I think the Republicans are going to ask Bush to take a two-year vacation. At this point, a blow job in the Oval Office might just raise their opinion of him-- and improve his legacy as well.

And when I see them so utterly contemptuous of  Bush, I could only say without a smile, "We liberals told you so."  

It's funny, though, how many of them still say Iraq could have ever worked.  George Washington or Abraham Lincoln couldn't have made this invasion work.  

But a real statesman would have deep-sixed this plan without a second thought.      

(1) what do we want to accomplish?  (2) how are we going to do that?

You know, any moron can do a mapquest.  Any project manager with the ink still wet on his diploma knows that.

But not the Republicans.

This isn't about political ideology.  The liberals in Congress did not in fact hold out.  

It's about not knowing your head from your ass, and sending other people in to a hamburger grinder for no purpose or benefit.

Remember the marches.  Not just in the US but around the world?  

But it's the man with the power who insisted on the policy, who sold it, who must be held to blame.

Strange how Republican politicians are beginning to agree with that now.

It's also notable after any chance of power has been dashed, that you immediately begin to hear from those who were keeping quiet for power's sake.  How many days was it before these guys realized Bush was a total fuck-up?  That maybe they should have tabled the invasion of Iraq till we found somebody competent to lead it?

But it would have taken more than mere competence to win Iraq.

Army are not social workers.  They don't reform nations, they kill them.  They can chase people to the ends of the earth, run them down, gun them down.

But they don't teach democracy.   People don't learn democracy from teachers, they learn it from experience, and they have to want it first.

We should have had a government in place and ready to go when we crossed the LOD, and that should have been one that the regional powers and the Iraqi people would have supported.

Why didn't we?  Well, no govt could fit that description.  Only Saddam, who didn't give a shit about other powers and the iraqis as a whole, could sit in Baghdad and make it work.

We could partition the country out to Turkey, Iran, etc - create 3 separate rump states after selling off some territory.

Then we scoot.  The reason we do this is because they will spend the next 40 years cutting each others' throats and be too busy to come after us.

No oil from that place for 50 years.  By then, we won't need them.  We'll all be riding bikes, and we'll live twice as long, with half the fucking mental illnesses.

The partitian of India after independence probably killed 200k to 1mil people.  

The questions are, after the three rump states go through their ethnic cleansing stage, will they ever stop fighting?  If they don't, can the several powers involved then restrain themselves from all out war?  

The nightmares about this just never stop.

Americans are responsible 1st for themselves.

If 200 million muslims want a bloodbath, we are not going to stop them.  Our only choice is whether we are going to stand in the middle of that riot.

Our withdrawal allows them to do what they want, without our interference.   It does not force them, or even influence them, to kill each other to the last man.

Yes, I think they probably would.  I think there would be a century of on again, off again warfare.   That is probably the best solution the USA can get out of this at this point, and yes, the best thing we could do would be pack up and leave.  Cut our losses and get out of GW's misconceived fraternity prank.

Yes, I think it would have the effect of weakening the local states, and maybe provide a breeding ground for terrorism.  But we can insert ourselves temporarily to take those out, and impress on them that if you're going to plot against the USA, you better limit yourself to pencil and paper and a dozen people in a jitney, tops.

We - ARE - NOT - responsible - for the rest of the world.  We have trouble enough controlling ourselves.

-- Modified on 11/19/2006 4:46:33 PM

I would say though, that you have to make a congress and treaty with the surrounding nations, and literally have them agree on what would be a constitution for Iraq, in whole or part. We should try to learn from this how to "treat" failed States, a phenomenon which threatens the world.  

We might do this before, during or after we pull out, but if the situation gets out of control, we're going to wake up and find gasoline at $15 a gallon, at a bargain.

are we going to enforce something when the surrounding states change their minds?  Or say, "Hey, we were joking!"

I don't think there's much we can do about gas prices.  Unless you want the Marines as permanent guards on the Persian gulf oil.  Just annex the place, and run the rest of those people off.  Set up minefields covered by final protective fires.

Is partition really that bad an idea?

We're forgetting, Iraq is an "artificial" state created by the ever-incompetent British imperialists, whose incompetence was exceeded only by their greed everywhere and anywhere they inflicted themselves.

There's no overriding "logic" to Iraq as it is presently constituted.  Under the Ottomans it was the province of Mesopotamia, which was divided, for administrative convenience, into the three areas of Basra [Shia], Baghdad [Sunni] and Mosul [Kurds. And oil].  A partition, teriible as it might be in it's accomplishment, can be viewed as the return to a "normal" state of affairs after the "abnormal" interregnum of the Iraqi state.

The problems arises with the continuation of sectarian violence between statelets, the bloody population transfers necessary to effect the partition, the opprssion of the minorities who stay behind in the "wrong" areas, and the jockeying between other states nd non-state actors for influence.  But this "trick" kinda has "worked" in the former Yugoslavia, so why not give it a whirl here?  It's no worse than where we [and the Iraqis] find themselves today.

My proposal -- and i'm deadly serious -- Saddamn is pardoned and restored to power as a figurehead under some sort of regency/trusteeship arrangement [actually a very low-keyed and glorified house arrest]. Perhaps a constututional monarchy can be set up with SH as king. Before this is done all Iraqis who so desire are allowed to emmigrate. In a worse case scenario the US agrees to accept all Iraqi refugees on the condition that they will NEVER be eligible for US citizenship, nor will their children born in the US be US citizens [this will require the passage of some enabling legislation], unless they have  first left US jurisdiction and lived elsewhere for a specified period of time [not less than 10 years?]. US forces are eventually redeployed to Afghanistan to be on standby in case Saddam somehow reacquires real political power.  Until then, US forces are more productively employed in the hunt for OBL [remember him?] and killing additional Taliban members.  And protecting an actual "successful" regime change.

