrong reasons by the wrong people with the wrong plan.

Please don't get hung up by a subjective disagreement with the author on the magnitude of dictatorial evil in the first chapter. Read the whole piece.

In particular, it calls for substantial autonomy for Kurds.

By contrast, Dubya's plan tonight will not be nearly ready to 'take the training wheels off.' Dubya's taken two literal spills from the failure to use training wheels -- but Iraq looks to be his real spill.

I don't think they simply failed to plan for the occupation. I don't think they cared particularly because they felt they could just bulldoze on with the usual puppet oppression scheme of ancient history. That- AND the preparations for more wars(still lurking and moving along with antagonism against Syria and Iran) is something reasonable people outside the inner loop cannot simply imagine.

No, what they count on are terrorist attacks, somewhere, sometime, to bury all this "quibbling" all this holding them to minor accountability about strategic niceties, justifications and "democratic" outcomes.

You fail to see that PNAC itself- as horrific as it is- is only window dressing for money and power grabs with no ideological or national interest motivation. The unqualified stooges on PNAC were like any other issue research team set up by ALEC to keep GOP cliques busy setting agendas thinly veiled as conservative, purposely created to serve the interests of specific big corporations. I mean those moaners in PNAC also complain about Bush's bungling. Quayle would have done better?

Any allowance or goodwill or national interest intentions granted to this WH is democracy's Achilles heel.

Please. This is going according to plan. If it isn't rosy and upsets the natives with broken promises, invisible merits, that is only a concern if someone actually rouses themselves to stop them. In the big picture the Bushies are only upset we HAVEN'T had a major terrorist attack. No footdragging or convenient incompetence now to cripple our ability to stave off a new attack is "letting it happen" this time. There have been leaked vocal complaints that those dastardly terrorists are screwing up the need for a new jumpstart for Bush.

So what if Iraq is a mess and Bush is sinking in the polls? They are still there, unaccountable, poised for the next gift from Al Qaeda, the next steps in taking the Middle East and all other oil countries, all other democracies.

You are misunderestimating the innate evil of this administration, its true priorities, its true implacable course. Most of all, people shuffling their gaze aside from total accountability, making incompetence almost an excuse or theory, are enabling the impetus of the Bush-Cheney war on mankind to continue by the unobserved yet extremely open and obvious route- creating the certainty of new 911's that will sweep these fogged up critics who have granted the Bushistas too many of their MAIN justifications aside- or into the tide.

"Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity."

If we had exactly one data point to work with, response to the attack on 9/11/2001, then your theory would be more viable. However, we must also look at the response in Spain, by voters who saw through the duplicity of Aznar's attribution of the Al Qaeda attacks to Basque separatists to further their own agenda. We also have the continued drop in assessment for how bush's various wars have been going, and his current troubles at the polls. It is not at all clear that another stateside terrorist attack would have a positive effect on bush -- one could postulate quite the opposite.

It could be seen as proof positive that the administration's policy has failed completely in its sole democratically-justifiable objective: national security. Right now, the bushites receive the benefit of the doubt in the "Terror Wars" only because we haven't been domestically attacked post-2001. Once that excuse disappears, they'd be hard pressed to justify any of their policies at all -- even the alleged purpose for the Afghanistan invasion would go up in smoke.

The neo-cons don't need terror attacks to further their agenda at this point, what they need are credible victories: i.e., foiled attack attempts by terrorists (ideally, intelligence success stories that can be linked to "Patriot Act" excesses), or perhaps the capture of Osama bin Laden (or his corpse), or more Libyas suddenly acquiescing to UN inspections.

> I mean those moaners in PNAC also complain about Bush's bungling. Quayle would have done better?

You just pointed out two of the most famous bunglers in a political party known for two things: greed and bungling. Of course Quayle would not have done better, nor would Reagan or -- by his own admission -- Bush the Elder. Competence, which was overwhelmingly required for such an undertaking, is now easily perceived as sorely lacking within this administration. "Liberating" Iraq was only the first step in a very complicated process; the bushes have gambled a substantial share of the budget on something that can be seen in a positive light. If November rolls around and we have more of the same, or worse, then bush is going back to Crawford and the neo-cons are going to be stuck working with President Kerry.

I'm not going to rule out the possibility that elements within the GOP would relish additional terrorist attacks as an excuse to purloin the global oil supply. However, I think they overestimate the effectiveness of all-fear-all-the-time as a motivator.

so one seems overstated. Yes they have failed and bungled, but those who grant Bush goodwill or plain ignorance are missing some of the purposeful concentration of purpose that has mostly been spoiled by lack of justification(WMD's, new terror attacks here).

That those too might fail is not not completely certain. Spain was a near thing and one of the first things out of the Bushistas' mouth is a giveaway "we won't let that happen here". Not the attack, but the REACTION. Yes it may fail, but there is still tendency to give Bush an opportunity through a backdoor some people pretend is not there.

The best way to prevent the chance of a new coup 911 is to stop giving Bush too much false leeway. We have not stopped the chance of vote fraud. We have not stopped the incredible lie machine. We rest instead on the razor's edge.

Bush's falling off his bike on this edge is the biggest comfort to me. it shows that innately they can't take it, can't win unless allowed to.

It is Bush's simpleminded inadequate leadership, not their plans being known or blown, that is the weak link in their grandiose gambits. If only we could convince THEM of that a lot of lives would be saved. Meanwhile the politics, the foreign policy, the world go on a parallel interwoven course in some bewilderment, giving the "US" the "President" respect and chances he doesn't need or deserve, protected totally by the GOP government.

By the way we have no access to points about 911 to save us from it happening yet again under a more horrendous circumstance. I just have the disturbing feeling that their unnatural gambling and confidence in the face of setbacks underlies the irrelevance of failures "along the way"., just like Cheney considers huge budget deficits irrelevant. Even the Iraq seemed not too important. As things get worse and worse it seems they still have their eyes fixed on another goal in which the whole mess seems not to matter.

Yes I may be wrong. We live under a cloud of secrecy where people who pretend to see, see only madness.

Some people have begun to worry that this means Bush is Armageddon bound. The simpler explanation is that Bush is in reality pushing like the great dictator of the world and all other presumptions of law and fair play or elections are only the purview of suckers. The fewer people under this lie the more they will need to face the fact of defeat, the more the Bush Coup will be put down.

I think the evidence of bad faith is preponderant.

The obstruction of intelligence and defense functions prior to 911 and the investigations afterward, the obsession with secrecy and concealment and the hamstringing of whistle-blowers are all evidence of bad faith. I rather think like some in FBI that Rowley mentioned, that it seems like some in the American government were working for the terrorists before 911. The facile pattern of the anthrax attacks and the obstruction of that investigation by the FBI is a glaring sore evidencing bad faith. The pattern for bolstering the regime of an illegitimate prince is played out as advised in Machiavelli's Discourses by manufacturing a casus belli against an external enemy and then using it to manipulate a gullible public.

The material motives of a regime which suffered from illegitimacy from day one, causes it to jump from one hamster wheel to another, in a reckless course to remake American society into an unchallengable corporate/centralized police state to deter democracy. I don't rule out further terrorist attacks or pretexts for war, facilitated in one way or another by this regime, to interfere with elections or other constitutional processes. In fact, I think they are likely.

The wrongful intent of this regime can be inferred from its innovative and ludicrous legal theories justifying imprisonment, torture and killing without due process of law and the litany of unconstitutional activities authorized by the Patriot Act.