The only way out for the US is to support a rising national trend in Iraq and establish a
national Iraqi government rather than the current sectarian one, by now it is obvious that the bet on the sectarian forces has lead to submitting the country to Iran and civil unrest, I hope that the Americans have learned their lessons from the past four years. All the current Shiate paries are ???Made in Iran??? as a result their ideology was is a reflection of the standard ???Islamic Revolution??? which considers US as the ???Great Devil???, the Bush administration and Iran may have found common enemy in Saddam Hussain but as facts on the ground change so does the loyalties. Promoting nationalism can lead to a true democracy at some point of time the other option is a bunch of war lords fighting over influence territories
Slaughterhouse Beirut
- Share:
-
Email To A Friend
Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link.
As the United States had no choice but to leave Lebanon, it has created a situation in which it has no choice but to stay in Iraq.
That's why Crocker, now the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, and Gen. David Petraeus and the other professionals trying to salvage the situation there are always so guarded in their progress reports. The situation can indeed get worse. The patient's on life support, and if Congress pulls the plug it will probably die, but we'll still be stuck in the room with the decaying corpse.
One of the more reasonable prescriptions for Iraq I've heard lately was on a panel with Colin Kahl, a political scientist at Georgetown University. His catch phrase was, as opposed to victory, sustainable stability: contain or crush the remnants of Al Qaeda in Iraq, try to keep the state from collapsing altogether or becoming an Iranian puppet and prevent genocidal violence. And if you can do all those things, whether by negotiation with Iran, twisting the arms of Iraqi politicians, using troops on the ground or threatening to pull them out, then that's about as much as can be expected.
All of which sounds as if we'll be fighting for a long time just to achieve the kind of painful stalemate that emerged in Lebanon when we left after a mere 18 months on the ground. But I'm not so sure I'd give as much credit to Reagan's wisdom as Mike Sheehan does.
On the day the last Marine combat unit pulled out of Lebanon in 1984, a television interviewer asked then-Secretary of State George Shultz if that meant a victory for the bad guys. He could not but equivocate: "This is a kind of warfare, really, that is something different for us … We have to improve our intelligence capability, and we have to think through how, within the concept of the rule of law, which we hold so dear, we can take a more aggressive posture toward what is a worldwide and very undesirable trend." That was 24 years ago, and we're still thinking it through.
© 2008
- Share:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