The 14th amendment - both as to equal protection and the citizenship issues - would have to be repealed.

That's the provision that changed race relations and extended the BoRights to the states.  I ain't changing that, not for all the oil in Iraq, AND 72 virgins of my selection.

Pardoning Saddam is about equally likely.  I have no theoretical objections, but I also know it ain't gonna happen.  

Your point that partition worked for the Yugos is well taken.   My point has been, if it doesn't, having them all slashing each other's throats isn't at all bad for us.

with the 3 states having there own armies, governors, etc. and then some kind of very weak central gov.

Bagdad would may be a problem unless it went to either the sunnis or shias.  Kurds wouldn't want it.

And the sunnis might be pissed cause there's no oil in their part.

A cantonal arrangement like the Swiss?  Hmmm, intersting idea, I don't know if the Iraqis have enogh self-discipline or self-interest to live and let live under that arrangement.  But i like it in general.

The Sunnis, no oil?  Tough nuggies.  

Kurds would not have the self-discipline to resist trying to unite with felow Kurds in Turkey and Syria.  Creating a new set of problems.

Are you and Zinival in the same sophmore class? Which one has more years experience as a sophmore? Is there any hope that either one of you will ever advance beyond sophmoric, moronic statements?

would get invaded by Turkey.

to stay away, multi-syllabic words in use.

Are you claiming that the Republicans did in fact have a plan for Iraq that passed the laugh test, ie, considered our various observations in Asia, and considered what we expected to acheive, and how we were going to get there?

Because it sure looks like they had their heads so far up their asses that they weren't seeing anything but brown; and your comment here only reinforces the view that lots of Republicans are stupid and proud of it.

the time to do these things is before you invade; you build it, have it in place, get all the locals on board, then just flip the switch and watch things happen.

Now that we have invaded, won the war and then lost the peace (THANK YOU GEORGE BUSH) all the vultures are circling, and they are not going to cut anybody any slack.

We would need the support of all the Iraqis, who have learned to play us off against each other, and we would need to defend them against the other locals - the Iranians, Turks, Saudis, and the bit players.   That's like trying to balance a stack of billiard balls by sticking them together with KY jelly.

the real question is, can it survive long enough that it's not paying the Iranians and Syrians for our poor judgment?

We can't turn the place over to the Saudis.  They're nothing but a Mercedes body on a Yugo society, and they'd fuck it up in a week.

that somebody has to want them to stay there, and want it badly enough to point enough bayonets at people who don't want them, to keep it that way.

Ideally, it would be the people involved.  That's cheapest, minimum explaining necessary, don't have to look over their shoulder, etc.

We all agree the country was artificially crreated by the Brits, and Saddam held it together by terror - probably more so than Tito did.

It's also a fair bet that if there was enough money, these people would get over their differences and happily making their pies higher.

And it should be easy to agree that the time to do this is in advance, that we put all this stuff in place, so that the day Saddam's statue comes down, the govt would step into place from exile; and they would be taking over the army, etc, and we'd be out in 6-12 months tops, and never be doing any kind of police role.   Foreigners as police is inviting disaster anywhere.   They have to be willing to shoot to kill anybody who is suspected of farting, and they have to accept that all hell will break loose whenever they're not there shooting.

IOW, the Republicans were thinking out of their ass again, like dogs chasing cars.  They caught it, and then didn't know what to do with it.

The ONLY chance for this to work would have been set it up IN ADVANCE, so that it was popular enoough with the people around there, and popular enough with us.

Assume that we can keep a lid on the Arabs and Turks.  But exactly what is the chance that we could keep the 3 major iraqi groups and the Americans happy, and keep a lid on the Iranians too?

What, we split the kurds between the Turks and Iranians, and set the shias and sunnis in a confederation against each other, the arabs and the Turks and Iranians (who are also balanced against each other) and then set a bunch of nuclear mines down and tell them all that if anybody so much as belches, they'll get instant automatic nuclear holocaust?  Even forgetting threatening Armageddon, and accepting that we may have to do some guaranteeing, it's like trying to balance a dozen billiard balls on top of each other - just not that likely.

Getting your fingers into a mess is one hell of a lot easier than getting them out.  

There's a lot to be said for letting these fuckers exhaust themselves fighting each other, then stepping in to administer the coup de grace to the last ones.   Getting in this fight from the beginning has to be one of the reupbicans' stupidest ideas yet - and a lot of that has to be because none of them have ever actually run a patrol themselves, and they go looking for content for Fox News.

which is just ONE reason we should have put 20 minutes' advance thought into this clusterfuck.

Thanks again, George.

Something like Thomas Jefferson, I mean, where all of us are just stopped by the wisdom or the sound of it.  Please lead us to the truth that you see so perfectly.  Or at least admit that you have no way to express your enlightened thoughts except by farting and tap dancing.  

I haven't read anything you've written hinting that you know a elbow from an asshole.  

BTW, when you call somebody "sophomoric" you should at least spell the word right.  Usually spelling criticisms are lame, but this one is too ironic.  

At least you know how to spell "moron."  I bet that comes in handy.

but let me ask you this:  How do you know it's not a bot?

The succession to the thrown will not be very easy, and the King right now is in his 80s.  

-- Modified on 11/21/2006 8:09:14 PM