<p>The estimations of Saddam’s WMD potential was overblown, often for political purposes by various agents in the game. </p>
<p>I would have invaded Afghanistan, though I would not have relied upon locals to keep OBL contained.</p>
<p>I would not have invaded Iraq, but would have continued to monitor, both via open inspections and intelligence operations.</p>
<p>Iran poses are far more real, for more difficult threat. We’ve limited our options, however, because our military is bogged down in Iraq. Moreover, due to the strong Iranian connections with the Iraqi Shiites who must of necessity form the basis of any stability in a post-Saddam Iraq, our political options, if not circumsribed, come with some high costs attached as well. </p>
<p>Horribly, horribly, horribly misplayed out of total arrogance.</p>
<p>Since Sadaam’s sole threat to the US came in the form of routing illegal revenues from the Oil for Food Program to terrorist financiers, I believe the optimum US response would have been to expose the corruption in the program, corruption that strengthened Sadaam’s hold on power and influence.</p>
<p>The UN wasn’t about to lift the sanctions. Too many people were making a killing from the program. I don’t think Sadaam even wanted the sanctions lifted. The structure of the sanctions made the entire Iraq economy a black market with a cut of every transaction going into Sadaam’s pocket.</p>
<p>I think there are some tangible positives in Iraq. It is clear that it is better that Saddam is not in power anymore. The elections look pretty good to me. The sentiment of the populace as reported in the US press that I read is positive.</p>
<p>The question is, should it be our job to ovethrow a bad government? One thing is clear, the UN has not been effective at all. Though I do not know what the alternative is.</p>
<p>For me, no question we should have gone in to Afghanistan.</p>
<p>If you think the Iraqi elections look pretty good, then you probably don’t understand what’s happening on the ground. Give it another six months and you’ll see the slo-mo train wreck play out. </p>
<p>Saddam Hussein is not in power any more. Otoh, we are producing new terrorists at a greater rate than we’re killing them. Um.</p>
<p>ID: you are wrong about the sanctions not being lifted. They were all but gone when we went in; had we completed the WMD investigations there would have been no rationale for the UN to have continued them and France, Russia and Germany would have insisted that they be removed.</p>
<p>TD, nice concept of continuing the “open inspections” but apparently you forgot what it took to get the inspections to occur. Were you advocating keeping several hundred thousand US troops camped on his border to make Saddam allow the investigations?</p>
<p>Nobody in Iraq is even predicting a timeframe for seating a coalition government at this point. The winning UIA block has yet to nominate a candidate for prime minister and indications are that the UIA is splintered with internal power struggles. Negotiations for the formation of a government have not started.</p>
<p>The only “positive” news (depending on your point of view) is that the Shiia militias have begun the process of neutralizing opposition forces.</p>
<p>See this week’s State Department status report:</p>
<p>Electricity availabillity for the last week in Baghdad averaged 4.4 hours per day. Nationwide electricity availability averaged 9.4 hours a day. These levels are still at or below pre-war levels.</p>
<p>Crude Oil production increased last week to 1.94 million barrels a day, compared to a pre-war peak of 2.5 MBPD and a post-war peak of 2.67 MBPD.</p>
<p>And that is the oil production to support the oil for food program that is now being questioned? How was the previous level of production supported? Clearly the UN was not effective at all in enforcing the “peace” after the first gulf war.</p>
<p>The future is always difficult to predict so I am not convinced that it will not turn out well. That also means I am not convinced that it will either.</p>
<p>If you recall, Bush had initially outlined a plan where rapidly increasing Iraqi oil exports following the war would fund the reconstruction. Instead, we have see Iraqi oil production decline with a deteriorating security situation.</p>
<p>Boiled down to its essence, we are trying to rebuild a country that is a) in the middle of a war and b) not only doesn’t want our help, but undermines every reconstruction effort.</p>
<p>I’m all for “stay the course” in principle, but not when, three years after the war, things are not fundamentally improving. For the President to continue spending US dollars at the current rate, he needs to explain precisely what he hopes to accomplish in Iraq and lay out a scenario where that can happen. At this point, it is quite clear that a “beacon of light” stable democracy in Iraq (the goal initially touted) is not going to happen anytime soon. So what are we doing there? Who is benefitting?</p>
<p>Excellent points. I agree that we need a better plan than we have and that Bush did lay out a direction that said oil exports would pay for the reconstruction effort. Not sure what to do, but I think getting out now is not right either. That is a decision that should have been made before going in.</p>
<p>I am still waiting for the training up of the Iraqi militia and police force. And where is all the insurgency coming from? Is it just the old Saddam loyalists who are now on the outs? Perhaps the country will splinter into a number of different fiefdoms.</p>
<p>The thing is, I am not certain they are worse of than they were before the war. Regardless, I would prefer not to be in the nation building business. Obviously that is entirely different than our action in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Eagle, your hope in the Iraqi police & army units is doomed. There are virtually no “national” units of any effectiveness. Many are direct proxies of one political faction or another. Those that aren’t are riddled with informers in three, four, five, six different directions. </p>
