I wish you would rejoin my ideas and not how I express them. Deny, for example, that the war is going very badly, or that there is no national will to sacrifice for the supposedly noble and essential goals of "Operation Iraqi Freedom."

It is highly misleading to characterize hyperbolic statements as "falsehoods." Hyperbole is an effective means of calling attention to striking circumstances that are important but which, perhaps, are being ignored. E.g. "You haven't done a lick of work in the past week."

Fascists interpret the world through fascist categories; bourgeois-liberals, Islamists, Marxists, and so forth, analogously. This should not prevent intellectual engagement here between persons subscribing to whatever systems of historical and social interpretation. I do not object to the the use of categories that I consider preposterous, neither should you.

There are more kinds of people in this world than Republicans and Democrats.

Turnea,

I don't disagree that this is the goal...but then isn't the end result the same (either way, once its accomplished, the troops come home). So, it seems purely a semantical difference....would you (and CJ?) agree? One might argue that the troops would have to stay to maintain a stable democratic Iraq....to which the counter would be that the goal has not then been achieved. I don't see any situation in which the goal is achieved and at least the great majority of troops come home. I don't see an issue with those that would remain. We have global bases all over the world, this would then just be another of them. One might argue its need, effectiveness, number of personnel, etc.--but that would be a wholy separate debate. Also, it should be noted that given this goal...the troops could potentially even come home prior to its accomplishment, if Iraqi security forces become self-sufficient, eliminating the need for American troops even though the final goal has not yet been achieved. So, given this goal the only difference is that troop could possibly come earlier. Again, then....the scenario has always been for the troops to come home ASAP. There seems to be common agreement that bringing them home before then is not desirable. There might be some debate on exactly what constitutes ASAP...but that doesn't change the fact that bringing them home then has always been the plan.

Or even better:



There are no doubt problems in Iraq, but the constant pessimism coming from American is staggering. While the public is losing patience with Bush only 39% of Americans wish to pull out of Iraq. Given the amount of money and time, we have spent in Iraq our casualties remain historically very low (especially if you consider some of the casualty projections made before the war started).

Fortunately, for the US the Presidential election is over and Bush can stay the course. President Bush has many faults, but now is not the time to worry about the political fallout, leave that to the bureaucrats in Congress. If things continue to get worse, the Congress will have the option of cutting the money off and the President will have no choice but to end the occupation.

Honestly, I believe Bush’s biggest problem is the rising gas prices. Perception is reality, and the perception is that Iraq is the reason this is happening (not the insane SUV sales). I have stated before that Bush deserves this after bringing gas prices up in the 2000 election however, the President can do nothing to lower long-term gas prices (especially when the US has had no energy policy for 20 years).

Touche.



Caualties are indeed low by comparison to what would gladly be accepted if the national defense were at stake. But people look at these losses, and these mountainous expenditures, and say, "for what?" Nobody's forgotten that the prime reason for invading Iraq was to capture the WMD. That makes the notion of "staying the course" somewhat problematic. "Be strong! We must stay this new course -- and anyway, it was never about WMD." Oh sure! Where can I sign up?

Only 39% support withdrawl? That figure is staggeringly unfavorable for the Administration. My recollection is that even after Tet, a much smaller proportion of Americans supported withdrawal from Vietnam. Really, fully 39% favor withdrawal? My point is made. You can't fight a war without essential unanimity, and that is very far from it.

You may be right that domestic political pressures will be insufficient to bring about a change in war policy, though your 39% report makes me doubt it very much, and I suspect that if Bush wholeheartedly agreed with you, he wouldn't have spent the past several days addressing this issue. But at some eventual point, America will have to confront the failure of its war. The question is not whether there will be a U.S. withdrawal and an intensification of the Iraqi civil war, but when.

Hobbes, I think there is a big difference between what I'm suggesting and what Turnea is suggesting and it is more than semantics. Turnea can feel free to jump in and correct me if I misrepresent his position but basically he thinks the goal should be to stay until Iraq is "stable and democratic" in the literal sense. One only needs to stop and think about the implications of that suggestion to realize that could have us acting as police for the next 10 years or more easily.

What I am suggesting is that we need to set out some specific goals that will help Iraq become "stable and democratic" but I do not believe we should be in country until that happens. Just as an example some of those things might be:
- Constitution is drafted and ratified by the country
- Permanent government has been elected
- X number of Iraqis have been trained
- X% of basic services are restored

If we focus on those things then I think that not only changes the timeline when we leave but it also to a certain extent changes the jobs the troops are doing, the troop strength required and where money is allocated. After each is acheived people that don't need to be there go home, period. We don't setup permanent bases in Iraq and we don't have a "presence" to fight the GWOT.

