Comments on After We Withdraw

OOOOHHHH YOU GO ON WID'yo BAD SELF!!

There's no arguing that, yes, the American did volunteer for at least part of what they'll face in Iraq. But as the brother of one of those volunteers, those words -- truthful though they may be -- make me SO FUCKING SAD.

That's life, I guess.

Dearest Anne;

The New York Times is a lovely place to find recipes and read reviews. It is also a fount of political disinformation. (For further examples please see Judith Miller and Jeff Gerth.) So, please please please, read deeper, and stop being such a fucking stooge.

Love,
Reality

um i don't think a lot of people are saying that we pull out and leave them to their own devices. i think we pull out as the US and then support a coalition of UN forces that are there to keep peace and help stabalize a government.

Can I support the US staying in Iraq if I am of fighting age and do not enlist (male or female)? If I think that the US should stay in Iraq, then it seems I am ethically obligated to enlist. Unless, of course, like the veep during the Vietnam War, I have 'other priorities'...

lol, yeah a coalition of UN forces who really wants to be there and would totally be voted to be there by the UN?

Ha!

I say we pull out, and hand guns out to women children along the way. after all, guns prevent violence according to the right.

@3

Don't be so mean! It's not like it's one of her film opinions.

Things are going to be looking up for everybody stuck in Iraq now that you can finally tell people to shut up.

You're right, Annie.

The Iraq War must continue forever.

It's imperative for the troops and Iraqi civilians to continue to be slaughtered for failed foreign policy theories, incompetent leadership and CEOs' profits.

@ 3,

Thank you. The NYT prints open lies with amazing regularity.

Haven't you been saying "shut up" pretty much all along? And seriously, the NYT has never stopped running stories like this from day one. So it kinda doesn't prove anything -- it may reflect general Iraqi opinion, it may not. As you say, it's pure anecdote, so it's impossible to draw any broader conclusions.

If it makes you feel better, there seems to be little doubt that U.S. forces will be in Iraq for the foreseeable future. So, whether or not your view is sensible, it's the view that will prevail until some profound shift in policy priorities occur. You win!

Annie:
You are now the Queen Of Statisics!

A 40 person non-random survey in a country of 27 million people that says what you wanted to hear! Wooo Wooo!

You're a mainstream reporter now baby!

give annie a break... what is so hard to believe about this story? iraq will be a mess when we pull out. it's a mess now. it is not difficult to image that there is a sizable amount of the population that favours the US presence there over withdrawl. US soldiers are dying to save Iraqi lives (and US interests). they will be replaced by iraqi forces who may or may not be any better, or more effective. it's a mess and i'm not sure what should be done. but the knee-jerk reaction to want to pull out is very attractive. i say set the date, and set it now. i just wish i could have a better feeling about it.

Seriously Annie, you are in Peggy Noonan land on this one. Dumb, dumb, dumb post. I gotta say that the bullets and bombs aimed at American troops speak a bit louder than your 40 person sample. I am pretty sure that it is YOU that need to shut the hell up, or stick to doing your crappy film reviews.

Mess now, mess when we withdraw...what's the difference? Oh yeah, we'll be letting a sovereign country manage their own affairs, and our people won't be getting killed on a daily basis. And 40 Iraqis is hardly a representative sample, regardless of the difficulty of polling over there.

Bush who? Once he's gone, he'll just have people say rude things to him in person, or mock him publicly.

oh, and @4 - I'm saying that.

Sounds to me that Anne needs to hurry up and sign up to go to Iraq.

I think that everyone wants Iraq to be stable but then how is that ever going to happen? Seriously Anne, have you actually studied the history of Iraq? It is an artificial construct drawn up by Britian. And frankly, the Iraqi's need to fix their own mess instead of going on vacation this summer. Yeah Anne, this nation that we should stay and fight in is going to have a legistlature that is going on vacation for a couple of months IN THE MIDDLE OF A CIVIL WAR!!!

So seriously, if you want to trust the 40 people who the NY Times polled (the same newspaper who ran dozens of articles in the run up to the war about all the WMD's Saddam had) you have a moral obligation to enlist in the Army.

