Its not a civil war...

[a_unique_person]

I have two observations:

1) I find it extremely interesting that you have used the word "terrorists" in your description of the article although that word was not used at all in the article itself. You have also used the phrase "coalition forces" when the article used the phrase "U.S. forces" exclusively.

2) You have made a very good point about these attacks not being against U.S. forces. However, the fact that we're now seeing an increase in Iraqi-on- Iraqi violence sems to bolster the civil war claims, not to debunk them.

These particular attacks. US troops are still being regularly attacked, and suffering casualties.

 

[a_unique_person]

I have two observations:

1) I find it extremely interesting that you have used the word "terrorists" in your description of the article although that word was not used at all in the article itself. You have also used the phrase "coalition forces" when the article used the phrase "U.S. forces" exclusively.

2) You have made a very good point about these attacks not being against U.S. forces. However, the fact that we're now seeing an increase in Iraqi-on- Iraqi violence sems to bolster the civil war claims, not to debunk them.

These particular attacks. US troops are still being regularly attacked, and suffering casualties.

 

[Ziggurat]

I think to the rational person the editorial says what is going on is a civil war.

I can't speak directly for Rik, but I suspect this applies to him as well as me. As a rational person, I compare the editorial's definition of the term "civil war" with my own definition. If said editorial's definition does not fit mine, and I choose not to adapt their definition (which I don't because I think mine is better), then the evidence they present regarding whether or not Iraq is a civil war under their definition do not necessarily support the argument that it's a civil war under my definition. It is quite possible that the same evidence can support a civil war under one definition AND the absence of a civil war under another definition. There's nothing irrational about it, just a recognition that the definitions don't match. I have already made this explicit, so I'm surprised you didn't consider this possibility when responding to Rik. Wouldn't that have been the rational thing to do?

 

[Ziggurat]

These particular attacks. US troops are still being regularly attacked, and suffering casualties.

The story is indicative of a real trend which is eqasily observable even if you track all attacks: the number of attacks against US and coalition troops is dropping significantly, and so are US and coalition casualties.

 

[a_unique_person]

The story is indicative of a real trend which is eqasily observable even if you track all attacks: the number of attacks against US and coalition troops is dropping significantly, and so are US and coalition casualties.

That would be because attacks on Iraqi's are rising. You can cut it any way you want, it's not what Cheney and Rumsfeld thought it would be, and most definitely not Bush. Certainly, Powell.

 

[rikzilla]

That would be because attacks on Iraqi's are rising. You can cut it any way you want, it's not what Cheney and Rumsfeld thought it would be, and most definitely not Bush. Certainly, Powell.

So your problem with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush is that they can't tell the future? Well hell! Alert Randi to stop payment on that $1,000,000 check he wrote to GWB!!

-z

 

[davefoc]

Yup, that's about the size of it. And we won't know definitively which of us was right, and to what extent, until probably years from now.

This is the one thing that Ziggurat has said which is almost certainly wrong.

A judgment as to whether this Iraq war was beneficial for the US, UK, Iraq, Israel, the surrounding Arab countries, and/or the world is a tricky one at best. I doubt very much if greater time will bring any greater clarity on the issue.

There were very real difficulties if Hussein was left in power. At some point the restrictions on his oil income would have ended and this would have left Hussein with massive funds to build and/or purchase whatever WMD he desired which he might have deployed to threaten his neighbors, or to use in a preemptive war against Israel, or to supply to terrorists to be smuggled into the US or Western Europe. Further he might have embarked on a genocidal war against the Kurds. So lots of bad stuff might have happened if Hussein had been left in power. No one can say definitively that any of that bad stuff or any other bad stuff wouldn't have happened if Hussein had been left in power.

What we are left with now is judging how likely that bad stuff was without the war and how it might have been mitigated wihtout the war versus the really bad stuff that has happened with this Iraq war that did happen.

Amongst the bad stuff that has happened but is often not taken into account by the people who still think this war was a good idea is that American influence in the world has been reduced substantially. The war has exacerbated anti-American feelings in the world, the war has sapped huge chunks of American capital and it has emboldened American enemies to ignore the US. And the effects of those events would need to be taken into account in any cost/benefit judgment of the war. But reliably attributing a particular world problem to a problem caused by the war will probably be impossible regardless to how much time has passed..

The most likely result of the war will be a fundamentalist Shiite government that won't be any more to the US liking than Hussein's government was. Time might prove or disprove this notion but more time will never answer the question as to what would have happened without the war.

 

[Ziggurat]

The most likely result of the war will be a fundamentalist Shiite government that won't be any more to the US liking than Hussein's government was. Time might prove or disprove this notion but more time will never answer the question as to what would have happened without the war.

