Why we MUST stay in Iraq
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Jerry Chase - Published: November 29, 2005
I did not vote for Bush, nor would I in the future if he was allowed to run, but I find myself increasingly siding with the concept that we as a nation need to stay the course in Iraq, contrary to the demands of political opportunists and vocal opponents of Bush that we get out of that country immediately.
My reasons for so thinking are heretical to those who blindly follow Republican and Democratic party lines and rhetoric. I ask that you consider these reasons on their own merit, and if they fail to convince you, let it be an argument of logic that dictates your response, and not one of passing emotion.
To understand the situation as a whole, it is vital to understand the history of the area and the conflicts involved. I summarize this now, to remind you of the major points.
First, if you have read the news reports, it is obvious that there is a type of civil war already occurring in Iraq. Specifically, the Sunni Muslim extremists, the Sunni Muslims, the Baathist loyalists, and the Shi'ite Muslims are at odds with each other. The Kurds are largely outside of this conflict.
Saudi Arabia is primarily Sunni. The extremist sect that formed the core of the terrorist group that took down the World Trade Center came from a relatively small group of Sunni fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia.
Iran is primarily Shi'ite. The Shi'ites are sometimes considered more progressive than the Sunni, but Islam forms the core of their beliefs, and Sunni and Shi'ite are closer in beliefs than Shi'ite and Christian.
Step back in time to the 1970s and the last Shah of Iran. This was a time when the sensibilities of the Shi'ites were trod upon by a non-religious dictator backed by the U.S. If the Shah had been slower in introducing western culture, and had been more inclusive of the powerful clerics of Iran, he might have continued to reign and succeeded at bringing Iran closer ties with the U.S. and Europe.
When the Shah was deposed by clerical uprising, the backlash against the United States was inevitable. The U.S. lost a valuable foothold in the Arab and Persian mideast, and was forced to align even more strongly with Israel, making relations with Muslims even worse.
About that time, Afghanistan was heating up as a battleground. The Soviets held a puppet leader in that country, and our own CIA funded, trained, and used the mujahadeen religious rebels to fight as proxies against the Soviet soldiers enforcing the puppet government. It was the cost of the wars in Vietnam and in Afghanistan that was key to the eventual toppling of the Soviet government, economy, and war machine, saving the lives of countless future servicemen.
Once the job of removing the Soviets from Afghanistan was done, the CIA prudently left Afghanistan. There were rogue groups of CIA- trained Muslim extremists left behind to fend for themselves. Osama Ben Laden was the best known of those.
It was only logical that the government of Afghanistan would swing away from the soviet puppets and the CIA, and turn towards the religious fundamentalist warriors as leaders in the power vacuum that the end of the war brought. After some years of infighting, the Taliban came to power.
Extremists sheltered by the Taliban struck out against the United States repeatedly, attacking embassies and the World Trade Center on multiple occasions. This threat was underestimated by both the government and the citizens of the U.S.. We felt invulnerable when we were not.
Iraq, since the rise to power of Saddam Hussein, had been a country poised to be the leader of the Arab world and mideast. The first attempt to become a major power, a long war with Iran that was under-reported in the U.S., had Vermont ties, when Dr. Bull developed his cannon in Derby Line, with the intent of it being able to launch satellites. Iraq funded Dr. Bull and his work, in the hopes of creating low-tech ballistic missile capabilities, until Israel became so alarmed that it had the Mossad assassinate Dr. Bull. (The United States never bothered to file a protest against this murder of a citizen of the U.S. by foreign intelligence agents.)
The second major attempt of Iraq to gain power was apparently started by a communication error of a low level U.S. diplomat, indicating that Iraq's claim to the separate country of Kuwait was not an important issue to the U.S.. Saddam interpreted that it was acceptable for him to take Kuwait by force, resulting in fear within the other neighboring countries; and eventually, the Gulf War.
When, by a seeming miracle, Saddam was not killed or removed from power at the end of the Gulf War, he apparently took the admonitions of the United States to heart, but did not dare to convey weakness to his enemies. Remember that Iraq had by this time also fought a long and bitter war with Iran, and the Shi'ites within his country had been repressed to prevent his being toppled form power from within. Saddam grasped power by the throat and held it only by creating the sense of a strong force able to defeat any foe.