I think ultimately your comments are nearly as bad as what comes out of Fox News or Tony Snow.

Annie, I’m curious what your assumptions are here. I mean, if we maintain the current troop strength in Iraq, the war will never end. We’ll never lose, we’ll never win. It’ll just keep going indefinitely, like Vietnam. In order to increase troop levels there, we would need a draft-- which is simply never going to happen. If we did increase troop levels, we still don’t know that Iraq would resolve into a stable republic. The order created by a successful occupation might simply lead to the orderly devolution of the country. But the clear reality is that such a “successful” occupation is totally impossible with current troop levels. Which means that, barring a draft, the current level of chaos will just go on for as long as we’re there and, barring a real surge that establishes order long enough for the government to devolve, there will still be a bloody civil war when we leave— if we ever do.

So please explain to me what happy (or even less sad) ending you see in the future with current troop levels in Iraq.

@13

AAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!1!

Annie, it is undoubtedly true that there will be a shitstorm of violence in Iraq if we leave now. And yes, we broke it, we are at least partly responsible for the chaos that exists there now.

The question is, will our continued presence there fix anything? There is no reason to believe it will. The conflicts between Sunni, Shia, and Kurds is centuries old. Saddam, vicious tyrant that he was, managed to keep that under control. We tossed him out and inflamed a sectarian civil war. It is too late to close the barn door. We cannot undue what we have done.

Can our continued presence there stop this civil war from happening? No. It cannot. At best, we can delay the worst of it. But whether we leave in 10 weeks, 10 months, or 10 years, we cannot stop Iraq from sliding into civil war after we are gone. All we accomplish by staying is delaying the inevitable. As a bonus, we inflame anti-American sentiment throughout the middle east, destroy our credibility on the world stage, loose a hundred troops a month (or so), and increase our deficit by a couple hundred billion dollars a year. This is the very definition of a quagmire.

I'm glad SOMEBODY who writes for this rag understands there's two sides to this Iraq problem.

I have nothing nice to say.

If I ever see a convincing demonstration that most Iraqis want US troops to stay, I'll start thinking about it.

It's funny that a lot of the people trying to shout Annie down don't really have a lot of proof to back it up, except their own wishful thinking. Seriously... whether you survey 40 people or 40,000, is the conclusion reached here unreasonable? Do you know something that other people don't?

And if that's what's true on the ground, are we prepared to permit the deaths of Iraqis to save the lives of American soldiers? What's the calculus?

I'm not necessarily saying that our policies are the best, but the completely unrealistic thinking of the Get Out Of Iraq Now crowd is mind-boggling. Almost as bad as the belief that a surge is the best strategy.

@24 - What's so unrealistic in the "get out now" philosophy that is trumped by the realism of "if we stay things will somehow get better"? No one's unrealistically saying things will be great there if we leave now, whereas the administration and others who are for staying do seem to think somehow things will just magically improve if we stay there. How is that realistic? In your post you say a surge is actually worse, so what's your big idea?

Hey Annie, I dunno how many times I've had to say this to a journalist, but: learn to read. Your own snippets prove that the Iraqis *do* want us out. They just want us to clean up our mess first.

Sadly, it would be just as irresponsible to dump Iraq now as it was to barge in in the first place.

Like a gaggle of neighborhood kids who come in without knocking, trash the house, then leave.

Of course, we ought to be able to support Iraq stability without unilateral military occupation. GWB should go back to the UN, this time on his knees, begging it to take over Iraq reconstruction and peacekeeping. Maybe we'll even think about paying our dues.

SDA in SEA has got it exactly right. There will be a greater shitstorm when the US leaves Iraq--no matter when we leave. Staying the course simply destroys the reputation of the US and wastes lives and billions of dollars--a couple trillion a decade, by most estimates. There's no guarantee that we could keep things at this level even if we wanted to pay the price.

So, our best course of action is to leave as soon as possible. We should leave in a way that increases the odds for a less fucked up result for Iraqis, but the harsh reality is that we don't have the power to make the situation much better. Talking to Iran, as the Bush administration is now doing, is a good first step for an eventual withdrawal. Iran and other regional powers will be the ones who have to pick up after our mess in the long run, along with the Iraqis. Anything we can do to prevent those regional powers from going to war over the remnants of Iraq in our eventual absence is a good idea.