<p>For your edification and entertainment, I invite you to watch the on-going process to determine who controls the Interior Ministry in the new governmnet. SCIRI is determined to maintain control and has its people in place through the ranks from top to bottom; other factions are demanding, in light of SCIRI to use the Interior (police) forces to its own ends, that SCIRI <em>not</em> retain control. And this is but one small fragment of the overall picture that is looking no better than the next fragment and the next and the one after that. Cf., an Impressionist painting, where you don’t pay much attention to any one blotch of color but look at the effect in aggregate. The administration is feverish in its efforts to point at any one splotch of “yellow” or whatever to lead people to conclude that the picture is bright. The odds are very heavy that the picture in six months or twelve months will be even worse than it is now, assuming the goal is a stable, democratic Iraqi society where the insurgency is on the wain. </p>
<p>I’ve long said that the options for a stable, democratic, pro-American government was “choose any two.” I’m beginning to think that even I was optimistic.</p>
<p>There is no such thing as an Iraqi military or police force because there is no such thing as an “Iraq” right now. Iraq is another one of those botched set of lines drawn on a map by Europeans that bears no resemblence to the underlying ethnic groups. There are three major groups in Iraq (Shiia, Sunni, and Kurds), none of whom share any common interests, all of whom are jocking for position. Left to their own devices, all three would rather destroy the idea of an Iraqi nation-state than relinquish or share their power. Of the three, the Shiia majority is the only group that can (and will) dominate the political landscape, but this is the one group the US doesn’t want to see in power because they are led by Islamic clerics and have natural cultural ties to Iran. Realistically, what we should have done is jumped into bed with the Shiia clerics from the get go and tried to use the opportunity to forge economic ties with the Islamic theocracy that will ultimately hold power in Iraq. Or, for that matter, we could have avoided an invasion altogether and just funded a Shiia revolution 10 years ago. Same result, lower cost. </p>
<p>Insurgency is really the wrong concept altogether because it implies one organized force resisting an established organized force. That isn’t the case in Iraq. A better conceptual framework would be anarchy.</p>
<p>The groups causing the trouble are numerous. First are the Baathist Sadaam loyalists (a largely secular crowd) who are losing their sweetheart grasp on power. Remember, we never really defeated this group militarily – they ran for the hills during the invasion. Overlapping this group are the Sunni muslims who are desperate to reject a political process because they know they will be a minority. Attacking electric stations prevents stability and the last thing they want is stability. Meanwhile, you have strong Shiia militias in the south flexing their muscles to impose fundamentalist Islamic law. Layered on top of this local instability is a steady flow of jihadists who avail themselvs of the opportunity to pour into Iraq and fight the great Satan. This is compounded by the fact that none of the other countries in the region want to see stability in Iraq. They all have one dog or another in the fight. The Turks don’t want to see the Kurdish faction gain power. The Iranians don’t want to see the Sunnis gain power. The Saudis and the Syrians don’t want to see the Shiia gain power. And, so on and so forth. Nowhere on earth is the old adage “With friends like that, who needs enemies?” more true than with the US and its allies in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Our presence is largely irrelevant to the political outcome in Iraq. That is going to be determined by a (bloody) power struggle among Iraqi factions. All we are doing is holding our finger in the dike and delaying the inevitable. The result is going to be the same. The only real choice is how much money and how many lives we pour down the drain in the interim. Right now, we are just serving as a convenient target.</p>
<p>The sad point of incompetence is that none of this is a surprise. The administration chose believe its own wishes, because of the emotional gratification they could get from knocking off Saddam, supported by the info supplied by Chalabi and his minions, who were angling for their own interests, and occasionally with a shrewd bit of egging on by the Israelis, where at least certain elements were happy to use the U.S. as a catspaw to serve their own interests.</p>
<p>The Bush administration thought that they could ramrod through an Allawi led government. One story presented on a C-SPAN foreign policy roundtable last week was there were plans to engineer a coup against Sadaam in 2002 and install Allawi as the new strongman head of the Baathist party – basically keeping the political structure in place, but putting an experience Baathist strongman in the leadership role, someone who the US did business with. As the story goes, Chalabi ratted out the plan to Sadaam.</p>
<p>After the war, the US still thought it could turn to Allawi. They installed him as the interim prime minister and then attempted to covertly boost his chances in the first election. But, it didn’t work. One of the obstacles is that the Shiaa have the only ready-made political organization in the country (through the mosques). Party building is key to any democracy. When you have a country with no history of political party machinery, the one party with a built-in infrastructure has an insurmountable advantage.</p>
<p>If I had to guess, my hunch is that the US is now working feverishly to slap together some kind of gerrymandered alliance for a coalition government led by anybody but the UIA Shiia alliance that dominated the popular voting. If we assume that the Shia theocrats will ultimate control Iraqi politics, then attempting to gerrymander them out of power is just plain stupid foreign policy. There would be worse scenarios than having a Shia theocracy in the Middle East that we can do business with. We’d be better off if we at least had some economic ties with Iran, too.</p>
<p>I mean…it’s not like we really approve of the Chinese government, but we do business with them because it’s in our national interests to do so and to maintain functional channels of communication and cooperation where there is shared self-interest.</p>