Iraq has final exploded and all over the world people are surprised. Why? Haven’t they been paying attention? Suddenly every nut case who needs some tube time is howling for the President to do something. A typical example is Congressman Mike McCaul who goes on TV and demands that the President act to curtail this threat to our national security. When asked what the president should do, however, he is, as expected, stuck for an answer. This seems to be a universal pose.
McCaul makes the ludicrous statement that it is Obama’s failure to negotiate a Status of Forces agreement in Iraq that has put us in this position. He is, as usual, dead wrong and far too limited in the intelligence department to understand that it takes two people to negotiate a contract. Maybe McCaul hasn’t got the intellectual wherewithal to remember but it was the Bush/ Cheney lies that led us into Iraq and put us in this situation in the first place. Obama was still a Senator voting against this invasion when we hit the beaches in Iraq.
When asked if Obama should take military action McCaul answers that he should look at his options, which is politic speak for I don’t have a clue. He then complains that we are not leading. Why should we be leading these Cro-Magnon religious fanatics and how do you make them understand that neither their religion nor their political beliefs are conversant with any kind of peaceful co-existence or humanistic behavior. The only solution to Iraq is to let them kill each other off until someone comes out of the dark ages and realizes that the country should be divided into thirds with the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds, each having their own land.
Of course Mitt Romney couldn’t pass on a chance to show us why he lost the last election. So he was on the tube saying Obama should act. Sounds good but when asked what Obama should do, he too couldn’t come up with an answer. Then Ron Gregory asks Romney about his statements, a couple of years ago, that we should leave Iraq and leave them in charge of their own destiny. He naturally has nothing to say about that either. There’s a reason why no one can come up with an answer to, “What should we do in Iraq?” It’s because there is no answer. We should not do anything.
Bill Maher had some turkey named Tom Rogan on his show a while back. This guy thinks it’s because we withdrew from Iraq that the local Muslim sects are slaughtering each other. What he doesn’t understand is that it’s because we went in there in the first place. Our invasion of Iraq was based on a lie and carried out with no exit strategy. No matter when we left this would have happened simply because the Sunnis and the Shiites have hated each other far longer than we have been a nation. The Kurds have wanted their own country and among the three of them a war has been inevitable ever since we killed the dictator who was keeping these maniacs in line. Some people are too stupid to live like human beings without a dictator forcing them to. That was obviously the case in Iraq. Bush/Cheney screwed up the status quo and once they did, this result was inevitable.
A lot of people have been asking the question lately, who lost Iraq. The left accuses Bush/Chaney while the right accuses Obama. Those answers are far too simplistic In fact if you look back over history you will see that wherever we have lost a war the reason has always been that we have backed the wrong local leader. Go all the way back to WWII when we backed Chang Kai Sheik in China He was the wrong horse and because we chose to back him we lost China as an ally for 60 years. Didn’t stop there, look at Vietnam where we backed a weak, crooked regime and lost that war or how about Cuba where we could have backed an idealistic Castro but chose the mob run casinos and whorehouses and big sugar that wanted their butt boy, Batista. We are currently doing the same thing in Afghanistan and we already did the same thing in Iraq where al-Maliki lost the war. He was a cowardly, corrupt, gangster who was picked by George Bush, who thought he could control him. Bush having invaded Iraq with a small force, developed the worst war plan in history.
Without making any judgment on the men involved, the American command decided to back those who had opposed Saddam Husain, regardless of their talents or abilities to run a government. In doing this they dismantled the entire governmental structure of the country, throwing out any and all experienced bureaucrats and leaders. The government quickly collapsed.
But what about Obama? Why didn’t he, as McCaul accuses, negotiate a Status of Forces agreement with Maliki or why didn’t he force Maliki to accept one so that we could keep a regulatory force in he country. Well, according to a senior Iraqi politician at the time of the negotiations part of the problem was that Iran didn’t want one and it was Iran who had backed Maliki from the beginning and was giving him much of his power and money at the time of the negotiations. He assured our source that a Status of Forces agreement would never happen. To quote:
“It will not happen, Maliki cannot allow American Troops to stay on. Iran has made very clear to Maliki that its number one demand is that there be no American troops remaining in Iraq, and Maliki owes them.”
That’s true, Maliki had spent over twenty years in Iran and Syria and most of his funding had come from Iran. He did owe them but there was a much bigger problem why Maliki wouldn’t sign a Status of Forces Agreement. It was because of Blackstone, the Cheney installed contractor that made billions and kicked back who knows how much. Blackstone became it’s own army talking orders from no one and even threatening to kill a state department investigator who was sent over to assess their deficiencies. They created a catastrophe when their mercenary contractors murdered Iraqi civilians in the streets and it was made worse when the obviously guilty perpetrators got off scot-free in US courts. Maliki is a piece of garbage but he was dead right on that issue and there was no way he could back down on it and allow the same kind of thing to happen again.
We can argue over whether we should use air strikes or just sit back and watch but our real problem is that we have picked the wrong horse, a complete and indefensible loser and we’re stuck with him.
Richard Haas one of the wisest minds on foreign policy extent, seems to have the best take on what is going on and what we should do about it. He points out that the countries under consideration have no real historical, geographic outline. They were created a hundred or so years ago by the Bits and the French with no concept of adhering to natural, tribal or ethnic boundaries but rather to straight lines, they were able to draw on maps. He points out further that the current situation is erasing the map borders. That there is no real border between Syria and Iraq but rather spheres of influence based on religious, ethnic considerations, and the barrel of a gun. He suggests that we support not Sunnis, Shiites or anyone else in Syria and Iraq but that we support Jordan and Lebanon which are struggling under a mountain of fleeing immigrants and just let the combatants settle out their own scores until they are so depleted by their combat that they realize that the only functional solution is a tripartite division of what is now Syria and Iraq into Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite states.
As long as neither we, nor the monsters of the Middle-East, accept this reality there will be no peace.