At some point we have to hand over the country and expect them to run it themselves. I am NOT of the opinion that we need to stay there until everything is completely peaceful and the last insurgent is dead or has given up. We need to ensure they have a good probability of success but the rest needs to be left up to the Iraqis. If we march down the path of nation building we are going to fail, that is not a strength our Army has under its belt.

If Iraq becomes “a failure” (I am not ready to make that assertion) you are right, America will confront it. Naysayers have always been out there, just look at the quote from Joseph Kennedy. Arguments can go on all day about the justifications for/against the war. The greater question is where do we stand now? The best course of action right now is to stay the course. I do not believe the cost is “too steep,” but I wonder if Americans have the resolve.

As for this:

America has been in many wars without “essential unanimity.” The chief example would be the Revolutionary War (15-20% of adult males were tories).

I think all of those things have been set as goals. However, I also think an abysmal job of publicizing them as such has been done, particularly the latter two. It would seem then, that what you would like to see is for these goals to be made more public...to which I would agree. I would add the caveat, though, especially with regards to the public services, that this will make them more of a target. But this should be weighed against the fact that lack of making them more public is going to undermine political support for the war. It seems to me that the latter is becoming the more prominent concern...to which I think you would agree.

As for whether we need to be in country until these things happen, as I stated earlier, I would agree in principle. However, the question then becomes whether it is necessary for us to be there to ensure they do indeed happen. That's where that third item becomes important...to which I would add "...and are willing to fight", as that seems to be have been an issue previously.

At some point fear of incenting the insurgents needs to stop being the driving force behind making things public. Any insurgent with a brain would have already figured out that these things are important...I don't really see how stating that, and measuring success against them, really should be that big of a concern. For that matter, I think the insurgents would benefit from the US leaving...making the concern even smaller. I don't think there was that much doubt what our goals were in WWII....knowing them didn't enable the opposition to prevent them from occurring.

Just as an FYI in order to try and keep this thread on topic, I started a thread about the goals in Iraq here awhile ago. Maybe it was pre-mature then but it could be more relevant now.

That an absurdly pessimistic proposition was once uttered reflects very little on the realism of my appraisal of the Iraq situation. There are many who join in this appraisal.

I am not altogether certain that events during the American Revolution shed much light on current American political realities. The most recent apt comparision is Vietnam, when a policy of war became difficult to maintain with a much lower level of public opposition than appears to be present currently. Your misgiving as to whether the Americal people will be willing to stick out the Iraq war is apt, I opine.

It seems also that political support for the war is confined largely to those on the right. To me it has a manufactured, talk-radio, Fox-news feel to it, and I suspect it isn't very deep. That view also is supported by the comparative absence of enlistment among young Republicans. They appear to have other priorities.

In any case, time will tell which of these competing sets of predictions was the more realistic.

You hurt your arguments with these types of generalizations. Everyone that supports the war effort listens to talk radio, watches Fox-news, and is not very deep? I do not fit into any of those categories.

The only way to support a war is to enlist in the army? This is supposedly proof that the war support among Republicans is weak? With proof like this and assumptions like yours, you can pretty much cite anything to support your arguments. As for the comparisons to Vietnam, remember we were fighting a highly organized North Vietnam army and we had 56,000 dead. The comparisons just do not add up.

In order to discuss the debate questions, it is important to discuss what the criteria for success is. Now, I will grant that we are extending the debate here to look past the current situation and into the future. Still, success or failure can't be discussed without discussing what the requirements for either are.

CJ...I don't think you and Turnea disagree that much. It basically sounds like you think a level of detail beyond just 'stable and democratic' is necessary, else how would you know when you've achieved it. Is that a fair statement of your position?. I don't think there's much argument to that. Turnea...would you agree?

Could success not be defined by meeting the goals that are in place? It seems to me it's the "chicken or the egg" either you have specific goals and reaching all (or most) of them equate with success or you define success and then make up goals that will make you successful. It has been shown though that setting specific goals is more productive than having an ambiguous overarching goal such as: "we must win in Iraq."

Regradless, it was more of an aside. So carry on

It seems to me that all sides must find consensus on what the goals are.

Simply put, we must do what makes sense as far as Iraqi's are concerned. They finally are free of over thirty years of a fascist style dictatorship. They finally have the opportunity to vote for representatives of their own choosing. They can finally chart their own destiny, for better or worse, much as we did some two hundred plus years ago. Whether one agreed with the decision to enter Iraq in the first place for whatever premise, we do no justice to liberty minded Iraqi's if we simply cut and run.

