Regardless of one’s faith in God as an American, international political considerations and stratagems to implement policy require political competence for successful implementation. You may ask yourself; ‘sometimes do bizarre twists of providence put the cloak of stupidity over the heads of the President and the U.S. Congress for some unknown reason? A nation that spends more on defense with federal deficits than on manufacturing and environmental sector quality conservation will tend to lose a protracted international cultural conflict and neo-jihad with greater frequency than those running simultaneous national increases in manufacturing quality/quantity output, budget surpluses and domestic, comparative economic growth.
Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki recently made a statement in reply to American congressional agitation to withdraw military forces from Iraq that Americans are welcome to exit and that the Iraqi Government can safeguard Iraqi security themselves. Maliki’s was an important statement that should be considered substantively by Congress if not by the President whom will likely ignore it. Iraq is now technically a free country and the U.S.A. need be in Iraq only as long as they are welcomed by that government and people and while the Congress is willing to fund the expense of their deployment there.
Is Iraq ready to provide it’s own security or would a bloodbath follow an American exit right away? Allowing another democide to follow the democide of the sanctions era and the creeping democide of the occupation era is quite a difficult throw of the political dice while on the other hand perhaps an American exit would compel the Iraqi’s to live together peaceably more directly.
I have written following an analysis of the pre-Maliki statement situation of the United States and its Iraq policy with comments about how to improve it significantly. The changes that could result from Maliki’s statement to the number of troops and the schedule of their return to the U.S.A. is worth another analysis should the President and the congress choose to take that course perhaps to comply with various aspects of international law. If the Iraqi Government clearly wants continuing American military and economic support that is the criterion for the alterations for American Iraq policy below.
Following I will write three short term policy measures that should be advocated by both the Congress and President post haste…If the President fails to transition toward these goals presently the next administration will inherit a dysfunctional, expensive mess of high cost to Iraqis and Americans that for political reasons probably will be cut off directly with pursuant collateral damage politically both for the United States and Iraq.
These are the necessary political steps necessary for a transition to a stable Iraq in the short term;
1)Reduce and redeploy U.S. military forces in Iraq to sectarian security boundaries, Kurdistan, the Green Zone and national borders with a limit of 75,000 U.S. military personnel
2) U.S. Congress and the President shout from the rooftops, on the media and in Iraq that all Iraqi oil resources in Iraq be given to the people of Iraq in a one-time issuance of private sock shares with full ownership and inheritance rights. Each citizen of Iraq will receive an equal share of stock such as three shares each. The Government of Iraq would keep 25% of the stock issued for federal financing.
3) U.S. Government financing of Iraqi economic rebuilding should concentrate on providing jobs for Iraqi citizens and development of alternative energy and water purification resources in Iraq. Iraqi homes should all be provided with some sort of independent home electrical power production solar and or wind power to offset centralized power disruptions. An electric small car factory should be constructed for home recharged battery driven cars covered in solar recharging panels. A series of sectarian boundary security canals would be built providing jobs and fishing opportunities for Iraqi’s.
Julius Caesar was able to implement, innovate and follow up combined political and military initiatives in several campaigns including the Alexandrian war and after that on his sojourn through Syria in return to settle issues in Rome. Comparatively our American neo-democracy becoming a corporatist dialectical bi-partisan state lacks flexibility for quick policy adaptation for which Julius Caesar was well known and which terrorists increasingly emulate.
Some days it seems as if U.S. political leadership functions more like that of the ten year old quasi-idiot King of Spain that presided over the fall of Hapsburg power in Spain and the rise of Bourbon French rule in the 17th century than a group of patriotic nationalists searching for ways to make the United States a faster, cheaper, better more secure democracy with a high national standard of living for all citizens.
The Bush administration and the congress have demonstrated remarkable inflexibility and ineptness at evolving military and political strategies for bringing peace and stability to Iraq; they have been helped by globally owned broadcast media and select corporatist powers to pound square pegs into round holes.
The administration and the congress should develop political-military designed evolution policies for Iraq drawing upon scientific designed molecular evolution strategies that mimic and improve upon Darwinian evolution for promotion of desirable survival traits. Applications of inductive logic to meaningful premises of comprehensive parameters-brain storming can be better for finding the key to conflict resolution than complacent, blunt applications of power. Politicians must desire to win peace, prosperity and environmental health instead of posturing behind extreme and unchanging sound bite morsels maladapted to foreign political facts.
Scientists for some time have utilized focused, shotgun and blanket strategies for selecting molecules with desired traits and/or survival characteristics that might bring about evolutions of product objectives and/or survival success. A macro-social comparable paradigm is to search through political scenarios for winning strategies instead of just resting upon one initial doctrine; inflexible, obdurate, ineffective political policy.
