Not So Snappy Answers To Simple Questions
Atrios asks
They Say Go
More importantly, why the hell would we want to stay?
-Atrios 9:10 AM
Because it’s always been about the desire to control them. Which is sadly funny because of the paradox that occurs when there is a powerful popular front against such colonialism, as illustrated by this famous anti-imperialist dictum:
The more you tighten your grip, Governor Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
Which in turn is why so many wingnuts favor the Death Star solution against people who merely want soveriegnty over their own affairs.
***
Yeah, yeah more lefty/Chomkyite blathering from Retardo! He is not serious! So listen to Brzezinski, who is “serious”:
I mean, the fact of the matter is that, three years after the occupation of Baghdad, the authority we have installed is besieged and relatively helpless, and a civil war is beginning to mushroom, under the occupation, which is unable to crush the insurgency, because it is a foreign occupation.
And, last but not least, we have to get rid of the mindset, which is really by now totally ahistorical — we no longer live in the age of colonialism. We no longer have to assume “the white man’s burden” in order to civilize others, and I’m using these phrases in quotation marks.
The Iraqis are a historical people. They’re quite capable of handling things on their own, provided their leaders are real leaders of the country and not essentially proteges of an occupying power hiding in an American fortress.
[snip]
Now, Walter says, if I understood him correctly, that he’s willing to wait three more years to see if the present government leaves the Green Zone, the American fortress. Well, how many thousands of Iraqis will die in the meantime? How many hundreds, how many thousands of Americans will die in the meantime?
How much will our prestige internationally decline? How many billions of dollars will we spend on this?
You know, analogies are not always very helpful, but farfetched analogies are really misleading. I think the analogy to the American Civil War is really farfetched.
If you want some analogy, I would say a closer analogy is that of Algeria, in the waning days of the war that the Algerians were waging against the French. Until de Gaulle came to power, the government was getting all the time the same kind of advice we now are hearing about the situation in Iraq. It may get better. Yes, three years have been wasted, but maybe we can go on for another three years. And we’re going to do better; we’re going to control Algiers.
There’s a wonderful movie called “The Battle of Algiers,” which shows what happened when the effort was made finally just to control Algiers. I’m afraid the battle for Baghdad is, in many ways, reminiscent of the battle for Algiers.
And then a man came along, de Gaulle, who instead of listening to the same degree of timid consensus — “Gee, we are stuck, but we don’t know what to do, so let’s continue being stuck and maybe we’ll win” — he realized that this is a wrong war.
This is an unhistorical war. This is a war which France cannot win because the age has passed. And we have to realize that we cannot do now in Iraq what the British did in the 1920s. This is a new age and a colonial imperial war, in the name of tutelage, is just not going to prevail.
JIM LEHRER: So pull out, Dr. Brzezinski, now?
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Pull out in an intelligent fashion.
All the wingnuts can do — all they have ever done despite poll after poll like the one Yglesias cites — is insist, like Walter Russell Mead in the Zbig link, that those Iraqis who do not want us there are merely jihadists and terrorists, a minority faction. In point of fact, just as no American would tolerate an occupier here (‘benevolent’ or not), no ordinary Iraqi wants one there. Everyone wants to be sovereign. In short, wingnuts lie because they want to control other peoples and nations.
Col. Mathieu: “In practice, demonstrating a false humanitarianism
only leads to ridiculousness and impotence. I’m certain that all units
will understand and react accordingly.”
You could add that the reason why we’re in Iraq in particular, as opposed to Syria for instance, is the oil.
“‘Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs” – Dr. Genocide
Miles Ignotus, aka Henry the K.
In short, wingnuts lie because they want to control other peoples and nations.
Sure they do. They started their civic consciousnesses in grade school proudly saluting the flag and reciting the pledge every morning. They scowled and grunted at the big words on the pages but smiled at the pictures of eagles and soldiers and factories and blue skies.
