Go Back to the B3 Home Page
Complaints, compliments, arguments? Email me.
[<< "In 2 short days..."] [Archive Index] [>>"Shorter Andy Card:"]
12/07/2003 Archived Entry: "Interesting if true."
Interesting if true.
This is from Atrios' comments (Blogger is apparently dead today, so he's posting in his own comments) - it reads like speculation, but if it's true it casts a further shadow over US involvement in Iraq, and complicates the explanation Bush will need to make to declare 'victory.'
Those who try to do the undoable must also think the unthinkable. US strategists in Iraq are contemplating what they have always denied, the search for a "strong man with a moustache" to stop the present rot. If the result is not democracy, so be it.If the result is the dismemberment of Iraq, so be it. Iraq has become a mess. There is only one priority: to "get out with dignity".
This strategy is now being rammed down the throat of the US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, by George W. Bush's new "realist", Deputy National Security Adviser Bob Blackwill. He answers to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, not US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and is the new boss of Iraq.
The Pentagon, Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, architects of the old "idealist" strategy, are in retreat. The Iraqi Governing Council, which Bremer reluctantly created, will be disbanded. Washington must find someone with whom it can do business, someone who can deliver order in return for power. That search is Blackwill's job.
In a nutshell, Washington has bought the old British Middle East strategy, that you deal with local leaders and leave them to it. The fantasies of Rumsfeld and of Bush's recent "world democracy" speech are at an end. There must be no second Vietnam in Iraq. Necessity has become the mother of humiliating invention.
We shall never know if Rumsfeld's adventure could have turned out otherwise. As his weapons of mass destruction vanished in the desert air, so has his belief in a "new democratic beacon in the Middle East". That collapsed from the minute he peremptorily tore up the State Department's Future of Iraq Project shortly before the invasion and ostracised its staff.
His faith in corrupt expatriates was crazy. His post-invasion demolition of Saddam Hussein's state apparatus removed the institutions and disciplines on which any government depends. The May 16 order disbanding the Iraqi army created 400,000 enemies overnight and gave the Saddamists what they most needed, a sea of Sunni resentment in which to swim. The wild shooting habits and hearts-and-minds ineptitude of the US 82nd Airborne and 4th Infantry did the rest. They supplied a stream of blood-feud assassins.
What is amazing is the speed with which Washington recognises its mistakes. The dubiousness of "victory in Iraq" was vividly illustrated 11 days ago when Bush had to visit the country in secret and dared not leave his airbase. Hussein loyalists are operating virtually at will, now even in the south.
The White House got the message. Washington sacked its first governor, Jay Garner, within a month of the invasion. It is now effectively abandoning its second within six months. Baghdad has seen three regime changes within a year.
Replies: 2 people speak up
Remember why we are fighting terrorists, not Iraq. A site that has been down for a long time is finally back up. I've seen this more than ten times, and it still makes me well up. Watch, Remember, Carry the fight to those who would sacrifice our civil rights, and jeopardize our well-being for their political gain. New York September 2004
http://attacked911.tripod.com/
Posted by Stentor @ 12/07/2003 04:40 PM NY
Mission Accomplished.
Posted by skb @ 12/08/2003 11:00 AM NY
