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| Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Let’s solve the problem of evil > John McCain on Iraq... | Forum Quick Jump
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 8/31/2003 3:20 PM (GMT -6) |   | I am convinced that if we had had a leader like McCain as president, he would have convinced us for the following reasons why it would be good for us to help a regime change in Iraq without having to deceive us into thinking that Iraq presented a clear and present danger to our immediate nat'l security.
dlw
Why We Must Win
By John McCain
Sunday, August 31, 2003; Page B07
A recent visit to Iraq convinced me of several things. We were right to go to war to liberate Iraq. The Iraqi people welcome their liberation from tyranny. A free Iraq could transform the Middle East. And failure to make the necessary political and financial commitment to build the new Iraq could endanger American leadership in the world, empower our enemies and condemn Iraqis to renewed tyranny.
If we are to avoid a debate over who "lost" Iraq, we must act urgently to transform our military success into political victory.
We fought a just war in Iraq to end the threat posed by a dictator with a record of aggression against his people and his neighbors and a proven willingness to use weapons of mass destruction against both.
Iraq's transformation into a progressive Arab state could set the region that produced Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and al Qaeda on a new course in which democratic expression and economic prosperity, rather than a radicalizing mix of humiliation, poverty and repression, define a modernity in the Muslim world that does not express itself in ways that threaten its people or other nations. Conversely, a forced U.S. retreat from Iraq would be the most serious American defeat since Vietnam.
America's mission in Iraq is too important to fail. Given the stakes, we cannot launch this "generational commitment" to changing the Middle East on the cheap. The administration should level with the American people about the cost and commitment required to transform Iraq.
Americans must understand how important this mission is and be prepared to sacrifice to achieve it. Without an intensive campaign now to explain what is at stake and absent the necessary political and financial commitment, we raise the potential for a defeat that will deal a lasting blow to American interests and freedom's progress.
Having liberated Iraq, we must demonstrate the tangible benefits of occupation, which the Iraqi silent majority will tolerate if it successfully delivers services, law and order and a transition to Iraqi rule. The danger is that our failure to improve daily life, security, and Iraqis' participation in their own governance will erode their patience and fuel insurrection.
We do not have time to spare. If we do not meaningfully improve services and security in Iraq over the next few months, it may be too late. We will risk an irreversible loss of Iraqi confidence and reinforce the efforts of extremists who seek our defeat and threaten Iraq's democratic future.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, an able administrator, lacks resources and the political commitment to achieve his goal of Iraq's transformation. His operation is nearly broke, and he admits Iraq will need "tens of billions" of dollars for reconstruction next year alone. Yet there is an insufficient sense of urgency in Washington, and needs on the ground in Iraq are going unmet.
Security remains a serious problem in Iraq partly because, contrary to administration assurances, our military force levels are obviously inadequate. A visitor quickly learns in conversations with U.S. military personnel that we need to deploy at least another division. We need more foreign troops, particularly from Muslim allies such as Turkey and Pakistan, but security does not necessarily improve with each new country that deploys forces. It is the number and quality of military forces, not the number of countries that send them, that matters.
Iraq's reconstruction requires not simply more troops but a different mix of troops -- linguists, civil affairs officers, military police, engineers -- as well as a significant increase in civilian experts in development and democracy-building. The number of civilian advisers in Iraq is astonishingly low. I was struck by the near-unanimity of opinion among American officers in Iraq that civilian expertise -- on reconstruction, judicial reform and local governance -- is as important as our military presence.
I was also struck by the distrust many Iraqis hold for the United Nations. It is questionable whether U.N. authority over Iraq's political transition would enhance its legitimacy. A U.N. peacekeeping force like the one that stood by as thousands of Bosnians were massacred at Srebrenica would not inspire the Iraqi people's confidence. U.N. blessing of the occupation authority, recognition of the Iraqi Governing Council and advising on Iraq's reconstruction could help in soliciting foreign troops and reconstruction aid, but U.N. primacy would endanger Iraq's transformation.
Iraqis must have a greater role in determining their future. Training a new Iraqi army, civil defense force and police force is critical. We should be equally aggressive in training and advising political parties, transferring more authority to Iraqi leaders and establishing a framework and timeline for a political transition.
Let there be no doubt: Iraq remains the central battle in the war on terror. We must succeed in Iraq because every bad actor in the Middle East -- Baathist killers, terror's sponsors in Iran and Syria, terror's financiers in Saudi Arabia, terror's radical Shiite and Wahhabi inciters, the terrorists of al Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam, Hamas and Hezbollah -- has a stake in our failure. They know Iraq's transformation would be a grave and perhaps fatal setback to them.
Iraq must be important to us because it is so important to our enemies. That's why they are opposing us so fiercely, and why we must win.