Talk about an American education crisis — perhaps we should begin a serious conversation about the collusion between the Department of Education and the textbook publishers to turn every “social studies” book into an Exceptionalism 101 primer. That’s what today’s wingnuts grew up with. It’s why they believe they’re inherently stronger, smarter and morally superior to everyone else. And it’s why they believe that their fellow Americans who don’t agree with them are traitors — we’re guilty of rejecting the myth they’ve believed wholeheartedly their entire lives.
All the wingnuts can do is insist that those Iraqis who do not want us there are merely jihadists and terrorists
Actually the jihadis and terrorists DO want us there. Our presence in Iraq galvanizes their movement and draws recruits, it bleeds America dry, and it offers easy practice fighting western forces. The CIA, for instance, knows that bin Laden and his henchmen do, in fact, want us to stay in Iraq for a long time, having intercepted communications saying just that.
Brzezinski: There’s a wonderful movie called “The Battle of Algiers,� which shows what happened when the effort was made finally just to control Algiers. I’m afraid the battle for Baghdad is, in many ways, reminiscent of the battle for Algiers.
It’s worth remembering that the Bush Administration actually screened Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers in the White House back in 2003.
Apparently they thought that the message of the film was “torture works” (just as they now apparently think that the lesson of Vietnam was “stay the course”).
Delusional doesn’t begin to describe them.
When I had to explain the Iraq war to my 9-year-old, I made it as basic as possible: “Every war is about who gets to be in charge and who gets to make the rules.”
Since she and her friends argue that very point in many of the games they play, she understood the concept immediately. Of course, she and her friends don’t resort to suicide bombing or indefinite detention or torture. Maybe when she grows up…
I got in an argument with another “milblogger” a few years ago about this exact subject. He was utterly convinced that if the US were an “occupied country” that people would not resort to IEDs and blowing up/killing off the occupiers.
He was a full-of-shit wingnut then, and he still is. I guess he missed the sovereignty point as well.
So is three years “one Mead Unit”? Do we wait to MU until the cows fucking come home? These people amaze me.
He was utterly convinced that if the US were an “occupied country� that people would not resort to IEDs and blowing up/killing off the occupiers.
Yep. Once Bush was installed and the media went red, Tim McVeigh, the Montana Freemen, the rest of the ‘patriot movement’ and the like all kinda fell off the radar. And if it ain’t on TV, it don’t exist…
…like the American Revolution, when those rascally rebels refused to fight like men in easily-mowed-down formations but hid in trees like cowards… committed arson on Her Majesty’s revenue ship Gaspee… and so on…
You can argue the merits and demerits of each case, but the remainder is this: People will do what they feel they need to do, whether you presume they are capable of it or not, whether you approve or not, whether it dovetails with your worldview or not…
I’m starting to wonder if the chief difference between the right and the left is the same chief difference between religion and science: the latter groups at least consider the possibility that they might be wrong. The problem is that consideration and analysis are dismissed as hand-wringing while blindly charging off the nearest cliff is considered bold, decisive and strong.
Excellent point about the way American Exceptionalism is written into school textbooks. Wingnuts seem to be able to remember all the slogans and propaganda very well, but are uncritical when it comes time to take a look at REAL history.
They are the perfect dupes. Insecure, powerless and small, they get their self-esteem from being born in “the greatest nation on Earth.”
This is an unhistorical war.
Yes, indeed it is. If you look at history with a view unfogged by nationalistic just-so stories, you make an amazing discovery. Modern wars have no winners. In fact, modern wars are all, and will all be unwinnable. This became obvious in 1953, but no one seems to be willing to acknowledge it even 53 years later. Name one war that has had a clear winner since the “truce” on the Korean penninsula shouted out to the world “wars may end, but there is no winner”! Wars used to be declared, fought between fairly equally constituted armies until one was conquered and/or surrendered. Then came Korea, with the global geopolitical considerations, and there simply was no way to win. Followed by Algeria, Suez, Dien Bien Phu, The Six Day war, Vietnam, Afghanistan I, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, The Balkans, Rwanda, GW I, etc. The interesting thing is the asymetrical nature of these conflicts. Invariably, one side is a powerful traditional military and the other side is a more populist guerrilla force, typically supported by another powerful nation. There are no big decisive battles, no truly occupied territory (in vietnam we frequently said we only owned the ground we were standing on). Given a supply of money and weapons, the guerrillas can just keep bleeding the traditional military until the homefront support collapses and the fighting slows, then stops. At least for a while.