I'm not necessarily saying that our policies are the best, but the completely unrealistic thinking of the Get Out Of Iraq Now crowd is mind-boggling. Almost as bad as the belief that a surge is the best strategy.

So I'll ask you the same question I asked Annie: how will maintaining our current troop levels create a situation where we can withdrawal without causing a bloody civil war? What is the improved situation you believe we can create with current troop strength?

"...are we prepared to permit the deaths of Iraqis to save the lives of American soldiers?"

What? Nothing we do is going to save a reasonable number of Iraqis. So, yes.

Weren't many of the same arguments used to keep us in Vietnam, that if we left, it would become a bloodbath? Would the Vietnamese be better off today if we had stayed?

My argument is not that a continuing troop presence is going to turn the country around. My argument is that if we were to pull the troops out now, it would be a repeat of the Paris Peace Accords and the invasion of South Vietnam in 1975. We leave, and Kurdistan secedes and picks a fight with Turkey, Shiites create a strong dictatorship in the lower two-thirds of the country and kick the Sunnis into a third rump state, and the region becomes much less stable. Might even have an iconic helicopter evacuation of an embassy.

So if we're prepared for that to happen, if we're willing to pay that price, then let's do it. If, on the other hand, we're going to be distraught by the ethnic cleansing and slaughter that will inevitably be broadcast on the news in the months and years following, what can we do to solve both problems?

We've broken Iraq. Shoving more troops in there might not be a solution, but leaving the country on its own is just as disgusting. We have a responsibility to fix what we've done, and pawning it off merely as the sins of Republican neocons is a bunch of garbage. And hey, while I might not have an answer, at least I'm brave enough to say that, as opposed to people who obsessively crow that bringing the troops home now and damn the consequences is the best response, despite the evidence.

And heeeeeere come the lefties with their usual No More War Troops Out Now wank!

How are they any different from the Republicans again?

I wonder what the conversation on this entire thread would be if there was a mandatory draft for Iraq? I know a lot of the Stranger Staff would be heading out or moving to Canada. I never realized that so many people even on the "moderate left" are as blood thirsty as the radical right wing if they are not asked to give anything up.

It appears we have two choices, first stay in Iraq forever, which some people on Slog seem to be very happy with as long as they are not having to sign up to go off to someone else's civil war. Or get the hell out. We have been there for four years and the only change that has happened is the body count. Honestly, a bunch of you sound like you work for Fox News.

And for what Cindy did? I thank her for her service for helping put this war on the front burner. Remember, she was against this war long before it was "cool" to be anti-war and when Dan Savage was still thinking invading Iraq was a good idea. And she faced constant attack from the right and the left for simply asking why her son had to die.

Cindy is a real life hero for trying to stop this insanity we are in. She gave us a glimmer of hope that we can get our nation out of this nightmare.

Can't anyone help me out of my moral quandary (@5)? I am serious. Gomez, you start. How old are you? Have you ever wanted to travel to the middle east boy? BMA, are you willing to risk your life in Iraq or just having your taxes squandered there?

P.S. You may think this is the equivalent of the rightwingers who say, "If the U.S. is so bad, why don't you move to Cuba" but this is not the case. I feel like my question is the next logical response to those who want to stay indefinitely.

Thank goodness we have Gomez and his non-stop, pointless, snide comments to put us in our place.

If only more people like him were around when Bush II started the war. Oh, right.

I hear that if you bang your head against a brick wall long enough you can actually WALK THROUGH the brick wall. How fucking cool is that?

Of course the wall will be destroyed, but whatever, YOU JUST WALKED THROUGH A BRICK WALL! How fucking cool is that?!

And hey, while I might not have an answer, at least I'm brave enough to say that,

Are you fucking kidding me? That’s not brave; you’re not sacrificing anything for that plan. And yeah, as a point of order, I am prepared to watch the stream of horror that will come across the airwaves after we leave. Because the difference between the horror show that will start once we leave and the one that’s happening now is that the one that will start once we leave will eventually end.