The President and Congress should energize their vistas of creative intellect before they perish through disuse and act with faith that they will be directed to an evolution of sound foreign policy acceptable to the people of the United States and Iraq. The intelligent position in Iraq of a gradually reduction of troop strength by half over several months presently is an extremely minority opinion but the necessary one for the victory of pragmatism over personal egotism.
The United States cannot afford political or financially a long range war of attrition against sundry terrorists in Iraq, nor afford to completely withdraw military forces from Iraq and permit an unhindered opportunity for national and regional civil war and production of new terrorists for export. The conflict with foreign terrorists is an economic as well as a military one. The Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky was a first rate Russian general leading the Reds to victory over the white army including U.S. military forces as well as a brilliant political revolutionary. Stalin of course was a more pragmatic Machiavellian rival to take personal political power. The administration should have learned the lesson of Trotsky that war is a continuation of politics and reciprocally sometimes politics a continuation of war as well as economics. Simultaneous economic, political and military approaches are generally de rigueur for bringing about successful foreign policy in the world today in the engagement of substantive adverse opposition powers not subject to containment by regular law enforcement.
Reducing U.S. forces in Iraq to 75,000 with redeployment along sectarian boundaries as peace keepers is a better approach for containment of terrorism and possible Iraq civil war, with sectarian Iraqi regions providing their own security.
Following is some background history and philosophy of the conflict in Iraqi briefly iterated along with more ideas for constructive use of U.S. resources in Iraq.
American involvement in Iraq since the 1990 Desert Storm war to expel the forces of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait have been costly in lives and money for both Americans and Iraqis. Presently the United States is engaged in a protracted ‘war’ against terrorism and to stabilize the Iraqi Government that has continued since the 2003 Iraq war and the costs to the people of the United States and Iraq are increasing still. Americans naturally want an end to the cost of American troop deployments in Iraq and the end of casualties and over-deployments of American military forces that undermine the health and combat readiness of the U.S. military.
Compared to the Vietnam War quite often, the war in Iraq has similar political features both in its polarization of domestic American political responses to it, in it’s adverse impact upon global American combat readiness and in possible withdrawal plans from the conflict that in some ways might be considered ‘Vietnamization’. The notable absence of a priori or even timely political intelligence in both the administration and in the congress about how to transition the rebuilding of Iraq into a winning posture is notable. The President believes a military solution to the troubles of the Middle East and Iraq concerning sectarian strife and fundamentalist terrorism is the only way and that terrorism can be solved by American intervention and military dominance. The President in this matter is quite wrong; the Shi’a-Sunni strife has existed for more than 600 years, and the dynamics of revolutionary Muslim populism has also deep roots of more than a century that has increased in the presence of oil wealth and westernizing economic elements. Terrorism may be stimulated amidst larger numbers of Muslims in Iraq with the collateral damage of conflict in which the U.S. military is a protagonist over what it would be without U.S. occupation forces in significant numbers. The historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that a people will fight harder in defense of their religion than even for defense of their national political leadership; it may thus be a mistake to inadvertently disregard the collateral impact of conflict upon Muslim religious practices that the U.S. presence has in it’s effort to compel the Shi’a and Sunni of Iraq to live together equally sharing a democratic government and expel terrorist living there to the infernal realms of correction for abominable practices upon civilians.
The most well known Muslim historian Ibn Kaldun wrote that Mohammedans intrinsically must dominate the world and annihilate sectarian opposition while Christianity and other religions have no such implicit drive. What the west can do about the broader issue of inherent Muslim aggression is to win through peace and prosperity converts to an intelligent, rational, just, democratic and confident environmentally progressive liberating, spiritual free westernist ideal that grew from Greek philosophers and politicians and divine leadership teleogically by the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob unto the universal liberator Jesus Christ. Fossil fuel for automobiles and federal deficits aren’t the progressive way of the new west but an economically reprobate backsliding into crude conservative dependence on anti-western oil reserves.
Islam developed as a warrior faith of Muhammad that conquered the old world below the Mediterranean Sea and expanded northward until repulsed by European counterattacks to drive Muslim powers from Iberia, Italy and the Balkans. With the vast transfer of western wealth through purchases of fossil fuels from Muslim nations the west has stimulated both Muslim economic development and simultaneously renewed the will to power over the world of many Muslim Machiavellis enriched with budget surpluses and the ability to purchase political influence.
In Washington D.C. political power still flows toward a post second world war era belief that American globalism is a necessary response to global communism. In that paradigm all anti-communist powers including the Muslim nations were appropriate business partners while populist democratic revolutionaries were suspected of socialist sympathy and commonly were opposed by the west in favor of royal governments. The consequences of western anti-populism in Iran continue today while suspicions about Shi’a anti-populism in Iraq lead Washington policy toward self-contradictory relations both in support of and in opposition to Shi’a power while simultaneously supporting Sunni royal power in the middle east and Gulf States, and in opposing Sunni fundamentalist revolutionary powers that are expressed through terrorist means such as Al Qa’eda and the Salafist movement.