We will not see an old-fashion war ever again. There’s just no way two powerful nations will slug it out. Oh, if America doesn’t learn her lesson, there may come a war with China at some point, but it will be brief, because very quickly escalation will threaten the world’s survival. So it would be important for Pentagon officials to begin to understand that while it’s easy to start a war, it’s almost impossible to end one. And it’s certainly impossible to win one. The world has changed – why haven’t they noticed?
mikey
OH GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK!!!!!
THIS IS TOTAL HIPPY CRAPOLA, WE ARE NOT LEAVING IRAQ, GET USED TO IT. THEY CAN’T FUCKING DEAL WITH THEIR NUTBAR PROBLEM AND HOW EVIL ARE YOU TO SUGGEST WE LEAVE THEM TO BE KILLEED BY THE FUCKHEADS LIKE SADR???
I HOPE YOU ROT IN HELL FOR BEING SUCH A SICK BASTARD, ALL OF YOU.
Plus, the second we leave, Turkey is gonna invade. Prolly Iran will help them.
Drunk already, annie?
Thanks for your thoughtful contribution, idiot girl. Now go away…
mikey
I wonder what the figures are for rentals of Red Dawn in Iraq?
I’ve always suspected that some of the prime architects of the Iraq War were people with severe daddy issues, but historical rather than biological ones. In this case, their “daddies” are the “Greatest Generation” that fought and defeated the Nazis and Imperial Japan.
These people, the neocon architects, and their wingnut acolytes desperately want to defeat bad guys on the order of the Nazis, to be called a “Greatest Generation”, to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat as did Churchill, to be resoute, gritty heroes who would shut their ears to the soft masses who “can’t handle the truth” and forge a dramatic victory over the forces of darkness that would be heralded for all time as the shining moment of American manhood … consigning the defeat in Vietnam, which many of them had a part in to their bitter shame, to an anomaly on the linear progression of U.S. triumphalism.
Never mind that no remotely plausible candidate existed for the role of the Nazis, as history accurately recalls them – their power, aggression and depravity equally formidable … much less as the warm glow of mytho-cultural storytelling has rendered them Blofeldian supervillians. The architects and cheerleaders of the War on Terror were handed 9-11 and hit the ground running – skipping the historical portrayal of the enemy and going straight to mythological hyperbole as they blended disparate strains of Middle Eastern unpleasantness (the would-be tyranny of Bin Laden and the boxed-in tyranny of Saddam) into a farfetched single force of superpowered fascist jihad – motivated and, incredibly, somehow equipped to bring about world destruction.
Never mind the real lessons of WWII, Vietnam and the West’s two-steps-forward-one-and-two-thirds-steps-back decades-long struggle against communism – that liberation by the sword is simple tyranny in all but the rarest of cases where legitimate self-defence and/or aggression by a third party are in play. That the boring, slow-boiling creep of market penetration, cultural bridge-making, support for dissident movements and the historically upward trending ebb and flow of economic prosperity are the truly effective weapons against totalitarianism … sharper by several orders of magnitude than any bombastic, three-week military campaign to capture the enemy’s flag. Which then reappears throughout the countryside, stronger for the shot of nationalist adrenaline you’ve pumped into it by giving it a really existing, ocuppying enemy.
The architects of the GWOT don’t want to walk down and fuck all the cows. They want to stand triumphantly on the Evil One’s toppled statue and fuck it for all the world to see and regard them with fear and awe and gratitude. (Or rather, they don’t want to actually be in harm’s way at any time, but the glory they seek as the designers of such moments is much the same.)
They’re children. Who don’t realize that different historical moments require different strategies for victory. Sometimes – rarely – those moments require glorious, martial feats of will and arms, and you get to be Churchill, you lucky duck. But most of the time, they require dull, incremental slogging towards mundane markers of progress … and all that is remembered is that the weight of history and the drip-drip-dripping of economic forces and the slight edge of policy success on one side all added up to a situation where, hopefully, there’s a bit more freedom and justice and prosperity in the world today than there was yesterday.
