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Bushism.IraqDilemma.Repeat (n)
In today’s New York Sun I find this:
Three-Day Insurgent Bombing Spree Capped by Funeral AttackBut wait—wasn’t the election, followed by the setting up of a new government, supposed to signal the defeat of the insurgency, rather than a surging of the insurgency to new heights of murder? That of course has been the cheerleading chant of the Bushites, meaning the people who uncritically support President Bush’s Iraq policy and echo his arguments. According to their reasoning, the closer the Iraqis get to a new government,—when we handed sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004, when the Iraqis held an election for a National Assembly in January 2005, and when the National Assembly appointed a provisional government in April 2005—the more the air would go out of the insurgency, until no air was left. But this scenario never made sense. The purpose of the insurgency is to prevent any successor government from forming, or, if one does form, to prevent it from remaining in existence. The insurgents pursue this aim, George Will wrote recently, by making life in Iraq so nasty, brutish, and short that the government will lose any legitimacy and people will turn back to the Ba’athists who will at least give them personal security from being blown up by Ba’athists. It follows that the forming of a democratically elected government would not lead to the demoralization or weakening of the Ba’athist and jihadist terrorists, but to a spurt in their activity, as has actually happened. The words in the news story quoted above, “since insurgents started bearing down on Iraq’s newly named government late last week,” say it all. Since I have always assumed that an election would be held and that a government would be formed, the very things that the Bushites have hailed as betokening miraculous victory and success have meant little to me. The holding of elections and the appointing of a government were not the issue. The issue was, and is, whether we can destroy the insurgency. If we cannot destroy the insurgency, then the new Iraqi government will not be able to survive, and eventually it will fall, unless we keep our forces in Iraq indefinitely. The recent government-making has not changed this analysis by one jot. As I’ve said about 100 times since the summer of 2003, notwithstanding the Bushites’ constant whoops of “We’re making progress!”, “We’re succeeding!”, “We’re building schools!”, “We’re winning hearts and minds!”, We’re holding elections!”, “Iraq is now a democracy!”, “Freedom is intoxicating!”, “Oh, the exhilaration of freedom!”, the fundamental problem—creating security in Iraq—has not been solved, and does not seem to be on the way to being solved.
I have also many times urged a rethinking of our Iraq and Islam policy aimed at a broader strategy that might have a chance at victory. I have offered strategic ideas that are radically different from President Bush’s approach, coming from a variety of writers who have done some useful thinking in this area. But what’s the point of repeating these ideas yet again? Nothing like what I’ve proposed has the slightest possibility of being discussed by ten people, let alone of being considered in public debate, nor do there seem to be any other alternatives on the table. For the foreseeable future, there is no chance that we’re going to do anything other than continue as we’ve been doing, staying the course that Bush has chosen. Email entry |