You talk about the Paris Peace Accords and the ’75 invasion of South Vietnam, but you evidently fail to grasp the significance of those events: when the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, something awful happened— and then the country achieved a local equilibrium that eventually led to a fairly sane and surprisingly liberal government. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is hardly perfect, but neither is it the state of war that existed in Vietnam from 1946 to 1975.

First of all, aside from this administration having totally alienated the UN, none of the member nations have any sizable amounts of troops left to commit, so you can just flush that pipe dream of the UN soldiers coming in to save the day.

They are literally scraping the bottom of the barrel to meet all the peacekeeping needs around the world and their commitments to Afghanistan. They downsized from Cold-War level armies too. Germany for one, literally doesn't have any more infantry to send to Afghanistan, and most of the other nations are in the same boat. Remember, they are providing troops all over the world for peacekeeping missions.

We're fucked.
If we leave, the existing civil war will escalate into more ethnic cleansing than is already going on. BUT, we aren't stopping the civil war and ethnic cleansing that is going on already, so in the bigger scheme of things what the hell are we getting for breaking the Army and Marines, our peoples deaths and the bankrupting of our nation? Just breeding a new crop of people that hate us because we are kicking down their doors, touching their women, dragging their men off to torture and supporting BOTH sides death squads.

The only thing we gain by staying is more $ for Halliburton and an endless supply of new people that hate America so much they'll do just about anything to hurt us. Unless you hold stock in a defense contractor there is nothing to be gained by staying.

Yes it's gonna suck real bad when we pull out, but we WILL bw puling out sooner or later, might as well save some lives and some treasure and maybe have a few less people grow up hating the US quite so much.

The only thing to salvage here is we shouldn't leave the Kurds hanging in the wind again. If we walk out on them and Turkey fucks them over, Americas reputation will sink even further (besides being reprehensible). Kurdistan is stable enough and US friendly enough that it should be *fairly* inexpensive in lives and treasure to keep enough of a base and troops there to keep Turkey from fucking them over. I just hope in our haste to be done with this mess Bushitler has gotten us into we don't fuck over the Kurds (again).

The Iraqis are already withdrawing by the millions to other countries. All we have to do is keep slaughtering people there until the rest leave and then all our problems are solved We get the Iraqi oil without the Iraqis.

Endless war works!

Can't anyone help me out of my moral quandary (@5)? I am serious. Gomez, you start. How old are you? Have you ever wanted to travel to the middle east boy? BMA, are you willing to risk your life in Iraq or just having your taxes squandered there?

That's a pretty weak argument, pal. I'm amazed that people just don't *get* it.

Look, I don't think that we should stay there forever. I didn't think that a war was the right idea from the get go. It was stupid, and although I really like the idea of getting a ruthless dictator out of power, situations like Yugoslavia have proven that a power vacuum is not always a great thing.

But if you listen to people parroting the message from the left, here in Seattle and elsewhere, they have the exact flip side of the "greeting us with flowers" mantra that the neocons had at the beginning of the war. Simply put: if we leave now, I have no doubt that the bloodshed and political instability will continue, or, more likely, get worse. Period. There's no evidence to think otherwise.

Now, you can spin that in many different ways, but the idyllic worldview of the left and the right are both incredibly detached from reality. The truth is somewhere in the uncomfortable middle, and the debate has to be directed towards a very simple calculus. Is sacrificing more American soldiers in a meat grinder worth the possibility of saving Iraqi lives and providing extra stability to the government and region?

Yes or no. That's it. You can have many different reasons, but it gets down to a yes or a no. And if you do think that pulling out troops now, or next week, or next year is a good idea, you really need to get prepared for the negative ramifications of that action, as well as the positives. It's not just going to be rainbows and sunshine, folks. It's going to be a lot of ethnic and religious strife, it's going to be strongmen in power over a rigid Islamic state, it's going to be dead men, women and children. It's going to be on cable news, 24 hours a day. And yes, we could be in a position to stop or control some of that, or we could wash our hands of the whole situation and let things fall where they may.