So they screened the “Battle of Algiers” in the White House? I can hear ’em now…
“See, the French quit, thats why they lost. The French are quitters.”
“Good point Mr. President, sir! You sure have steely resolve!”
I assume the above post by Annie is a fake Annie; unhinged as she is, she never posts in all caps and usually spells correctly. I hope. I keed.
This has been colonial hubris from the start, in a region we don’t understand nor have any interest in understanding. There’s oil there, so we’ve always done whatever’s necessary to keep it in our best interests (Saddam, the Shah, etc.). The neocons thought planting one seed of “democracy” would keep them in our best interests, as opposed to the former policy of installing crackpot dictators to keep the brown people in line. But they’ve always been wrong in the long run, and this time the short run bit them in the ass. Lessons never learned, and many have died from our arrogance.
I believe this little bit I saw over at The Vanity Press puts all these questions in perspective:
In America last week I was shocked at how unaware even anti-war Americans are (like many Britons) of the depth of the predicament in Iraq. They compare it with Vietnam or the Balkans — but it is not the same. It is total anarchy. All sentences beginning, “What we should now do in Iraq … ” are devoid of meaning. We are in no position to do anything….
Either that or she’s drunk this early in the morning.
Jeez.
I’m home all day with a domestic plumbing emergency. Glad to see S.N! is up and running.
So…to summarize the ravings, we’re going to be in Iraq for ever because “they” can’t deal with their “nutbar” problem. What’s a nutbar, exactly? It sounds tasty, maybe it’s made with dates or raisins. And if we “leave them” they’ll be killed by Sadr? Who? And what exaatly are we going to do to prevent it by staying. We already treat Sadr with kid gloves, so why would we expect that to change?
Sadr is a Shiite. Are we protecting the Sunni? But the government of Iraq is Shiite. Why would Iran invade? The government of Iran is an ally of the Iraqi Shiite government.
Turkey invading too? Why? Because of the Kurds? Huh?
I keep expecting Grand Moff Tarkin to offer a lozenge to Princess Lea, but he never does.
Iran and Turkey are already bombing northern Iraq. Duh.
Iran and Turkey are already bombing northern Iraq. Duh.
Link?
http://agonist.org/node/29896
One little bit of the tons of info here:
Both Turkey and Iran have been launching military raids into northern Iraq against a Kurdish paramilitary group that is based there, posing a dangerous new threat to stability both within Iraq and to the region.
Kurdustan is one of the many complicating factors in Iraq. If only the genius white men who parcelled up the Ottoman Empire had thought to draw the lines on the map with some regard to the people living in the region, instead of the balance of power among the victors of WWI, the Middle East might be quite a different place today. But then these were the same genius white men who crafted the Treaty of Versailles, so what could you expect?
Should we have let the stoopid brown people do it?
Racism ends a debate, bucko.
Excuse me, stoopid brown women, I should have said.
I was being sarcastic, Annie, as many on the right tend to be racist, or at least their policies. Colonialism is but one of the symptoms of this attitude, and that was the point of my comment.
Keep up, please. We don’t have all day.
And Tarkin was a neocon.
With a cool uniform.
He was utterly convinced that if the US were an “occupied country� that people would not resort to IEDs and blowing up/killing off the occupiers.
Didn’t he ever see Red Dawn?
Plus, the second we leave, Turkey is gonna invade. Prolly Iran will help them.
So what’s your solution, Annie? Stay there forever? That’s not a plan for victory. The problem with the stay-the-course crowd is that they don’t have a plan for victory. They don’t have a plan for much of anything.
If you can’t be serious about a serious situation like Iraq, then you should probably stay out of the debate.
Turkey won’t stand for Iraq being split up, which is what will likely happen if we leave. If we leave and the whole area goes to Hell…..it will be our doing. All of it. Personally, it makes me happy, the terrorists will be infighting like crazy and Israel will eventually nuke someone.
