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Fareed Zakaria
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Video: Global Issues with Fareed Zakaria
We’re Fighting the Wrong War
'What remains is a negative objective, stopping the war from spilling over, within Iraq but also outside it.'
Pity the U.S. presidential candidates. They had their positions on Iraq all worked out by last summer and have repeated them consistently ever since. But events on the ground have changed dramatically, and their rhetoric feels increasingly stale. They're fighting the Iraq War all right, but it's the wrong one.
The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to "ending the war" and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.
From 2003 to 2005 the war in Iraq was defined by an insurgency. After the bombing of the Golden Mosque in Samarra in February 2006, it became largely a sectarian conflict. Now the dominant feature of the war is the proliferation of local ceasefires across the country. The real questions that candidates need to answer are these: How do they interpret this new reality? What would they do to maintain the new stability? What does all this mean for U.S. foreign and military policy in the next few years?
American forces in Iraq have done superbly but the violence has not ended because they won great military victories. Instead, the adversary —the Sunnis—switched sides. Instead of shooting Americans they are now allied with them. This has happened for many reasons—changes in U.S. policy, Al Qaeda's brutality, Sunni defeats and war weariness. But it's a fragile peace. Stephen Biddle, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has made several trips to Iraq to advise Gen. David Petraeus, says, "If you go south of Baghdad you will see Sunni units that are the most impressive Iraqi fighting forces in the country, never defeated, with their command structure, tight discipline, equipment and gear all intact. They have simply made a decision to stop fighting."
This realignment, however, has been directed at the United States and not the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. Petraeus has been trying to integrate these "Concerned Local Citizens"—the military's wonderful euphemism for Sunni militias—within the Iraqi police and security forces, so they can be paid by the central government and develop a new relationship with Shiites. But both sides remain extremely wary. The Shiites suspect the former insurgents' motives; the Sunnis say that jobs and weapons are being withheld by the government. As of now, the United States Army is the organizer, financier, guarantor and enforcer of the peace.
Iraq remains deeply divided. The national reconciliation that Iraqi politicians promised has not occurred. Some movement has taken place on sharing oil revenue but on almost nothing else. The complicated new law on de-Baathification has been, in the words of a senior Iraqi official, "a big mess, perhaps worse than if we had done nothing." The non-Kurdish parts of the country remain utterly dysfunctional, and chaos and warlordism are growing in the south. Of the 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled the country, a trickle—a few thousand—have returned home.
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Member Comments
Posted By: pawinda @ 01/26/2008 2:34:32 AM
Comment: Respected Mr. Fareed Zakria, with due respect , I happen to read one of your article"IN THE DARK HOURS". This was regarding a wave of unprecedented Terror in PAKISTAN. The answer to your innocent Qurry is very simple, PAKITANIS ARE AT WAR WITH U.S.A. It is an open war with closed eyes of entire Muslims.
Posted By: klebrun @ 01/25/2008 2:10:06 PM
Comment: The death toll for the Iraq war, which we did not need to fight, is grossly understated. Besides massive Iraqi deaths, it does not take into account the additional deaths of Americans who are being denied health care coverage because of the cost of the war in Iraq - expected to cost well over a trillion dollars before we are finished.
For example, with an estimated 45 million uninsured Americans and an estimated one trillion dollars, the money spent on the Iraq war would average $22,222 per person, enough to pay almost ten years of health coverage for every uninsured person.
The average mortality rate in the U.S. by 2007 estimates is 8.26 per 1,000 population, or 371,700 deaths per year for a population of 45 million. The Kaiser Commission report, published in 2006, estimates the death rate for uninsured could be reduced by 10-15%. (1)
???Research has consistently shown that the lack of insurance ultimately compromises persons??? health because they are less likely to receive preventive care, are more likely to be hospitalized for avoidable health problems, and are more likely to be diagnosed in the late stages of disease. Having insurance
improves health overall and could reduce mortality rates for the uninsured by 10 to 15%.???
That amounts to a reduction in premature deaths ranging from approximately 37,000 to 55,000 per year for the uninsured population. So, each year we are condemning to death, for lack of insurance, a population that approaches the deaths caused by the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima that ended the war with Japan.
(1) http://www.illinoiscovered.com/assets/cover_7451.pdf
Posted By: impartialobserver @ 01/24/2008 10:08:09 PM
Comment: The occupation was illegal, unadvised, unfounded and just plain wrong. America has done more damage to Iraq than they could ever hope to undo, and the country has turned into a battleground. Even if the American Government did this on an altruistic impulse, which I think is a ludicrous claim, they had no right to trespass Iraq's sovereignty. I am not from Iraq, and I can't imagine what it's like having foreign troops enter your country to overthrow a dictator the American Government itself supported for so many years. What nationalist pride do the Iraqis have left now? All those martyred Iraqi civilians: what did they deserve to die like this while we all are safe and secure, and have nothing to fear from non-existant weapons of mass destruction? What is the world coming to? Why are we humans so deaf to the screams of those innocent Iraqis? We compromised our own humanity when we failed to stop this madness and loss of precious human lives. This is no Iraqi or American or Muslim or Christian or Jewish loss- it is a human loss, and I hope we are not too blind to see through our different appearances and understand the difficulties that humans face today.