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No Time for Choice on a Iraq Retreat
Josh Marshall of TPM hase some thoughts on the U.S. retreat in Iraq [emph added]:
Perpetuating the slow-motion disaster that is the status quo is necessary to sustain our denial.
[…]
I know there are many people who are for immediate withdrawal. No delays. Out in a matter of months. But I don’t think that’s a majority position even among those who are strongly against the war. That is because the situation is so bad and so unpredictable that it is hard to make categorical decisions before we’ve even got the practice started. Speaking only for myself but I suspect speaking for many others as well, the key is that we start the process. The key is that we make a category decision that the US occupation of Iraq is more the problem than the solution.
Somehow Josh, like the majority, seems to be still in denial. There is no unpredictability, ‘start of the process’ and then slowgoing before making categorical decisions. It’s in or out NOW.
There are some 160,000 U.S. soldiers and a whole bunch of mercenaries keeping this war going. All current part-withdrawl calls from the Democratic as well as the Republican side are aiming for some ‘reduction of combat forces’ – not for real total retreat. They all are bullshit.
One may be able to reduce troops in Iraq now from 160,000 back to 130,000 without much strategic change by stopping to interfere with the ongoing ethnic clensing at the local level of this or that Iraqi province. But below that count, it will get continuously harder to keep up any base in Iraq. There is a long and endangered supply line that feeds these bases and it needs 24/7 coverage by lots of combat forces to stay open.
Below 130,000 troops in the country, or maybe below 110,000 – the exact point is debatable – the overall position is untenable. The number of troops needed to secure the replenishment of resident troops will succeed these manifold. There comes a point where one needs a brigade of combat roops or two or three to allow for delivery of a single sheet of toilet paper, or a gallon of water, for one platoon outpost somewhere in the Anbar desert.
Any call for retreat of all combat forces while at the same time pretending to hold on to some superbases that do need supply delivered by ground traffic is illusionary. An ‘endgame‘ with just one big base in the Kurdish northern Iraq is equally lunatic as this sets up the U.S. as a Kurdish backup force against Turkey on which roads the U.S. supplies for that base would depend.
It’s all or nothing. Nothing is certainly a bad option for the Washington cocktail party consent, but it’s the best option available.
General Pace is preparing the public for a troop increase. But with the current recruiting problems and rank attrition there is no hope that any meaningful increase can be sustained long enough to gain anything. Indeed any increase would only be possible by increasing deployment time. The original schedule at the start of the war was one year of deployment and two at home. The new one would be 18 months combat and less than 12 months home with the next deployment already marked on the calendar. Only psychopath will sign that contract line.
Starting the retreat process now, as Josh recommends, without recognizing the inevitable fast flight under fire that will immediately and inevitably follow, is still denial.
The situation is NOT unpredictable. For the U.S. there is only a binary decision left. Get out now and do so fast, or prolong the stay and pay an very, very high material and human price.
All the base equipment, wide LCD TV’s and air conditioners or whatever was supplied by ten-thousands of trucks during the last years will be not be recoverable anyway. Every convoy leaving the country will be attacked more furiously than any convoy coming in today.
This is inevitable. There is no categorical decision to be avoided anymore. It’s now and bad or later and worse. Get a grip on that and tell the people.
Antifa is right. Frightenly so.
Slothrop wouldn’t know a fact if it sat on his face. Face it, Sloth, we’re all too dumb for you here — that’s why everything written here is so “reductionist.” Only you possess the sublime ability to distill the infinite number of signifiers and semiots in the world down to the primordial goo that is your very own brand of informed opinion, unhampered by “facts.” Only you know how to read a book written by some second-level, third-world, neo-con think-tank apparatchik, and distill facts from motivation, a feat that not a single pinhead on this pitiful blog has yet mastered, despite your selfless and unflagging tutelage. Oh woe to the stupid, the ignorant, the knee-jerk leftists of this blog who don’t automatically condemn the whole of Mesopotamia to automatic death because of slothrop’s ineluctable “facts.” What a bunch of bleeding heart softies we must all be! Even an Einstein and a Chomsky could not keep up with slothrop’s steady stream of “disinterested” analysis which his dusty tomes supply only him (and perhaps Bill Kristol): Those two lesser minds lacked slothrop’s mighty ability to configure the vast universal jigsaw of “facts,” and both eventually descended into the snakepit of humanism. So did Nobel Laureates like Dawkins, Aumann, and Schelling — whose work has provided an empirical basis to the long-term value of co-operation. Alas, humanity must be really fucked when such genius believes in itself. Oh mighty Slothrop, help us; rescue us from this dankful porridge of humanism, this reductive liberalism that insists on believing in people and co-operation over the Steppenwolfian world of Machiavelian, Hegalian Hell in which only you is privileged to eternally roast.
Keep telling us how Iraq was worse beforehand, with everyone killing everyone, and no civilized society whatsoever — no universities, no museums, no culture, no education, no rights for women, no healthcare, no shia-sunni intermarriage, no agriculture, no oil earnings to be distributed to the people, and far more background radiation then now, which the DU aerosolized over the country like some magic sticky goo which has miraculously absorbed all of those free ions preventing cancer throughout the lucky-ducky populace, sending those cancer rates and one-eyed cyclops microcephalic births to all-time lows in recorded history, far more carniverous fish cleaning the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, far more women forced to prostitute themselves to the very occupying force they so detest, far more men caught up in the anodyne stupor of drug addiction — slutrollop baby, keep telling us, we’ll get it eventually.
Slothrop, truly you inhabit a Bizarro world; could you possibly be just an imaginary character out of a second-rate Seinfeld episode — a feverish nightmare of Kramer’s, or are you, despite all evidence — a humaniod. Look, Dr. Frankenstein, the creature, it breathes. Indeed it does. Unfortunately, in it’s puerile over-eagerness, it tends to spit-up a bit over the rest of us.
Posted by: Bob M. | Jul 18 2007 9:14 utc | 24
We’ve already killed/evicted 20% of the population and probably wounded/psychologically destroyed another 20%.
Maybe a bit high, but no stupid quibbles now.
50% of the rest live from hand to mouth, with insufficient food, no electricity, no jobs, no health care, dirty water, no schools, no going out for girls, no air conditioning, life in the Bad Zone.
it is:
giving birth in the dark, with only dirty water, an oil lamp, attended by a frightened neighbor; prayer, hope;
never passing your end of year exams, the teacher has been killed and the class decimated, even if you did pass, a stamp of sympathy, there is no future;
having to close your small shop, huddle in fear in your home. or move to a bombed out building, live under plastic sheets, beg in the street;
come home and conceal a rape, to finally break and hang yourself, it was not possible to continue the deception;
look at a starving child; know you can no longer breast feed, the child is 2 and you yourself are undernourished, despairing, dried up;
search and search and hunt to exhaustion for the son, the uncle, the father, the friend, taken away in a raid, not accounted for, no information, hunt, hunt, where, how?
apply for a job in the Green Zone; the money will feed, will, must: but the risks are so high…
better to be a prostitute, with care, maybe…
scream an’ yell and hope to intimidate when the US soldiers show up, wail, bend down, pray, but mostly make a lot of noise, they don’t like it, it can make them leave; they kill but are also vulnerable; hide the children if possible;
try to live without any male support;
Watchers, scribblers, pundits: Weep. bitter tears. Have at least that grace. And go on from there.
Posted by: Noirette | Jul 18 2007 19:31 utc | 41
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