The present American policy is to continue the pursuit of an abstract Iraqi Government largely modeled upon a continuity of the Baathist Government of Saddam Hussein with different democratic and western players supportive of existing Middle East leadership in other nations in theory assuming command. In some instances corrupt rollover of officials and practices from the oil for food program have continued. How ineffective must it be for U.S. taxpayers to buy gasoline for Iraqis at high cost via contracts to Halliburton or other favorite corporations of the administration?
The policy goal of purifying a democratic government from sectarianism antagonisms directing death squads or other dysfunctions of government integrity seems unrealistic even if a saturation of Iraq to some extent is accomplished militarily that is able to search and destroy Muslim terrorist preemptively as some of the sectarian killings are slow revenge and sectarian cleansing activities. Was Britain able to halt the IRA terror campaign in Ireland in 5 or 6 years, and were the I.R.A. as different from the British, or as stocked with explosives, or as full of hate and suicide bombers, language and cultural differences as the Muslims of the Middle East are from Americans in Iraq?
In Vietnam a war of attrition was also waged upon the VC and NVA forces between 1965 and 1967 producing according to Vietnamese Military Commander Giap 500,000 Vietnamese military casualties. The 1968 Tet offensive was devastated by American military forces while Saigon, defended by the South Vietnamese ARVN forces, was infiltrated to produce battles lasting several days. Though the NVA and VC lot the Tet offensive they won a propaganda offensive in America that compelled the leadership to begin withdrawing forces. President Johnson choose not to run for re-election and President Nixon began withdrawing U.S. military forces promptly upon taking the oath of office in January 1969 over a period of several years.
With the Presidential election of 2008 approaching similar phenomena seems to be developing with history repeating itself somewhat. President Bush seems more and more like L.B.J. fighting for good reasons but not comprehending a priori the costs to America for doing so, while Hillary Clinton seems like another Richard Nixon without the political intelligence posturing to begin withdrawing forces immediately upon taking office if elected.
Many insurgent forces have learned that they may defeat the United States simply by protracting combat casualties even if one-sidedly in their disfavor out over a period of several years to outlast supporting American political opinion. The improficient structuring of peace and economics in post 2003 Iraq may damage future American national security significantly as potential foreign enemies discover more about substantive flaws in American defense reasoning and policy inflexibility.
Does a war won so swiftly in 2003 over Iraq, perhaps because Saddam Hussein did not believe America would really attack and instead positioned most of his forces along the Iranian border believing they might, followed by ineptness in building a peace in Iraq offer lessons of the corrupting influence of corporatism upon the executive branch in contracting and designing contracting criteria for post war reconstruction?
Julius Caesar personally led the Roman legions in battle and adaptively devised quick responses to tactical field challenges. The U.S. commander in chief today is far removed from battlefield and social reality and claims to follow the advice of military officers in the field while descrying political interference or ideas in what he believes is essentially a military conflict. President Bush could not be more wrong about the nature of the Iraq conflict and the sectarian purgings following the lifting of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror. The political situations in Iraq are the causes for the conflicts and lay beyond the reach of military solutions but are amenable to political remediations reinforced with condign power.
Military commanders cannot formulate political policy for Iraq and can do no more than wage a war of attrition upon terrorists in Iraq acting as a sort of macro-national police force.
In the Iraq conflict it is civilians taking a beating from sectarian and terrorist killings and that phenomenon has increased each year the Bush policy for Iraq has been in effect following the 2003 Gulf war.
The Bush method has increased terrorism and harmed respect for American military forces internationally. Political remedies for the Iraq democide are what are missing from U.S. Iraq policy.
The failure of the peace building in Iraq in protracted bloody quagmire is an echo of the pre-war democide of civilians killed during the sanctions era that was a moral justification for the 2003 war…the ongoing civilian democide in Iraq is a corrupt, negative slide toward that pit of evil politics in existence before the war. I will not write about the alternate, unreasoned and shadow incompetent plan of some Congressional Democrats to vacate Iraq with immediate, complete troop withdrawal to allow an Iraqi civil war to flower.
The cost of hundreds of billions of dollars to police against terrorism in Iraq isn’t sustainable or necessary in the long run. The presence of American occupation forces may promote a new generation of terrorists and blood vengeance toward Americans as likely as to end terrorism. Osama Bin Ladin planned to use economic war upon the United States and to create U.S. expense and in that regard Al Qa’eda is soundly defeating the Bush administration’s profligate, ineffective spending of military and economic resources in Iraq. The economic opportunity costs for the United States of spending hundreds or thousands of billions of dollars in Iraq instead of in the United States and Mexico are all in favor of the surplus generating oil producing Muslim countries that produce Al Qa’eda terrorists.