You are correct that it is possible to have ambiguous outcomes, because yes, we're not all going to agree on how things would have played out had we done something other than invade. But I think you're wrong to discount the possibility of a long-term outcome that demonstrates the invasion as being worthwhile.

Fundamentalist governments never remain popular: they have popular appeal under a dictatorship where the mosque is the only alternative power base that isn't crushed completely, but they never maintain widespread popularity after spending any significant amount of time in power. As long as democratic structures remain in place, I think Shia fundamentalists will have to moderate in order to govern, or they'll get kicked out for obsessing about stupid stuff and not addressing the real day-to-day problems people face. And because of the constitutional structure put in place, the Kurds can basically veto any major changes to the constitution, so all we have to do is make sure that all the parties keep playing by those rules and things will work themselves out. In the end, we don't need Iraq to become a western country, we just need them to become the first middle-eastern country besides Israel to start acting rationally. If we can achieve that, I think it really will have all been worth it, and there won't be any ambiguity in my mind.

 

[Melendwyr]

Israel doesn't act rationally. It owes its entire existence to religious fundamentalism, and its actions frequently sow the seeds of future conflicts.

 

[Ziggurat]

Israel doesn't act rationally. It owes its entire existence to religious fundamentalism, and its actions frequently sow the seeds of future conflicts.

Blah blah blah.

Israel isn't the one which kept launching wars it repeatedly loses. They aren't the ones who continually antagonize a foe who could easily crush them, and endlessly attempt to escalate a conflict which they are guaranteed to lose (and badly) if they actually succeeded in that escalation. You can whine all you want to about Israel falling short of your rational ideal, but when you look around the neighborhood they're in, they are quite CLEARLY the only country in the region capable of thinking even remotely rationally.

 

[davefoc]

...But I think you're wrong to discount the possibility of a long-term outcome that demonstrates the invasion as being worthwhile.

It is conceivable as all things are conceivable.

A long term outcome that is a stable, secular, democratic government will not justify the war unless it can reasonably be agreed that the war produced it.

Dictatorships don't last forever either so there was a reasonable chance that something like that would have happened without the war. You are now hypothesizing an Iraqi government that you and I might be a little more comfortable with that arises out of a fundamentalist regime that came about directly as a result of the war would prove the war was justified. I don't think it would prove that although it might provide a little evidence for the proposition.

 

[Ziggurat]

Dictatorships don't last forever either so there was a reasonable chance that something like that would have happened without the war.

A chance? Perhaps. A reasonable chance? I don't see how. There's absolutely no precedent for such a development anywhere in the world. The only places in which democracy topples dictatorships from within are countries where the middle class gains critical mass, demands power, and the political and military establishment cannot crack down on them without destroying their own economic base. That simply doesn't apply in a place like Iraq (or any oil-rich country), where the abject poverty, complete misery, and absolute lack of economic productivity of the majority of the population doesn't actually threaten the regime's source of power. Hence the term "the curse of oil": absent some outside force, oil allows despotism to perpetuate itself indefinitely. So there's absolutely no precedent for it, and no reason to think it could work.

 

[CapelDodger]

But I have heard many, many, many on the left deriding GWB's intelligence.

I've known dogs with more intelligence than Bush. Of course we deride his intelligence. People on the right deride his intelligence. That's his electoral charm : "I'm an idiot, you'd be an idiot to vote for me, if you vote for me you have your kind of President". The sophistry is irrefutable.

Bush Minor is not a Policy President, he's a Presentation President. The hotty weather-girl, not the meteorologist. He's not a very good one under pressure, either - Reagan was far better. (If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs, it could be you haven't got a clue what's going on, and you're the guy we'll put up to calm people's nerves.) The Iraq War was not conceived, pushed through and executed by Bush Minor. Screw him, frankly.

The guilty men include Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and the whole PNAC fraternity. That's just for starters. Some of these guys are very clever, but most of them are ignorant and don't realise it. My position is not that I'm cleverer than them - not to concede that possibility, of course - but that I'm a lot less ignorant.

 

[Cleon]

For the record, Israel does not owe "its entire existence to religious fundamentalism." That's simply historically untrue. The early Zionists were largely secular, and the European powers were involved out of self-interest. The Orthodox, particularly the Hassidim, were largely hostile to Zionism up until relatively recently.

The fundamentalist settler movement is definitely a post-1967 phenomenon, and had nothing to do with the founding of Israel. Israel certainly doesn't depend on them in any way; if anything, they're a liability.

So Melendwyr, as usual, seems to be toking on the happy pipe.

 

[CapelDodger]

And it's a much more interesting one than Vietnam. But it doesn't get nearly as much attention, because the conclusions to be drawn from it (it doesn't quite point to inevitable defeat or inevitable victory) don't fit squarely on a pro- or anti-war one-liner.