So if you can accept the ramifications of that action, beyond the abstract, warm and fuzzy ideas and the not-quite-so-pithy comments people have written here, then by all means go for it. I just don't think that the answer is as easy as people think it is. I think that we need to change strategies completely, as opposed to being drawn into this pathetic "Should We Stay Or Should We Go?" binary.

Personally, I could give a rat's ass what the Iraqis want. I just want this money-draining joke of a war to be over.

The worst thing that could possibly happen is for us to stay. The worst thing that could possibly happen is for us to go.

Seriously: we broke it. It's broken. There is no way to put Humpty Dumpty back again. We're standing over the still-warm corpse, smoking gun in hand, and debating on what's the best way to fix it. There is no fixing it.

Part of me wants more Americans to die, as punishment for what we did. But unfortunately it will be the wrong Americans. But we do owe the Iraqis something more than this. We asked for it, we really did. It's ours.

And if you do think that pulling out troops now, or next week, or next year is a good idea, you really need to get prepared for the negative ramifications of that action, as well as the positives. It's not just going to be rainbows and sunshine, folks.

Uh-huh. So who the fuck said anything about rainbows and sunshine? You're arguing with a point nobody even attempted to make. How 'bout you address the points we did make?

I didn't ask for this, Fnarf--a lot of us didn't. How about we just send over the ones who did?

It's important to remember that this is not a war, but an occupation. Down through the echoing corridors of time, occupations have never worked. So why would we expect this half-assed occupation to work?

I have a feeling that the powers that be like the chaos, because it allows them to fatten their pockets, and the pockets of their corporations. And the people who think that this is some sort of noble exercise are their patsies - just as the fundie Xtians are the patsies of the right.

All I know for sure is that it's a real mess, and we aren't helping matters any by continuing to be there.

i don't think we broke it. it was already broken. we are the kings horses who couldn't put it back together again. the kings men won't be about to fix it either. it will be painful to watch Iraq be torn into different states, and the US will be blamed for much of it, but that might be best for all in the long run.

Fuck the Iraqis. Yes, the already existing humanitarian crisis will get worse, and yes, the US should intervene in humanitarian crises, but only when we've got our own shit together. We've got hundreds of thousands of Katrina refugees, a major American city that hasn't been rebuilt, economic misery, fascism at the highest levels of government, and our security situation is the worst it's been since the fucking Cuban Missle Crisis.

So, sorry, Iraqis, you're fucked no matter what. I'm sick of wasting blood and treasure to hold back the civil war you're so intent on. I'm sick of our politicians and pundits pretending that our two and a quarter century old country can fix the problems that have been plaguing you since the Seventh Century. I want our troops home now, I want all our brigades to be rated combat ready, I want our equipment replaced, and I want our budget to refocus on domestic programs.

And I really don't care how bastardly I sound. I love my country, and its survival and prosperity are my paramount concerns.

Gitai wrote:

We've got [...] fascism at the highest levels of government

For more on that topic, see "George W. Bush and the 14 points of fascism". It begins:

In his original article, "Fascism Anyone?", Laurence Britt (interview) compared the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet and identified 14 characteristics common to those fascist regimes. This page is a collection of news articles dating from the start of the Bush presidency divided into topics relating to each of the 14 points of fascism. Further analysis of American Fascism done by the POAC can be read here.

(POAC = "People for the Old American Century" a group whose name is a play on Project for the New American Century.)

Last March, Opinion Research Business released what it calls "the largest poll into Iraqi opinion ever to be published."

Says The Christian Science Monitor: 'The ORB poll... shows that a majority of Iraqis believe the security situation in Iraq will get better when the "multi national forces" leave Iraq, with 53 percent saying it will be "a great deal better" or "a little better" as opposed to 26% who say it will be "a great deal worse" or "a little worse."'

So, no, The New York Times survey of 40 people won't get me to "shut up." about it.

It sounds like this post was handled properly. Now that it is dead, I have one gripe to add:

"The American volunteered."

Does financial coercion - and the promise of an education and/or other benefits - influence the volunteer status of our soldiers?

I suppose that the people that signed up for duty as some kind of opportunity to improve their lives deserve to be involved in this politicized power struggle.

Remind me: How will we know we have been victorious?

Ha! Whot is love!?
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