The economist Lester Thurow described some more obsolete fossil fuel and raw materials economic modes as in competition with more high tech approaches and just a maintenance national economic strategy instead of creative, progressive and competitive. The creation of debt and redistribution of U.S. borrowed wealth to that obsolete special interest sector may by a primary causal factor for the inefficiency of the Bush administration in failing to rebuild Iraq following April 2003 beginning with the plundering of the National Museum unprotected while the oil ministry was defended by U.S. troops.
President Bush as a lame duck should begin to consider political realities that he might still accomplish in his final year before the Nov. 7th 2008 Presidential election in order create some semblance of sustainable order in Iraq perhaps equivalent to the Korean troop deployment following the Korean War armistice.
The Iraq troop redeployment should be along sustainable sectarian lines and American troops would serve as armed peace-keepers preventing possibility of general civil war from flowing over the sectarian boundaries. Americans would let the Iraqi Government and sectarian geographic regions police themselves, and assist with safe travel and refugee relocation of sectarian minorities to their own majority region.
Iraqis finally taking charge of their own security would still have a central government in the green zone to participate in, and the U.S. would continue to defend the green zone until the sectarian issues had died down and each Shi’a and Sunni and Kurd district sought full participation in the Iraqi national Government. The Shi’a forces will find their own internal balance as can the Sunni while purging terrorists from their midst.
U.S. troop levels would be as follows;
a) 40,000 on defensible sectarian boundaries
10,000 on National border patrols
c) 10,000 in Kurdistan in an Armor Division
d) 10,000 dedicated for Green Zone security
e) 5,000 special forces for anti-terrorist special operations
The troop levels for the mission to Iraq would be stabilized at this 75,000 number for a few years deployment until the national Iraqi Government deems their mission fulfilled.
While there is no purely military solution for the problem of fundamentalist anti-American terrorism nor anti-sectarian terrorism in Iraq neither is there a purely political solution. Instead a mixed approach of political intelligence and military deployment are needed to shore up the multi-variegated political environment of Iraq along sustainable political lines as Iraqis themselves reduce terrorism through a variety of means. If the United States displaces Iraqi self-defense measures as it displaced South Vietnamese defense measures by taking over the war in 1965 from the Vietnamese a low to moderate level purging of sectarian neighborhoods, a variety of anti-American terrorist insurgent actions and formations of newer anti-American international terror coalitions of an ad hoc nature probably will continue to develop. Americans have lacked pragmatic political and military intelligence increasingly since the end of the Second World War.
Containment of communism in the South was hindered by a variety of self-limiting or self-misunderstanding parameters…I will mention two…
U.S. forces until late in the war could not pursue NVA or VC forces beyond South Vietnam following a battle thus allowing strategic opposition force retreat to safe havens as an implicit battle disengagement option. That parameter placed the U.S. military onto a permanently defensive posture on interior lines with no battle front as the VC and NVA tended to attack anywhere in South Vietnam with less concentration on the mid-section.
Secondly the issue of who the war could be won for was a concern. Could the ordinary South Vietnamese poor rural peasant understand Marxian or Smithian economic well, did they have an interest at all in European political philosophy, and would they have sympathized more with elite urban capitalists and foreign military forces or people that supported their rural interests and low taxation? The enlightened self-interests of many South Vietnamese might have drifted toward the communist forces quite easily especially with the prodding incentive of death for non-cooperation.
At any rate if a war to contain communism was won in South Vietnam would it have been possible to prevent rural peasant populations from perceiving their interests as dissimilar from urban capitalists identified with former colonialist powers? Wasn’t the ground for long-term resistance to foreign colonialism implicitly fruitful in post-colonial Vietnam, and wouldn’t it have been reinforced for decades by the former Soviet Union and Communist China through Laos and North Vietnam even if the United States had withdrawn early or not escalated the war? Isn’t the ground for anti-American and Anti-Christian/anti-Jewish terror in Iraq comparably fruitful in several ways?
With many foreign policy analysts describing the prospects for decades ahead of anti-northern, anti-western terrorism by Muslim and other global forces as a way of redistributing global wealth, the U.S. administration should develop before it’s last year in office a more practical long range budget for stabilizing Iraq. The administration’s reliance upon a corporatist economic rationale in disinterpretation of the principles of democracy and the right role of capitalism in democratic nationalism may preclude it’s opportunities to develop economic, defense and international relations policy in such a way that the financial interests of the U.S. Government are not disadvantaged and the financial interests of select military-industrial producers advantaged at public expense.
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Kazrith
July 16, 2007
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Weydon
July 16, 2007
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July 19, 2007
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