Thoughts deriving :

The eternal, and pointless, Moro campaign diverted resources from the strategically mega-important Corregidor base. What's more, it reduced the available resources because it was always in the news, it's what people thought of when a pollster asked them "Should we withdraw from the Philippines?". Isolationists and anti-military types made great play with that. As a result - IMO - when it went off with Japan that base was lost. In fact, had it always been ahead of what the Japanese could expect to crack, it might never have gone off at all.

Is this war distracting from what might be strategically mega-important? And might it sour people from believing a real cry of "Wolf!"? Time will tell.

 

[CapelDodger]

For the record, Israel does not owe "its entire existence to religious fundamentalism." That's simply historically untrue. The early Zionists were largely secular, and the European powers were involved out of self-interest. The Orthodox, particularly the Hassidim, were largely hostile to Zionism up until relatively recently.

The fundamentalist settler movement is definitely a post-1967 phenomenon, and had nothing to do with the founding of Israel. Israel certainly doesn't depend on them in any way; if anything, they're a liability.

Quite right. The neo-Judaist settler religion, all land and blood-line, is one we've been able to watch created before our eyes. "Ultra-orthodox" is a terrible misnomer.

 

[CapelDodger]

A chance? Perhaps. A reasonable chance? I don't see how.

In his final years Saddam was killing members of his tribe, his clan, his family, as the noose of trust closed in on him. There are plenty of precedents to leaders like that being overthrown. At some point the risk-benefit analysis passes a tipping-point. Saddam was getting shorter on reward and longer on terror. He'd probably have been gone by now, without an invasion, after a Rumanian Trial if any.

 

[davefoc]

A chance? Perhaps. A reasonable chance? I don't see how. There's absolutely no precedent for such a development anywhere in the world. ...

You almost made my point with this one comment.

The possibility of the overthrow, assassination or natural death of Hussein is exactly the kind of thing that would have to be factored into any credible analysis of whether in net the war was beneficial to any of the parties.

It is exactly this kind of hard, detailed analysis of possible scenarios that I assumed the Bush administration was doing before the war. I favored the war exactly because it was beyond belief to me that any American president would take the country to war without the deepest kind of thinking and analysis.

It has now been proven beyond any reasonable doubt to me that Bushco cooked the books in the most egregious way to make a case for war and exacerbated their lying by being staggeringly incompetent at understanding the ramifications of a war and perhaps even more incompetent at dealing with those ramifications.

But there are still many people that disagree with my view of the situation, some that are as well spoken and informed as you. So what does that say about the possibility of ever knowing with much certainty whether benefits of the war outweighted its benefits?

A few significant events since the war began:

No WMD were found and you continued to support the war.

Three years after Bush declared mission accomplished the war continues to rage and you continue to support the war.

Two years after Cheney declared that the insurgency was in its last throes the war continues to rage and you continue to support the war.

Electrical production in Iraq has yet to make it up to prewar levels.

Oil prices are now teetering at all time highs and significantly higher than before the war.

Korea has now declared based on the American example that preemptive wars are OK and you continue to support the war.

The fundamentalists in Iran have solidified their position and still you continue to support the war.

America has run up massive debt that has hugely weakened our foreign influence and you still continue to support the war.

Hamas has won a significant electoral victory and you still continue to support the war.

America has been hugely embarrassed in the world and the Middle East with its handling of Iraqi prisoners and you continue to support the people who oversaw that as leaders of this war effort.

My point is that all of these things might be seen as evidence against the Iraq war or they could be seen as unrelated events with only very limited significance as to whether the benefits will outweigh the costs of the Iraq war. Time is not going to make this determination much easier. The long-term effects of many of these events will never be known. Some people like yourself will tend to discount them and claim the war was justified pretty much no matter what happens and other people will see them as very significant and tend to see the war as a bad thing pretty much independent on how the thing turns out.

 

[Melendwyr]

For the record, Israel does not owe "its entire existence to religious fundamentalism." That's simply historically untrue. The early Zionists were largely secular, and the European powers were involved out of self-interest.

They were secular? And they chose the current site of Israel why exactly? It's hot, dry, has few natural resources, and is surrounded by hostile Muslim countries that have tried to destroy it multiple times. (Granted, being surrounded by hostile enemies is actually a very effective way of guaranteeing a strong sense of national identity, but it's a poor choice otherwise.)

The location was chosen because of religious beliefs, not from any intelligent secular purpose.

 

[Cleon]

Melendwyr, why don't you read a book about the subject and learn WTF you're talking about?

The choice of Palestine was mainly pushed by Theodore Hertzl, who was as secular as they come. He even wanted German (not Hebrew, not Yiddish, but German) to be the official Zionist language.

You're simply factually incorrect.