In all of this, it is important to realize that Saddam was, after the Shah of Iran, the next most likely mideast leader to lead the westernizing of that part of the world.
After 911, G W Bush correctly assessed that a festering wound of religious extremism resided in Afghanistan. In a largely brilliant campaign, the Taliban was torn from power with minimal U.S. casualties. In a less than stellar denouement, Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts were allowed to slip from the grasp of justice. This was a grave error that allowed further development of the terrorist networks.
When G W Bush, goaded on by his neo-con advisors, his own poor understanding of the objectives of the first Gulf War, the pressure to "do something," and competition/family loyalty, invaded Iraq, he made an even more serious error. Iraq was a secular house of cards, kept standing by Hussein. Taking out the leadership of Iraq guaranteed a civil war. Eliminating Hussein as a power set the westernizing of the mideast back at least twenty-five years. A vacuum of power and opportunity to fight Americans was created that drew in religious extremists like flies to a pasture patty.
Looking back in history, Iraq was a bungle from the beginning, when the British patched together a region of three different cultures and called it a country. The likelihood of Iraq continuing to exist as a single country over the next hundred years is slim at best.
Bush, by de-stabilizing Iraq and by not having a replacement scenario that could be quickly implemented, opened the hell-gates that pitted Sunni against Shi'ite, and gave hope to the religious extremists that a large nation bordering Saudi Arabia could become the beginnings of another Muslim empire, one that would eventually wrest power from the house of Saud, and claim ownership of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Control of those key cities would allow them to leverage Islam towards a more radically conservative form of religion.
The focus of the extremists upon Iraq is a mixed blessing. The repeated suicide attacks have become less aimed at American soldiers and more towards Shi'ites; perhaps in the hopes of inflaming an outright civil war, perhaps out of an attempt to force mainstream Sunnis into a more radical stance.
Rama Schneider quotes "It should come as no surprise, therefore, that we read "Ayad Allawi, a secular Shi'ite Muslim, told the London newspaper The Observer that fellow Shi'ites are responsible for death squads and secret torture centers and said brutality by elements of Iraqi security forces rivals that of Saddam's secret police." That quote is out of context, and twists emotions to deny the Gestalt. The Shi'ites have the feeling of deserving a certain amount of payback. Their own torturers, and those who benefited from Saddam's repression are being treated by their victims as those victims were taught (under the lash).
The shi'ites in Iraq are fighting for a dominance of their majority. If that dominance is denied by force or terrorism, little stands in the way of a now nuclear Iran from coming to their aid, de-stabilizing the area even more.
Iraq is serving host to the destruction of terrorists and extremists, just as much as an infected wound serves host to the destruction of invaders that would destroy the body.
While the focus of attention is on Iraq, it is not on other areas of the world. While the extremist money is going towards fighting in Iraq, it is not funding terror elsewhere. When each suicide bomber blows him or herself up in Iraq, he or she is not doing that in London or New York or any other city.
What the extremists don't understand, and what a lot of the general public doesn't understand is that there is a bell curve at work here, patiently working against extremists, and for the moderates of the world. It takes time for that curve to have an appreciable effect.
What do I mean by a bell curve? WIth most ideas, with most religions, with most held beliefs, there is a pattern of distribution where the middle ground dominates. Given time, even if an extreme takes hold, the distribution reverts back to one where the middle ground dominates.
In simple terms, for every Bin Laden, there is some Muslim at the other extreme claiming that everything Bin Laden is doing is wrong and everything he stands for is wrong. These extreme characters are rare. The vast majority of Muslims hold a more mainstream view, where some aspects of Bin Laden are respected and others are not. In our western culture, we demonize all aspects of our foes, to better fight them and cut off any sympathy. Those who would effect a lasting peace must rise above the common outrage and attempt to understand all aspects of the conflict and major players.