Then Jesus comes back. 🙂
You’re a special kind of crazy, Annie. If you’re one of those rapture folk (which it appears you are, you nutty troll) then may some sky deity bless you. According to your special book you’re going somewhere, but you may be surprised. BWAHAHAHA.
Brzezinski, is right about Iraq, but his history is seriously twisted. His version of France and Algeria is exactly like writing “Until Nixon came to power, the government was getting all the time the same kind of advice we now are hearing about the situation in Iraq. It may get better. [snip].
And then a man came along, Nixon, who instead of listening to the same degree of timid consensus — “Gee, we are stuck, but we don’t know what to do, so let’s continue being stuck and maybe we’ll win� — he realized that this is a wrong war.
Like Nixon, de Gaulle was in power for about half of the war. He came to power (in a rather less regular way which was not his fault*) at a time when most other politicians were much more nearly convinced that it was time to leave. In the end, he came around too (really has a way of getting real on you).
From the old Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Gaulle#1958.E2.80.941962:_Founding_of_the_Fifth_Republic
” In December, de Gaulle was elected President by the parliament with 78% of the vote, and inaugurated in January 1959.
[huge snip]
In March 1962 de Gaulle arranged a cease-fire in Algeria and a referendum supported independence, finally accomplished on 3 July 1962.”
Brzezinski’s “then this man came along” ignores over three (3) years of war and death under de Gaulle (hmmm do I read three years in Brzezinski’s bit). He is rewriting history. Interestingly, there is no possible advantage gained by his distortion. de Gaulle is hardly popular among those Americans who have to be convinced we should leave Iraq.
I assume he is simply honestly ignorant (no surprise).
*The odd way de Gaulle came to power is that a prime minister was elected who wanted to get out of Algeria. Various generals attempted a coup. Extremely powerful executive President de Gaulle was a compromise between following the constitution and a military dictatorship.
A little historical context is apparently in order for young Annie, who apparently thought Kurds had something to do with cottage cheese prior to 2003. Turkey has been fighting a Kurdish nationalist movement (terrorists, according to the Turks) known as the PKK since at least the 1970s, and probably earlier. The Kurdish peshmergas have been fighting a hit-and-run war with the Turks, who have responded with all kinds of secret police fun (torture, assassinations, and all the fun things we’re doing in Iraq). As part of that fight, the Turks have been bombing Kurdistan (in fact they get really pissed off anytime anybody uses the name “Kurdistan”) for quite a while now–it’s nothing new.
Back to your regularly scheduled rant.
Yeah, Doc, I’m not sure what annie’s trying to say, although listening to that simpleton’s take on global geopolitics is as painful as listening to a six year old describe the world of pokemon. Apparently, annie’s “knowledge” of the region goes back, oh, about 3 years.
Annie. Go read a history of the Ottoman empire. Learn how the borders as they exist today came about, and understand that the ethnic and sectarian tensions that you speak so casually of have existed for a thousand years. Try to understand that the Kurds, the Turkmen, the Arabs, the Persians, the Shi’a, the Sunni, the Druze and the Christians will struggle to live together in peace no matter what the outcome in Iraq is. Learn about the Lebanese civil war, the armenian genocide, the british mandate, palestine, the end of world war one, partition and UN181. And then come back and I’ll consider having an intelligent discussion with you. Otherwise, please, for the sake of us all, shut the fuck up…
mikey
LOL!
What do Saddam and Little Miss Muffet have in common??
They both have Kurds in their way!!!!!
Old joke, baby. What makes you think I need a history lesson? I’m schooling you, remember?
And not only the Turks consider the PKK terrorists. Everyone does.
It’s impossible to have an intelligent discussion with you, Mickey. You always resort to your bullshit of how, “i’m outta here, I was in a war and I’m fucking entitled to no one opposing my insane view of reality!! Why don’t you die Annie???”
Why the fuck do you think I care what you say, Mickey? After the horrible way you conducted yourself towards me, you can go fuck off right now for all I care.
Ya know, if the Ottomans hadn’t decided to side with the Germans in World War I, they wouldn’t have had the problems they had. Ya know, they picked the wrong side, they lost. Get over it.