The writer is a Republican senator from Arizona.
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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honorman
Registered Member
Date Joined Oct 2002
Total Posts : 1137
| Posted 8/31/2003 6:45 PM (GMT -6) | | | I liked McCain. I would have voted for him over Bush, but I think, personally wise, he came off as too strident. And since lots of people vote by how a person comes across on TV and how "nice" they are... | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/1/2003 7:27 AM (GMT -6) | | Shifting Sands of Neoconservative Logic
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16680
Shifting Sands of Neoconservative Logic
By Jason Vest, The American Prospect
August 28, 2003
As images of the bombed United Nations headquarters in Baghdad appeared on television last week, my thoughts turned to a conversation I had with a very senior national-security official (a political appointee with no military experience, not a career bureaucrat) prior to the invasion of Iraq. He earnestly told me that after Saddam Hussein's fall, Americans would be welcomed in Iraq, and not with a fleeting shower of goodwill but with a "deluge" of "rose water and flowers" that would last in perpetuity. Ahmad Chalabi and American advisers would set up shop to oversee a transition spearheaded by scores of returning Iraqi exiles, who would transform Iraq into a profitable, oil-pumping society. After all, the official said, this wasn't Afghanistan, where there were lots of religious and tribal differences among the local populations. We wouldn't need to stay long, and we certainly wouldn't need the United Nations – which, as far as this official and his compatriots were concerned, could go screw itself. The United States could handle it all. Within a year, he said, Iraq would be a beacon of democracy and stability in the Middle East.
These sentiments weren't anything new, of course; I had heard – and still hear – the same refrain sung by the neoconservative wing of Washington's brilliant-but-wrong choir. I therefore sighed as I anticipated the response to the query-as-rejoinder about to pass my lips. "So what do you think of the Army War College report?" I asked. The document I referred to was titled, "Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario," and it had been released in draft form the previous October, with a much more detailed version appearing in February 2003.
That report said that the administration hadn't planned adequately for a post-Hussein Iraq; it also very presciently rendered the likely results of such poor planning and gave well-considered suggestions for how to either properly shepherd Iraq to stability or, if too late for that, what not to do to make a bad situation worse. The last line of the document's penultimate section wasn't exactly encouraging: "Without an overwhelming effort to prepare for occupation," it said, "the US may find itself in a radically different world over the next few years, a world in which the threat of Saddam Hussein seems like a pale shadow of new problems of America's own making."
The official smiled a smug smile, reiterating his belief that most of those in uniform really didn't know anything. He dismissed internal military concerns about how thinly stretched U.S. forces were and how onerous the manpower requirements in postwar Iraq would be. He was particularly derisive of Eric Shinseki, the soon-to-be-forcibly-retired Army chief of staff, whose estimates of manpower requirements for postwar Iraq had been characterized by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as "wildly off the mark." Shinseki's comments, the official I spoke with said, were "bullshit from a Clintonite enamored of using the army for peacekeeping and nation building and not winning wars."
When I saw the official a few months later – right at the time Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was saying there wasn't a guerilla war in Iraq but his top general on the ground was saying that, well, yes, in fact there was – I asked him if he'd gotten around to reading the report. No, he said, adding as his Stepford programming kicked in that there was nothing to be worried about – those attacking U.S. troops were just a handful of Baathists, not foreign terrorists. "We know how to deal with them," he preened, "and the average Iraqi isn't going to take up arms against us."
Now the administration has changed its tune yet again, admitting that scores of rogue Baath Party loyalists and foreign terrorists are marauding throughout Iraq. But only Baathists and al-Qaeda-linked terrorists – or so my administration acquaintance swears. Earlier this week I sent him a copy of Sydney Morning Herald reporter Paul McGeough's Aug. 16 investigation into the burgeoning anti-American guerilla movement, which is neither Baathist nor associated with al-Qaeda or Ansar-al-Islam. As a result, McGeough reports of the post-Hussein chaos that the Bush administration was so sure couldn't occur, "tribal sheiks, Baghdad businessmen and many ordinary Iraqis [are] speaking in such harsh anti-American terms that it is hard not to conclude there is a growing body of Palestinian or Belfast-style empathy with the resistance." No response from my acquaintance has been forthcoming.
One can only hope that the events of the past week might prompt neoconservatives to reconsider certain fundamental notions about the nature of modern war and peace – or to at least recognize that their peculiar ideas, put into practice, have proven so problematic that the United States now cannot even create a secure environment for organizations like the United Nations that actually do appreciate the complexities of rebuilding civil society. Such reconsideration is not likely to happen, however, and not just because of simple neocon zealotry. It's bad enough that the neocons default to a combination of denial and spin when confronted with realities that might conflict with their articles-of-faith worldview. What makes it worse is how that default is emboldened by a lack of informed outrage on the part of Congress or the media.
