CT Blue

If you didn’t notice it at the time, check out Scott Bates recent column in the Day. Scott points out that we have actually achieved all the goals (bullshit that they were) we set for the war in Iraq when we started it, and that it is therefore time to leave.

Iraq has fallen out of the news, replaced in recent months by Afghanistan. We have short and limited attention spans. Remember when Iraq almost unseated Joe Lieberman?

No good will come from the adventure in Iraq. Once we leave, it may very well make common cause with Iran. Under Saddam there was a nice healthy (from our perspective) enmity between the two. But we have to leave, if for no other reason than that we are impoverishing ourselves with endless war.

Our own Scott Bates (State Committee person from our district) has a column in the Courant this morning about his experiences in Iraq, where he is, according to the Courant, “working with officials to strengthen democratic institutions”. I’m not sure exactly what that means, though I know Scott has been spending a lot of time there and working really hard. Sounds like Scott is not terribly optimistic:

Last week marked the Iraqi government’s takeover of security in its cities from the American military. The thinking is for U.S. forces to assume a lower profile and put the Iraqi government out front and center. In this region, the more visible the American military presence, the more we are identified as occupiers, which strengthens the hands of the extremists. And so we are at the point where the Iraqi government will need to sink or swim on its own. There is not much more we can do. And perhaps the idea of trying to control events in this part of the world is an illusion after all.

Here at home we are working hard to pretend that Iraq and Afghanistan don’t exist, but that’s a losing strategy. We will be dealing with both, in one way or another, for years to come. Scott puts the blame where it belongs, on the folks who got us into this mess with no clear plan on how to get us out, or even what to do assuming they intended to stay put (which they did).

This is the entire text of a “News in Brief” from this morning’s Day, which in turn is taken from a longer article in the Washington Post:

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Hussein, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.”

Those two paragraphs confirm every argument we war opponents made both before and after the war. This will be ignored, or dismissed as lies from the evil Saddam, but in fact it’s consistent with what the government was told by reliable sources even before the war.

Doesn’t it seem strange that this confirmation that our own “leaders” are war criminals only merits inclusion in the “News in Brief” section.

This is what we have accomplished in Iraq (reported, of course, by a British newspaper, The Guardian), via Americablog:

Authorities in the southern Iraqi city of Basra have admitted they are powerless to prevent ‘honour killings’ in the city following a 70 per cent increase in religious murders during the past year.

There has been no improvement in conviction rates for these killings. So far this year, 81 women in the city have been murdered for allegedly bringing shame on their families. Only five people have been convicted.

…

The figures come despite international outrage which followed The Observer’s coverage of the death of 17-year-old Rand Abdel-Qader, who was murdered by her father last April in an ‘honour killing’ after falling in love with a British soldier in Basra. The 4,000 British troops stationed in the city since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 withdrew to the airport last September.

Rand Abdel-Qader was killed after her family discovered that she had formed a friendship with a 22-year-old infantryman whom she knew as Paul. She was suffocated by her father then hacked at with a knife. Abdel-Qader Ali was subsequently arrested and released without charge.

Rand’s mother, Leila Hussein, who divorced her husband after the killing, went into hiding but was tracked down weeks later and assassinated by an unknown gunman. Her husband had told The Observer that police had congratulated him for killing his daughter.

…

Mariam Ayub Sattar, an activist in Basra, said that any woman caught speaking to a man in public who was not her husband or a relative was considered a prostitute and punished. A fortnight ago three women were burned with acid while walking through a market in Basra after stopping to speak to a male friend, Sattar said.

The going rate for “honour killing” hit men is $100.00.

We must exit Iraq, for a host of reasons. But we will leave behind a country that will become closely tied to Iran, and which will be in the grip of Islamic fundamentalists. Good work all around. But, as they say, who could have known?

Yet another study debunking the idea that the “surge” was the main cause of the reduction in violence in Iraq. The reason, in a nutshell, is that the “ethnic cleansing” (that’s euphemism for genocide) has done it’s work, and there’s not that many people left to kill.

Unfortunately, this explanation for the decreased violence, as obvious as it is, is far too complicated for our national discourse. It requires thinking, which makes our heads hurt. It’s so much easier to assign a handy cause to a perceived effect, particularly if it reinforces the official line. The study’s authors make the point in a slightly more high toned fashion:

Geographers and social scientists find it increasingly difficult to intervene in debates
about vital matters of public interest, such as the Iraq war, because of the ideological polarization and lack of respect for empirical analysis that have afflicted US politics in recent years. (Emphasis added)

Ain’t it the truth.

Iraq is our ally, at least I believe it is.

Israel is our ally. In fact, according to Sarah Palin, we should never ever second guess anything it chooses to do.

So why has the Iraqi Parliament just revoked legislative immunity for a member of that Parliament who had the temerity to visit Israel, and why is the State of Israel “described as an enemy of the State of Iraq in Iraqi law” and why is merely visiting Israel a felony in Iraq?

Things have come to a rather sorry pass when we are spending our blood and treasure to prop up a government that is a sworn enemy of one of our closest allies. Our foreign policy is incoherent, but what else is new.

John McCain is building his entire campaign around the “surge”, which he claims to have created himself, and which, according to him, has brought, or will bring, peace and prosperity to Iraq. In the process of promoting the “surge” he has misrepresented its origin, its purpose and its results. Juan Cole has an excellent post today about the surge, and delivers a decidedly negative appraisal.

As those with memories recall, the surge was supposed to supply a breathing space to allow for political reconciliation. It has been a failure on those terms, so McCain/Bush talk about reduced levels of violence. As Cole points out, there’s a reason for that reduced violence:

For the first six months of the troop escalation, high rates of violence continued unabated. That is suspicious. What exactly were US troops doing differently last September than they were doing in May, such that there was such a big change? The answer to that question is simply not clear. Note that the troop escalation only brought US force strength up to what it had been in late 2005. In a country of 27 million, 30,000 extra US troops are highly unlikely to have had a really major impact, when they had not before.

As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods.

One of those refugees, apparently, is the woman blogger at Baghdad Burning, whose last post is dated October, 2007, from Syria, to which country she fled just about the time that violence in Iraq began to decline. So it appears that the surge decreased levels of violence because it created a situation in which the people doing the killing had nobody left to kill. Just one more Bush success story.

Cole’s entire post is recommended reading. Cole actually knows what he’s talking about, which is one of the reasons so few people listen to him