Ya know, if the Ottomans hadn’t decided to side with the Germans in World War I, they wouldn’t have had the problems they had.
Yep, and if annie had a brain she’d still be an asshole…
mikey
They have no one to blame but themselves, Mikey. That is the whole point. They have to take responsibility for their own actions, instead of blaming the rest of the world. And you have no one to blame but yourself for being an idiot. Why do you feel the need to attack Miss Annie?
Hey Mickey, let’s just stop all this crap and be friends. I’m in a good mood today and feel generous towards my inferiors.
Gawd, I feel the need to bathe. Get these slugs away from me, fer crissakes…
mikey
It is rather slimey around these parts. I always feel tainted when I come to a liberal blog.
Let’s see if I follow your “reasoning”…Bush’s invasion of Iraq is a result of…the Ottoman Empire’s having been one of the Central Powers in the First World War, and pointing this out is…slimy.
Shoelimpy, do you ever read your own writing?
I didn’t bring up the Ottoman Empire, mickey did. The UNITED STATES’s (All America is at war, not just Bush) invasion of Iraq is the result of SADDAM HUSSEIN’s actions in not adhering to resolutions set up by the UNITED NATIONS (IE the official representative body of the entire world). Nothing to do with the Ottoman Empire, unless you are a liberal marxist who wants to tie in every little two-bit dictators actions with what happened 3,000 years ago or something, because really it isn’t Saddam’s fault.
Both Turkey and Iran have been launching military raids into northern Iraq against a Kurdish paramilitary group that is based there, posing a dangerous new threat to stability both within Iraq and to the region.
New? The Turks and Iranians have been making incursions into Kurdish Iraq since the early 90s.
Nothing to do with the Ottoman Empire, unless you are a liberal marxist who wants to tie in every little two-bit dictators actions with what happened 3,000 years ago or something, because really it isn’t Saddam’s fault.
Are people with multiple personality disorder usually this incoherent?
The UNITED STATES’s invasion of Iraq is the result of SADDAM HUSSEIN’s actions in not adhering to resolutions set up by the UNITED NATIONS
Oh, right, I forgot that he didn’t let the UN inspectors back in, and he refused to prove he didn’t have WMD beyond a reasonable doubt. Thanks for the reminder.
Liberals need reminders from time time to time. You don’t have very good rememberies.
Youth is wasted on the young. Also, sarcasm is wasted on the sarcastic.
I mean, the fact of the matter is that, three years after the occupation of Baghdad
OMG, Gary Ruppert *isn’t* a young Latino kid recently deported to Tijuana! He’s Zbigniew Brzezinski!
Shoelimpy: The UNITED STATES’s (All America is at war, not just Bush) invasion of Iraq is the result of SADDAM HUSSEIN’s actions in not adhering to resolutions set up by the UNITED NATIONS (IE the official representative body of the entire world).
Oh right, the same United Nations that Bush appointed Bolton to be ambassador to — the same Bolton who said you could slice off ten floors at the UN and not miss them. That United Nations. Yeah, the guys who ordered the invasion really, really respect the UN — just like Mark Foley really, really still respects Shoelimpy after their night of passion. Yep.
Shoelimpy: it was Bush who ordered the UN arms inspectors out.
Thank you for playing.
Okay, I know I’m 52 comments down this thread and no one will read it, but when I read this six-minute assessment by Brzezinski and see that Lehrer’s take-away is “So pull out, Dr. Brzezinski, now?”, I want to scream on the good doctor’s behalf:
“JESUS CHRIST, what is wrong with you? You were nodding while I was talking; were you listening to me or is your head on tumble-dry? I just spent six minutes of my life explaining what the hell is going on in terms I would expect most bright third-graders to cope well with, and you want me to agree to boil it down to a snappy pull-quote? NO! If you followed my argument; if you cannot find FAULT with my argument, then you should be able to figure out what we should do all by yourself, and so should every person who watches this show. This should not be the Argument Clinic, where one person says “Yes” and the other person says “No”, and your job is to turn to the camera and say, “There you have it”, because, frankly, if that’s what they pay you for, then I think your position can be filled more economically!”
*whew*