Mistakes Were Made

Posted on by

An editorial in today’s New York Times:

Iraq is becoming a country that America should be ashamed to support, let alone occupy. The nation as a whole is sliding closer to open civil war. In its capital, thugs kidnap and torture innocent civilians with impunity, then murder them for their religious beliefs. The rights of women are evaporating. The head of the government is the ally of a radical anti-American cleric who leads a powerful private militia that is behind much of the sectarian terror.

It would be nice if television and radio news explained this clearly, but an editorial is a start.

The Bush administration will not acknowledge the desperate situation. But it is, at least, pushing in the right direction, trying to mobilize all possible leverage in a frantic effort to persuade the leading Shiite parties to embrace more inclusive policies and support a broad-based national government.

Translation: Having screwed around for three years, the Bush Administration may be about to realize they created a monster they can’t control.

One vital goal is to persuade the Shiites to abort their disastrous nomination of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Jaafari is unable to form a broadly inclusive government and has made no serious effort to rein in police death squads. Even some Shiite leaders are now calling on him to step aside. If his nomination stands and is confirmed by Parliament, civil war will become much harder to head off. And from the American perspective, the Iraqi government will have become something that no parent should be asked to risk a soldier son or daughter to protect.

Unfortunately, after three years of policy blunders in Iraq, Washington may no longer have the political or military capital to prevail. That may be hard for Americans to understand, since it was the United States invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and helped the Shiite majority to power. Some 140,000 American troops remain in Iraq, more than 2,000 American servicemen and servicewomen have died there so far and hundreds of billions of American dollars have been spent.

I’ve said before that Iraq will be to Gawd Almighty Superpower America what Russia was to Napoleon. Thanks to flaming delusional idiots like Rummy and Cheney, the world now knows what our limits are. Even if some of us haven’t figured it out yet.

Yet Shiite leaders have responded to Washington’s pleas for inclusiveness with bristling hostility, personally vilifying Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and criticizing American military operations in the kind of harsh language previously heard only from Sunni leaders. Meanwhile, Moktada al-Sadr, the radically anti-American cleric and militia leader, has maneuvered himself into the position of kingmaker by providing decisive support for Mr. Jaafari’s candidacy to remain prime minister.

It was chilling to read Edward Wong’s interview with the Iraqi prime minister in The Times last week, during which Mr. Jaafari sat in the palace where he now makes his home, complained about the Americans and predicted that the sectarian militias that are currently terrorizing Iraqi civilians could be incorporated into the army and police. The stories about innocent homeowners and storekeepers who are dragged from their screaming families and killed by those same militias are heartbreaking, as is the thought that the United States, in its hubris, helped bring all this to pass.

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. — Proverbs 16:18

I hate to say this, but maybe the Bushies should have read their Bibles more closely before the bleeping invasion.

You can read the Edward Wong interview here and here.

It is conceivable that the situation can still be turned around. Mr. Khalilzad should not back off. The kind of broadly inclusive government he is trying to bring about offers the only hope that Iraq can make a successful transition from the terrible mess it is in now to the democracy that we all hoped would emerge after Saddam Hussein’s downfall. It is also the only way to redeem the blood that has been shed by Americans and Iraqis alike.

Every now and then someone who is smart enough to understand what’s happening will issue a statement like we can still win or we can still have a positive outcome in Iraq. Assuming they aren’t just plain lying, it seems to me these people are looking at Iraq as a kind of arithmetic problem. It’s still mathematically possible that we can make this work. Put another way, if we don’t make any more mistakes from this point forward, maybe we can salvage something from this mess. But then there’s the idiot factor — the Bushies are still in charge. So we know more mistakes will be made. The editorial writers need to come to grips with that.

See also Taylor Marsh.

5 thoughts on “Mistakes Were Made”

  1. A hard rain’s gonna fall on the Bushistas when it becomes clear that far from “winning” in Iraq they have, in fact, destroyed the Army.

    That’s right we don’t have a functioning Army anymore. We have a demoralised group of extremely tired, stressed out killers driving around in rapidly deteriorating equipment that is will cost more billions we don’t have to repair.

    Estimated cost to the U.S. for the Iraq war: 2 Trillion dollars. That is with a “T”.

    Game, set and match to Osama. He has won and more than that will be percieved as winning no matter what happens from here on in Iraq.

    Bush the loser soon to be consigned to the dustbin of history if not jail for the war crimes his government is responsible for.

    This or a similar reality is what is coming and no amount of Bushista “spin” will save him and his cronies.

  2. That’s interesting … you sparked some long-negleted synapses into firing…

    When I first went to college I spent a couple of semesters failing every class by not going to them. At all. Ever. In most cases, I never actually bothered to find out when or where the class actually met.

    And yet, seeing that F on the final grades report was always a surprise.

    I remember spending a lot of time making calculations like you mention above, whenever my anxiety allowed reality to intrude to any significant degree… “OK, so I’ve missed the first two tests now, but if I get busy and pass every test from now on, I should still pass this thing. I’ll start tomorrow.” “So, OK, now I’ve missed the first four tests, but if I make at least an A on every test from now on, plus do every bit of my homework, I’ll still pass this thing. I’ll get on that first thing tomorrow.” “So, OK, now I’ve missed every test but the final, but the final counts for a huge part of the grade, so all I have to do is make 100% on the final, plus maybe get a little extra credit, and I’ll be fine. I’ll start studying bright and early tomorrow.” “So … damn … guess I failed again… didn’t see THAT coming…” It never even occurred to me while making these calculations, that if I’d made it to this point in the semester by screwing up, the odds were low that I’d miraculously become a model student overnight … cause it was still me what would be doing it. There were reasons for how I got to that point in the first place, and those reasons didn’t evaporate just because I made the 57th decision to Do Better.

    But, see, when I did it, it was pathological. There was something WRONG with me. Bats missing in the belfry, elevator that didn’t quite go all the WHOLE way to the top, a load of bricks with a few missing, you get the idea. Thinking back on it, that is obvious to me. And, when my parents found out what I was up to, it was obvious to them at the time. I couldn’t see it, because after all being nuts makes it difficult to recognize when you’re being nuts, but it was and is PAINFULLY obvious to anyone who knew the facts of my actions.

    So why is it not painfully obvious to the “we could still do good in Iraq, if we just get an A on every test from now on” crowd? Why is this something that has to be POINTED OUT to poeople??? There are REASONS we are in the mess we are in, and those reasons don’t just disappear because we will it … any solution, at present, would have to come from exactly the same people who got us here in the first place. Why isn’t obvious to everybody how impossible that is? Why was it pathological when I did it, but Just a Few Foreign Policy Mistakes when an entire government does it?

    -me

  3. Alexander Cockburn has a sobering article that predicts that Iraq is splitting apart at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/cock01_.html . Based on this article and other information, it seems to me that Zalmay Khalilzad may succeed in his heroic effort to get the three main groups to form what the New York Times calls a “broadly inclusive” government. Then, once the American pressure is off, the three groups will go back to doing what they wanted to do all along. The Shiites and the Kurds will try to get autonomy and the Sunnis will try to reassert control over the whole country. And of course the Shiite portion of the country will be closely allied with Iran. The best the Bush administration can hope for is that the tragic ending will not occur on their watch but during the adminstration of the next president.

Comments are closed.