The extremes capture the public enchantment and imagination when the balance of power has been skewed in the opposite direction. The Shah of Iran westernized too fast and that country snapped back to a rigid religious society, which slowly allowed more freedoms until it again felt threatened and became less tolerant of western mores. The Taliban went too far in the other extreme, and once freed from this oppression, Afghanistan snapped back to a more middle ground. The lesson to be learned deserves its own paragraph:
Extremes are simply untenable over the long term, because there is only a limited percentage of the population that wholeheartedly supports such extremes.
The war in Iraq is taking the most extreme Muslims and performing one of two major services - 1. killing them outright, or 2. convincing them that they have to temper their extremism. The most extreme WILL NOT SURVIVE ten years in Iraq.
What the American public doesn't grasp is that this sorting out takes time, and all of the extremists can never be completely eradicated. What the American public doesn't grasp is that by reducing extremists' numbers below a critical level, and reducing the fervor of the most rabid dogs by death or imprisonment, the middle ground will seek to reestablish itself in a manner that creates distance between it and that extreme. What the American public doesn't grasp is that the underlying complaints of muslims in the middle east must be honestly and candidly addressed, and the greatest offenses to their sensibilities publicly corrected.
The U.S. military aid to Pakistanis devastated by the earthquake are a valuable start along this path. Treating people in need with compassion and dignity creates more rapport than the cries of our own extreme right-wing at the start of the war in Iraq to "kill all the ragheads." Treating people with respect also means not abandoning them in their hour of need. When the U.S. abandoned the Kurds after the Gulf War, Iraqis learned that the U.S. "commitment" could be fickle and unworthy of trust. Are we ready to repeat that performance and remove all doubt in their minds about our Charlie Brown wish-washy morality? How many thousands would die in this round of purges after the "Yankees" are gone? How do peacenicks justify that to save handfuls, thousands will die?
The increasing rhetoric from those who would have "(immediate) peace (at all costs)" is that Iraq is the new Vietnam. Rubbish - Smelly Rubbish.
Iraq is not Vietnam for a number of reasons.
In Vietnam, soldiers were often unwilling, poorly-educated draftees.
In Iraq, American soldiers come from a better educated VOLUNTEER military.
In Vietnam, the U.S. threw large numbers of soldiers into the fracas.
In Iraq, the U.S. is using a minimal number of soldiers.
In Vietnam, the U.S. was fighting a large group of people battling for control of their homeland, and their efforts were backed by the Soviet Union and China.
In Iraq, the U.S. is fighting a relatively small group of U.S. trained religious extremists and a group of poorly-trained foot soldiers that would have been described as cannon fodder in an earlier war. They have little funding, unless we are not being informed of any major countries funding them.
Most importantly, while the war in Vietnam was inherently self-limiting, since it involved local government issues, the war in Iraq is NOT self-limiting but is the sputtering fuse to a much larger conflict. The religious extremists see Iraq as a means to an end, and will not be satisfied by taking that country alone.
Many, if not most, of the combatants are not even Iraqi, but are from Saudi Arabia and other countries, and are intent on greater goals, including the seduction of the entire Islamic faith into a war against infidels.
The removal of U.S. forces before there is stability in Iraq is positively suicidal for any possibility of world peace. U.S. presence prevents the extremists from gaining a hold, either in the Iraqi government, or by the overthrow of the country by force. Any short-term peace caused by U.S. withdrawal would simply allow for a refractory and consolidation period in which extremists could retrench and begin to plan larger attacks, like the Taliban was able to do in Afghanistan, but with knowledge gained from the skirmishes just past.
In closing, when I say skirmishes, I mean just that. The war in Iraq has been a tiny skirmish for the U.S. that is small compared to Vietnam, and even smaller when compared to World War II, when the U.S. military lost close to 300,000 soldiers. The key to winning this war is to continue until the critical mass of extremists are dead, and the critical mass of moderates is empowered. Each life lost will save hundreds of future lives, but only if the game is allowed to play out.
The variety of views held be people of different cultures, and the sad fact that there will always be some who want to repress and kill others, means that there will never be a complete end to all fighting in the world. Peace is the goal. Minimizing the number of _innocents_ dying is the closest we can get to that goal. Peace at all costs is not peace, but a temporary illusion created by errors of logic and misaligned priorities.
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