To give but one example: Last month, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith – the official essentially responsible for the debacle of post-Hussein Iraq – accepted a report he had hastily commissioned from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on requirements for stabilization of the country. Though the report implicitly condemned Feith's work to date (its lists of things that either haven't been done or need to be done in a radically different manner are damning), you wouldn't know it from The Washington Post's account, which made one passing reference to the report's "critical" nature and assured readers that the undersecretary had "embraced" many of the document's findings.
The Post, and everyone else, also failed to mention that the CSIS paper was essentially a rehash of the pre- and postwar work of the think tank's own Anthony Cordesman, a conservative analyst whose grounded-in-reality assessments have put him at odds with the neoconservatives – as well as the War College's "Reconstructing Iraq...," which had been so cavalierly dismissed by my acquaintance in the administration.
So far the United States has taken the opposite approach of the one prescribed by that report – and just about every avoidable malady the document predicted has come to pass. Despite its remarkably perceptive qualities, the report itself has only been cited in two U.S. news sources. And the main use the media has found for one of its authors, Conrad Crane (a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel), has not been for consultation on the perils of improperly executed occupation and reconstruction operations – rather, his prime utility to news organizations like National Public Radio and The Associated Press has been to explain how military operations are given their nicknames.
In that vein, we might consider referring to postwar Iraq as "Operation Cognitive Dissonance" or "Operation Willful Ignorance," as the administration's civilian leadership and its crony generals appear to be unwilling or unable to abide reality. Though President Bush may still be unaware of it, his early July "bring 'em on" invitation to Iraqi insurgents infuriated swaths of officers and enlisted men and women alike. ("Only a frat boy who has no idea what it's like to have his ass under fire would say that," a retired officer seethed to me at the time.) It also enraged their families – who, thanks to an administration and a Congress that have pledged "unequivocal support" to servicemen and their dependents, are about to see combat pay and family separation allowances cut and enlisted raises capped.
It's not exactly the type of practice that's in the spirit of the CSIS report, which ends by noting that the "US government – both the executive branch and Congress – must change certain business as usual practices in order to maximize the [Coalition Provisional Authority's] opportunities to be successful. The CPA needs more resources, personnel and flexibility. We owe it to our people in the field, and to Iraqis, to provide everything necessary to get this right. US credibility and national interest depend on it." But coming from an administration that bases policy more on faith than facts, it's hardly surprising.
Jason Vest is a Prospect senior correspondent and a contributor to The Nation and The Village Voice.
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/6/2003 6:24 AM (GMT -6) | |
Iraqi Civil War Brewing
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16684
By William O. Beeman, Pacific News Service
August 29, 2003
The assassination of Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim in Najaf on August 28 is the opening volley in the coming Iraqi Civil War. The United States will reap the whirlwind.
One of the most consistent and ominous prewar warnings to the Bush administration by Middle East experts was that removal of Saddam Hussein without the most careful political and social engineering would result in the breaking apart of Iraq into warring factions that would battle each other for decades.
The hawks in the White House would not listen. They were so wedded to the fantasy scenario that the removal of Saddam in an act of "creative destruction" would result in the automatic emergence of democracy. They brushed aside all warnings.
Present-day Iraq was three provinces of the Ottoman Empire before World War I. It was cobbled together by the British for their own convenience after that conflict. The British installed a king, the Saudi Arabian son of the chief religious official of Mecca (Faisal, of Lawrence of Arabia Fame) and glued the whole mess together with the resident British Army.
The three regions were incompatible in ethnicity, religious confession and interests. The Sunni Muslim Kurds occupied the north. The Sunni Arab Bedouins occupied the center and Southwest. The Shi'a Arab and Persian population occupied the South and Southeast. Of the three groups, the Shi'a were largest, with 60 percent of the population. With oil, an outlet to the Persian Gulf and good agricultural land, they would be the natural dominant force in the state the British created. The Kurds would be important, too, because they lived in the region of the country with the largest oil reserves.
However, the British wanted the Sunni Arabs, the smallest faction of the population, to be dominant. They wanted this both to reward Saudi Arabians for helping them fight the Ottomans, and because they had existing clients in the sheikhs who ruled the Arab states of the Gulf.
When the British were finally expelled, and their Saudi ruling family deposed in Iraq in a 1958 nationalist coup, the new Ba'athist Iraqi nationalist rulers had a supremely unruly nation on their hands. The only way to keep power in Sunni Arab hands, and away from the Shi'ites, was through ruthless dictatorship and oppression. Saddam Hussein was the supreme master of this political strategy.