We must do what makes military sense. Due to security concerns, even an order to immediately withdraw troops must be conducted in a phased operation. There is simply no 'everybody packing their duffle bags and getting on a plane'. Operations would still need to be conducted in order to mitigate hazards to redeploying units, vehicles and equipment either turned over to the ISF of transported to Kuwait, and resupply efforts to all concerned parties. This obviously becomes easier to manage as more ISF troops are trained and certified as combat ready.
Coinciding with that, time must be given to allow the ISF command structure the ability to coordinate its actions and solidify it's management and logistics program.

Finally, this must all be accomplished in a manner that heals rather than harms national unity here at home. I think neither side of the left/right spectrum is totally correct, but neither bears all of the blame. There have been enough missteps by all parties to share responsibility and leave the rhetoric at the door. The war is lost when political will falters. We are in Iraq, the goal is to get out of Iraq. All politicians need to reach across the aisle and do this smarter not harder.
Unfortunately for us, the Iraqi's seem not to have an Adams, Henry, Madison or a Hamilton in their midst to make their political transformation bloodless, though we seem to think that their efforts must take place in a nanosecond compared to our own revolution. One wonders how things might have gone if ye old towne crier had a 24/7 news cycle.
Give it time, give it support and give it thoughtful critique. The infighting and endless blather by the punditry is quite tedious and rivals only Natalee Holloway for news airtime.

That is a fair statement Hobbes but I guess it depends on your interpretation. The way I am putting it makes clear my desire to see us leave Iraq within some fairly well defined period of time. Without discussing the exact goals, how much progress has been made on them and how much more needs to be made no time table is possible.

Turnea's position gives the administration and the military a blank check to spend as they desire in money and lives. I don't believe you shoudl ever give any branch of government a blank check in any currency. If your only goal is a "stable and democratic Iraq" that can really mean whatever you want it to mean. It could easily have us in country for another 10 years and spending billions (even trillions) of dollars more that we don't have in the first place.

I want defined and published goals, checks on progress - maybe not public but certainly by congressional oversight (that doesn't exist right now and it absolutely should), a full troop pullout within some reasonable amount of time (lets just say 2 years tops) and an end to this hemorrhaging of money in Iraq that our children will be paying back. It do not want to see the United States setting up any sort of permanent presence than is necessary to maintain an embassy there.

Now if Turnea agrees with all of that then maybe we do agree, I don't think he does though (and I'm sure he'll let us know shortly).

There is a point when we have paid enough here and it is time for someone else to take over. I don't know whether we haven't published any sort of goals because they don't exist or because we don't ever plan to leave (i.e. the neo-con agenda of using this as jumping off point to Democratize the rest of the ME).

I think if you step back and examine what has happened in the just over 2 years since we went into Iraq, you can see the plan for progress.

First step: Remove Saddam. Announced before the war. Completed.

Second Step: Defeat the insurgency. No announcement needed for this one, although the military seemed ill-prepared for this step. This is on-going and includes restoring security on a long term basis.

Third Step: Democratically elected government. Announced before the war began. Complete.

Fourth Step: Writing a Constitution which provides for minority rights and women's rights. This was announced as a goal. This is nearly completed.

Fifth Step: Ratification of the Constitution. Hopefully completed by the end of the year.

Sixth Step: Draw down of US troops to allow Iraqis to handle their own security. It has already been announced that we may decrease troop level in the early to mid part of 2006. Curiously, this would be soon after the Iraqi Constitution goes into effect.

Ongoing in there is the resumption of normalcy. That would include getting employment back up, restoring utilities, etc. This is on-going and has been greatly hampered by the insurgency in Step two.

I think there is a plan. I think much of it has been communicated to both the Iraqis and to people here in the US. The problem is that darn insurgency. If that went away, we'd probably be done already. But when these guys were assassinating Iraqi officials, it was kinda hard to get the government running smoothly.

Funny. As a CONSTRUCTION ELECTRICIAN IN THE UNITED STATES NAVY SEABEES until the beginning of this year, I can say with certainty that Iraqi has far more electrical power generation and availability then it had before the war (though not more then it had before 1990 and the Gulf War). As a matter of fact, places in rural areas of Iraq that have NEVER had electrical power, now have power (as well as clean running water). Not all of them of course, but it is a start.

