Clipmarks | jleealex's 'iraq' clips

Friedman: Ten Months or Ten Years

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 17:17:10 GMT

clipped by: jleealex

Ten Months or Ten Years

Here is the central truth about Iraq today: This country is so broken it can’t even have a proper civil war.

There are so many people killing so many other people for so many different reasons — religion, crime, politics — that all the proposals for how to settle this problem seem laughable. It was possible to settle Bosnia’s civil war by turning the country into a loose federation, because the main parties to that conflict were reasonably coherent, with leaders who could cut a deal and deliver their faction.

But Iraq is in so many little pieces now, divided among warlords, foreign terrorists, gangs, militias, parties, the police and the army, that nobody seems able to deliver anybody. Iraq has entered a stage beyond civil war — it’s gone from breaking apart to breaking down. This is not the Arab Yugoslavia anymore. It’s Hobbes’s jungle.

Given this, we need to face our real choices in Iraq, which are: 10 months or 10 years. Either we just get out of Iraq in a phased withdrawal over 10 months, and try to stabilize it some other way, or we accept the fact that the only way it will not be a failed state is if we start over and rebuild it from the ground up, which would take 10 years. This would require reinvading Iraq, with at least 150,000 more troops, crushing the Sunni and Shiite militias, controlling borders, and building Iraq’s institutions and political culture from scratch.

Anyone who tells you that we can just train a few more Iraqi troops and police officers and then slip out in two or three years is either lying or a fool. The minute we would leave, Iraq would collapse. There is nothing we can do by the end of the Bush presidency that would produce a self-sustaining stable Iraq — and “self-sustaining” is the key metric.

Tags: iraq, war, us, op-ed

Doubts about Iraqi Leader

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 16:57:10 GMT

clipped by: jleealex

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 — A classified memorandum by President Bush’s national security adviser expressed serious doubts about whether Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki had the capacity to control the sectarian violence in Iraq and recommended that the United States take new steps to strengthen the Iraqi leader’s position.

The Nov. 8 memo was prepared for Mr. Bush and his top deputies by Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, and senior aides on the staff of the National Security Council after a trip by Mr. Hadley to Baghdad.

The memo suggests that if Mr. Maliki fails to carry out a series of specified steps, it may ultimately be necessary to press him to reconfigure his parliamentary bloc, a step the United States could support by providing “monetary support to moderate groups,” and by sending thousands of additional American troops to Baghdad to make up for what the document suggests is a current shortage of Iraqi forces. (Text of the Memo)

The memo presents an unvarnished portrait of Mr. Maliki and notes that he relies for some of his political support on leaders of more extreme Shiite groups. The five-page document, classified secret, is based in part on a one-on-one meeting between Mr. Hadley and Mr. Maliki on Oct. 30.

“His intentions seem good when he talks with Americans, and sensitive reporting suggests he is trying to stand up to the Shia hierarchy and force positive change,” the memo said of the Iraqi leader. “But the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action.”

An administration official made a copy of the document available to a New York Times reporter seeking information on the administration’s policy review. The Times read and transcribed the memo.

Bush Adviser’s Memo Cites Doubts About Iraqi Leader

Tags: iraq, us, bush, war

Bushfeld: the new sitcom about nothing (except destroying the planet) (Satirical Political)

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 19:14:46 GMT

clipped by: anonymology
clipper's remarks: A rather current (in more ways than one) satire on the White House.

Please no one get on my case about how this is Actually Really Serious. It's not. It's satire. Read it as such.

Clip Source: satiricalpolitical.com

SCENE: THE OVAL OFFICE

CHENEY: I think I can sum up the Iraq War for you with one word: NOTHING.

BUSH: Nothing?

CHENEY: (Smiling) Nothing.

BUSH: What does that mean?

CHENEY: The war is about nothing.

COLIN POWELL: (To Cheney) Well, it’s not about nothing.

CHENEY: (To Colin) No, it’s about nothing.

POWELL: Well, maybe in philosophy. But, even nothing is something.

CONDOLEEZZA: What’s the war’s premise?

POWELL: Well, I would go to the U.N., and make a presentation about mobile biological labs and we would pretend there are threats of mushroom clouds, yellow cake and apocalypse.

CHENEY: Yeah, but nothing happens to trigger the war. You see, it’s just like life. You know, you eat, you go shopping, you read. You eat, you read, you invade Iraq.

BUSH: You read? You read about Iraq?

CHENEY: Well, forget the reading; we don’t want to learn about 1300 years of Sunni-Shia fighting.

BUSH: All right, tell me, tell me about the rationale for war. What kind of rationale?

CHENEY: Oh, no. No rationale.

BUSH: No rationale? So, what is it?

CHENEY: What’d you do today?

BUSH: I got up and worked out.

CHENEY: There’s a rationale. That’s a rationale for war.

BUSH: (Confused) How is that a rationale?

POWELL: Well, uh, maybe something happens on the way to your workout, like you find out Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, or his aides met with Mohammed Atta in Prague.

CHENEY: No, no, no. Nothing happens.

POWELL: Well, something happens.

BUSH: Well, why am I starting a war?

ROVE: Because it’ll be on TV, and help your re-election.

BUSH: By the way, where the hell is Rummy?

POWELL: I don’t know, but it seems the raisins are missing … along with a coupla’ hundred thousand troops.

Tags: satire

Is Iraq in a civil war?

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 18:08:59 GMT

clipped by: jleealex

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 — Is Iraq in a civil war?

Though the Bush administration continues to insist that it is not, a growing number of American and Iraqi scholars, leaders and policy analysts say the fighting in Iraq meets the standard definition of civil war.

The common scholarly definition has two main criteria. The first says that the warring groups must be from the same country and fighting for control of the political center, control over a separatist state or to force a major change in policy. The second says that at least 1,000 people must have been killed in total, with at least 100 from each side.

American professors who specialize in the study of civil wars say that most of their number are in agreement that Iraq’s conflict is a civil war.

In the United States, the debate over the term rages because many politicians, especially those who support the war, believe there would be domestic political implications to declaring it a civil war. They fear that an acknowledgment by the White House and its allies would be seen as an admission of a failure of President Bush’s Iraq policy.

They also worry that the American people might not see a role for American troops in an Iraqi civil war and would more loudly demand a withdrawal.

But in fact, many scholars say the bloodshed here already puts Iraq in the top ranks of the civil wars of the last half-century. The carnage of recent days — beginning with bombings on Thursday in a Shiite district of Baghdad that killed more than 200 people — reinforces their assertion.

Tags: politics, war, iraq, us