Iraq - Ugh!

Since I last posted I've finished Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, started The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward - A New Approach by Baker, Hamilton & The Iraq Study Group, and started and finished Peter Galbraith's The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End. I also read Maxwell Taylor Kennedy's Make Gentle the Life of This World : The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy and the Words That Inspired Him.

The books on the middle east lead me to believe that working to support a three state solution in Iraq and a 2 state solution in Palestine make the most sense for long term peace and are also in the best interest of our country. Instability in Iraq serves Iran very well for right now. And instability in Palestine serves almost no one, but Iran can probably still get some mileage from it.

In my opinion, we are turning Iran into a world power with far more influence than their size, economy, or ideology warrant. I say their ideology and yet I believe that it is really only a minority radical Shia Islamic agenda that is best served by the current situation.

Today, in Iraq, the most peaceful portions of the country are the Shia south and the Kurdish north. The part of the country that is most closely aligned with the west in general and the US in particular is the Kurdish north. It is also true that the most independent part of the country is the Kurdish north - they have a coherent government, army (peshmerga), and to some extent vision. They will go along with the single state Iraq long enough to insure that nothing is done to jeopardize their de facto independence. The Shia want to run & rule a religious state and the Sunnis seem to want a return to a unified Iraq with the Sunnis in charge - there are strong secular and religious minded elements in the Sunni camp, but both want Sunni dominance of a unified country. The Iranians are very strong supporters of all brands of the Shia, but probably also stir up the Sunni in order to foment an unstable situation.

The Palestine situation simply serves to create new generations of the disaffected who are great candidates for future terrorist organizations. Further, the more intransigent Israel appears then the more influence we see from Iranian sponsored political (& terrorist) organizations. And every time one of those organizations is able to tweak their nose at Israel or more importantly the US, the more their stature rises in the Middle East.

And as long as our troops are deployed in southern Iraq they are in danger of Iranian sponsored terrorist attacks as well as direct retaliation from the Iranian military. I believe this limits our options with regard to dealing with Iranian nuclear efforts.

The Iraq Study Group advocates a very broad and in my opinion very complex set of suggestions. It looks to me like the chance of general success given the number of objectives could be very difficult. However, their concept of working more in concert with other nations makes sense to me. I sometimes think the Bush administration's idea of working with other nations is to say - We're going to do this. Join us. - rather than truly consulting with those other countries.

From the book of quotes from Robert Kennedy, I found the following...

History is full of peoples who have discovered it is easier to fight than to think, easier to have enemies and friends selected by authority than to make their own painful choices, easier to follow blindly than to lead, even if leadership must be the private choice of a single man alone with a free and skeptical mind. But in the final telling it is that leadership, the impregnable skepticism of the free spirit, untouched by guns or police, which feeds the whirlwind of change and hope and progress in every land and time. -- ROBERT F KENNEDY

That some how fits and it seems like we need a leader that will lead in such a way.

And now the star power is weighing in. McCain is strongly in favor of the troop surge. Personally, I think that an increase of 20,000 is a case of way too little way too late. We can probably dominate certain locales with our troops, but we can't dominate the entire country for an extended period with the troops currently in country or on the way. We can maybe make things look a little better in some areas for a bit, but we'll have a hard time controlling the whole country, especially when our troops have to move on to another area. Hillary is tossing her hat in and now she's pretty much reversing course claiming to be against much of the Bush approach. And Barack is the rock star. He was against the war back when everyone was for it. He shows a little integrity or perhaps he's just not a good politician and got lucky on this one. Edwards regrets voting for the war, but he gets crowded out on the national level at this point. Edwards, however, may have the best combination of organization, rhetoric and name recognition in the early primary states.

What an interesting year this will be.