Speechless

Well, not really speechless, or I wouldn't have anything to write here.

In case you hadn't noticed, apparently the news article that last drove me to post was a bunch of hogwash. Troop levels certainly haven't been reduced.

Actually, that's what I'm addressing today. The Iraq Study Group recommended a phased withdrawal of troops from Iraq and to solicit diplomatic assistance from Iran and Syria. Well guess what? Bush isn't talking to either Iran or Syria. Totally unsurprising, I know, given his "axis of evil" rhetoric and persistent insistence that we don't negotiate with terrorists (a term he has given to governments in both Iran and Syria).

But the higher profile recommendation of James Baker and company was to get our troops out of there. I think Bush's pops must have spent too much time on his career and not enough on teaching his kid that it's okay to follow advice now and then. Whether he's stupid, stubborn, naive, all three, or just pure evil is up in the air. He's sending 3500 troops to Kuwait, to position them for deployment in Iraq toward the beginning of the year.

Okay, so, while I know that nobody actually reads this blog, let me say one thing loud and clear: the military just isn't going to win Iraq for us. I know that they don't lose battles -- no ragtag band of insurgents with AK-47s and improvised explosives is going to be able to defeat the American military. The troubles in Iraq, however, are not stemming from a lack of military superiority. They're stemming from a lack of political and social cohesion among the many factions in Iraq. Our military has smartly decided to stay neutral, neither overtly supporting Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds, or any other faction. As a consequence, however, their actions are actually completely unrelated to political unity. Think about it this way: if you're a Sunni, you know that you could be shot by one of the Shi'ites in the country who has decided violence is the only way to win this thing for his faction, or you could be shot by an American Marine, whose leaders have decided violence is the only way to win this thing. What I'm getting at is that if your brother or sister or son or daughter or whatever gets killed by an American servicemen (who, I realize, are typically extremely judicious with their use of force, but the situation is so bad there that some collateral damage can't be prevented), you aren't going to like the people of any of the other factions better. You're just going to hate us more. So, really, we're at quite a disadvantage.

I don't know how to fix things there, but I really don't know what kind of good we're doing there right now. I think we're just making everyone hate everyone else more. Maybe if we got our troops out of there, but kept a bunch of them in the neighborhood, as things started to descend into a completely unchecked civil war (it's certainly a civil war right now, but they can't fight it out in the open), a concrete enough group of people would emerge for us to fight. On the other hand, that's a really stupid idea -- civil war might even kill more innocent people than have been killed in our presence.

Again, I'll suggest getting all of our corporate interests out of there, beginning to work really, really hard on a peace process between Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, admit to the UN we made a bad mistake and ask them to help us keep things from deteriorating into a civil war there, and start praying for a Muslim version of Gandhi to emerge in Baghdad. In all honesty, we've probably screwed things up there to a point of no return. If I assume the best of everyone, I imagine Bush just wants to keep trying until he gets it right, but even then, he can't keep trying the same thing. Han, Luke, Chewie, and Leia never would have gotten out of the garbage compactor if they just kept banging their heads against the door. Unfortunately, I doubt misguided naivety is the only reason Bush keeps failing in Iraq -- it's really starting to test my faith in humanity. Maybe Hobbes was right.