Ayatollah al-Hakim's family was victimized by this oppression. Virtually every one of the Ayatollah's male relatives was executed by Saddam's regime. He fled to Iran for years of exile, returning only after Saddam was deposed by the United States. He became one of the principal leaders of the Shi'a community, and a symbol of rising Shi'a power in post-War Iraq. His triumphant return to Iraq and the holy city of Najaf was one of the most celebrated events in recent Iraqi history.
It is still not known who set off the explosion that killed him at the shrine of Ali, grandson of the Prophet Mohammad. It could have been Sunni Arab factions who fear the rise of Shi'a dominance in Iraq, or it could have been his own Shi'a supporters, disappointed with him for cooperating with American policies in Iraq. Or it could have been someone else. What is clear is that his death will now forever be a rallying cry for the Shi'ite community against its enemies.
It is notable that in Shi'ism virtually all significant leaders have been "martyred." Of the 12 historical Imams of the Ithna 'ashara branch of Shi'ism dominant in Iraq and Iran (Ithna 'ashara means "twelve" in Arabic), ten are buried in shrines in Iraq. Their tombs are ever-present reminders of the oppression and struggle of the Shi'a. Now Ayatollah al-Hakim will join them, and with the power of a saint, will inspire generations of grimly dedicated young warriors, determined to wreak vengeance and assert the power of their community. They will be led by his own paramilitary group, the Badr brigade.
Shi'a fury will be directed at the Sunnis to the north. It will also be directed toward United States as the occupying force who both did nothing to prevent this tragedy, and further continued the British doctrine of Sunni favoritism by insisting that the Shi'a religious leaders would never be allowed to come to power. In any case, the forces of retribution are about to be unleashed in a manner hitherto unseen in the region.
Could the United States have done anything to prevent this tragedy? Of course it could have. As the occupying power U.S. officials knew acutely about the danger to Ayatollah al-Hakim. Since Washington opposed the rise of Shi'a power in Iraq, charges of American indifference or even complicity in his death will soon be flying.
The final question Washington must now face is How to stop this inevitable civil war? When the factional shooting starts, where does the U.S. army, caught in the crossfire, aim its own guns?
PNS commentator William O. Beeman is Director of Middle East Studies at Brown University. He is author of the forthcoming book, "Iraq: State in Search of a Nation."
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/11/2003 5:27 AM (GMT -6) | | Knight Ridder Newspapers (USA), Sep. 10, 2003
http://www.bayarea.com
By John Walcott
WASHINGTON - Even some officials in the president's administration worry that in his address to the nation Sunday night he glossed over his shifting rationales for war in Iraq, oversimplified the sources of anti-American rage there and overstated the benefits of victory, both to the war on terrorism and to American policy in the Middle East.
Making the war in Iraq a central part of the war on terrorism that Osama bin Laden started two years ago this week sidestepped Bush's earlier rationale for war in Iraq - Iraq's alleged chemical and biological weapons and its nuclear ambitions - and ignored the fact that it was the American-led invasion that made Iraq a magnet for international terrorists, these officials said.
Before the war, intelligence analysts at the CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon acknowledged there was no evidence of cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida and no evidence of an Iraqi hand in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. None has yet surfaced.
"There was no substantive intelligence information linking Saddam to international terrorism before the war," said Vincent Cannistraro, the former director of counterterrorism operations and analysis at the CIA. "Now we've created the conditions that have made Iraq the place to come to attack Americans."
The president also may have underestimated the complexity of the problem the United States now faces in Iraq. In his speech, he suggested that the enemy there consists of "members of the old Saddam regime" and "foreign terrorists." Both are major parts of the problem, and foreigners appear to be a growing part of it, thanks in part to the fact that U.S. officials dissolved Iraq's border guards without having enough American soldiers to police the borders.
But there's growing evidence that some ordinary Iraqis are joining the enemy, motivated not by nostalgia for Saddam or hunger for holy war but by Iraqi and Arab nationalism, resentment of foreign invaders, suspicion of America's motives and the continuing lack of electricity, public safety and other necessities.
"The war in Vietnam was not just about communism, and the war in Iraq isn't just about terrorism," one senior administration official said Monday, speaking only on the condition of anonymity because he disagreed with much of what his boss had said. "We lost in Vietnam because we didn't understand that as well as we should have."
And just as an American victory in Vietnam wouldn't have dealt a mortal blow to Moscow or Beijing, much less Havana or Pyongyang, victory in Iraq isn't likely to deal a mortal blow to al-Qaida, as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice suggested it would Sunday.
Radical Islam is a faith, and its adherents in Indonesia, Yemen and Algeria aren't likely to fold their tents because some of their brethren die in Iraq.
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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