[Vision2020] Iraq Then and Now

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Hail to the Vision!

What gall supporters of the Iraq War have in saying that critics have to come up with a solution to the mess their President has got us in.  Here we stand saying that we should pull ourselves out of the quagmire, but we are being called "cowards" as our country and our honor sinks deeper into the quicksand.

Before the war Saddam was contained and his people, although selectively oppressed (as are millions around the world by dictators that we either ignore or support), were secure and Iraqi oil flowed uninterrupted for export. No-fly zones protected the Kurds in the North and the Shias in the South.  The secular Sunni government was wary of radical Islamists, and Iraq and Iran, after a bitter 8-year war, stood at an uneasy truce.

After 40 months of war, the average monthly rate of Iraqis killed (about 1250) exceeds Saddam's average kill rate of about 1053, taking 300,000 as the number killed under his nearly 24-year (285 months) rule. Even Bush conceded that 30,000 had died after the first two years.

The electricity is at prewar levels, unemployment is much, much higher, and oil is flowing at 80 percent of prewar levels, much of it being stolen by criminal gangs and troops who are supposed to guard the pipelines.

All the parties in the ruling Shiite coalition have close links to Iran and the new Prime minister has announced that it is OK for Iran to enrich uranium.  There is no question that this government will forge, regardless of our wishes, close ties with the only Shiite majority Muslim nation in the world.

In his most recent report from Iraq, Lawrence Kaplan (The New Republic, 7/10), a supporter of the war as was his journal initially, tells the story of two U. S. units that have been successful in pacifying their areas and making friends with some of the people.  Both of them are now pulling out and they are not being replaced, and Kaplan predicts that they will return to the hands of the insurgents. 

Bush says that he is staying the course, but Kaplan says that our troops and the Iraqis know very well that we are leaving long before the 5-10 years that retired General John Bastiste says we have to stay in order "to get the job done."

Vietnam was a quagmire and Iraq is one, too.  Thousands of American GIs and millions of Vietnamese died needlessly as Nixon dragged out the war and promised that our troops would not have died in vain.  They did nonetheless. An Iraq mission  based on false evidence, invalid reasoning, and poor planning cannot be completed successfully; it can only be aborted.