Does that suggest that an issue does not exist. No. Iraq's power generation plants are old technology (1960s-1970s), and all the plants have various issues that keep them from running at full capacity. At this point, the power plants are running at 50-60% of their rated output. The Army Corps of Engineers, Navy Seabees, Private Contactors and Iraqis are all working in ungrades, repairs, design improvements, etc to raise that percentage. Congress authorized 6 Billion dollars towards this (though some estimates suggest that the cost to bring it back to 100% would be around 12 Billion). It takes time, money, materials and ALOT of hard work. US service personal and Iraqis are working together to end this problem.



As a someone who served in this conflict I can't help but wonder why you think there is nothing else to do. US service personnel are rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure all over the country. They are working on the electric distribution, water purification, sewage treatment, roads, bridges, helping in hospitals, transporting humanitarian supplies, etc, etc, etc. Contractors and Iraqis are working on this alongside our personnel.

I have personally been on convoys that delivered Ammunition. However, I have also been on convoys that delivered food, medical supplies, materials for the rebuilding, etc, etc. Funny thing is, I was never shot at once. Just lucky I guess.

I get so irritated with this. People talking about the US Military around here as if "WE" are not volunteers, are just targets, have nothing to do, are not accomplishing anything in Iraq, have horrible morale, etc, etc, etc. Perhaps, those of you actually interested in what our service personnel are doing, how they are feeling, etc, should consider ASKING SOMEONE IN UNIFORM. If you have never served in the military then you DO NOT KNOW what military life is like, period. You could open you mind and try asking someone who is serving or has served, or you can continue with the partisan diatribes that have become more and more common place around here ever since the election. All I can say is, I for one am getting rather tired of it all.

Edited to add:

The above is representative of my views. Though it represents the views of most of the people I served with, it certainly does not speak for every single member of the Armed forces.

If you do look into military life by asking members of the military you WILL find people who disagree with the war, the President, their leaders, even me. Of course, that doesn't really fit the brainwashing propaganda very well.

Thank you for that information. Yes, actually I was on active duty for eight years, during the Vietnam War, so I do know what military life is like -- or was like in those days. And I did rub shoulders with quite a few Seabees .

All honor our splendid military people for everything they do, but my view is, not enough has been done, or can be done in context of the ongoing insurgency, to remedy the very bad situation in Iraq. Nor do I consider our achievements to date worth risking so many people's lives, or even, for that matter, disrupting the lives of many thousands of National Guardsmen and reservists.

The purpose of maintaining large military forces in Iraq is to control the future of that country. If our goal were merely to rebuild it, we would get out of there and, after the dust settled, simply send money. To install a transformer does not require an American. Not being in favor of the imperialist part of the project, the latter is the policy that I advocate.

When you compare what exists now in Iraq to what existed before the war, you should bear in mind that Iraq was subjected to a stringent economic blockade for 15 years. There was also a good deal of actual bombardment during those years, ostensibly to enforce the no-fly zone, but also to lead up to this war. All this, naturally, was very harmful to the Iraqi infrastructure.

Good points, but we also have to include the fact that what monies were received, either legal or in violation of sanctions, much of that was spent by Hussein and company on palaces, luxuries and equipping his loyal and favorite military units. The Iraqi's don't have a recent history (if really ever) if a free market economy without political restrictions.
It's naturally going to take time to both rebuild the infrastructure, bring it up to date (Hussein wasn't exactly generous with expanding the electric grid to Shia and Kurds), and it's going to take time to establish a monetary and bureaucratic system free from graft and corruption.
Can the Iraqi's accomplish this alone? Yes. Can they accomplish it sooner with US help? Likely.

BTW, thanks for serving

There is a pretty good article in the Washington Post today by ex-presidential candidate General Wesley Clark. I read through it and I agree with most of it. It is important to note that he doesn't say we should pull out now he is basically calling the administration to pull their heads out of the sand and form a realistic plan - in other words the "wait and see" approach will not work. Ever.



He goes on to discuss his plan in fairly high level detail in the article:

After reading the article I'm wondering...

Is it just me or is the "fairly high level detail" MIA in this article?

Clark has simply stated the obvious again, his strategy is almost no different from the administration's.

The only difference is the same thing he said during the campaign: that we should "engage" our allies and regional powers.

That has of course already been tried, with limited results.

Hot air...

It is funny that you have mentioned that he is stating the obvious. The troubling thing is that things aren't exactly going down this way Turnea. If you want to refute the article the provide some sort of proof and we can all examine it.

Refute the article?

The article makes no particular claims that are pertinent. That is why I called it hot air.

As I said the single "unique" idea was to engage other countries to help. I think the fact that we have been trying to do so since before the war refutes that as a solution quite nicely.


Clark is just doing what politicians always do, sticking to the talking points. He and Bush haven't come up with a new idea between them since the election.