What Can be Done
by KevinNovember 28th, 2006
The United States has no ability to affect the outcome of the war in Iraq any more. It hasn’t for quite some time, but now its official:
The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq or counter al-Qaeda’s rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report that set off debate in recent months about the military’s mission in Anbar province.
The Marines recently filed an updated version of that assessment that stood by its conclusions and stated that, as of mid-November, the problems in troubled Anbar province have not improved, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday. “The fundamental questions of lack of control, growth of the insurgency and criminality” remain the same, the official said.
The Marines’ August memo, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post, is far bleaker than some officials suggested when they described it in late summer. The report describes Iraq’s Sunni minority as “embroiled in a daily fight for survival,” fearful of “pogroms” by the Shiite majority and increasingly dependent on al-Qaeda in Iraq as its only hope against growing Iranian dominance across the capital.
The troops we have in place cannot do anything about this, and, absent a draft that we all know will not happen, there are no more troops to send. Many generals think too many troops will just inspire more opposition anyway. The fate of Iraq is now in the hands of the worst sorts, the militias and deathsquads that our stupid invasion allowed to come to power.
As I said earlier, the Bushes lost this war almost before they began fighting it:
Bush lost this war a long time ago; they lost it when they invaded with a force so small it couldn’t be careful; they lost it when they put tens of thousands of armed men out of work; they lost it when they ignored Sistani; they lost it when they went to war with an army that had no counter-insurgency tactics; they lost it when they refused to plan for the occupation; they lost it when they didn’t provide security to Baghdad in the days immediately after the invasion; they lost it when they decided that the proper response to the murder and humiliation of four contractors was to level an entire city.
The only thing the US can do now is help its allies and the people who want something the Kurds, Shiite and Sunni militias will not offer get out:
“Withdrawal means that the United States will have to watch Iraqis die in ever greater numbers without doing much of anything to prevent it, because the welfare of Iraqis will no longer be among our central concerns. Those Iraqis who have had anything to do with the occupation and its promises of democracy will be among the first to be killed: the translators, the government officials, the embassy employees, the journalists, the organizers of women’s and human rights groups. As it is, they are being killed one by one. (I personally know at least half a dozen of them who have been murdered.) Without the protection of the Green Zone, U.S. bases, or the inhibiting effect on the Sunni and Shia militias of 150,000 U.S. troops, they will be killed in much greater numbers. To me, the relevant historical analogy is not the helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, leaving thousands of Vietnamese to the reeducation camps. It is the systematic slaughter by the Khmer Rouge of every Cambodian who appeared to have had anything to do with the West.
If the United States leaves Iraq, our last shred of honor and decency will require us to save as many of these Iraqis as possible. In June, a U.S. Embassy cable about the lives of the Iraqi staff was leaked to The Washington Post. Among many disturbing examples of intimidation and fear was this sentence: “In March, a few staff approached us to ask what provisions would we make for them if we evacuate.” The cable gave no answer. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad does not issue visas. Iraqis who want to come to the United States must make their way across dangerous territory to a neighboring country that has a U.S. Embassy with a consular section. Iran and Syria do not; Jordan has recently begun to bar entry to Iraqi men under the age of 35. For a military translator to have a chance at coming to the United States, he must be able to prove that he worked for at least a year with U.S. forces and have the recommendation of a general officer–nearly impossible in most cases. Our current approach essentially traps Iraqis inside their country, where they will have to choose, like Osman, between jihadists and death squads.
We should start issuing visas in Baghdad, as well as in the regional embassies in Mosul, Kirkuk, Hilla, and Basra. We should issue them liberally, which means that we should vastly increase our quota for Iraqi refugees. (Last year, it was fewer than 200.) We should prepare contingency plans for massive airlifts and ground escorts. We should be ready for desperate and angry crowds at the gates of the Green Zone and U.S. bases. We should not allow wishful thinking to put off these decisions until it’s too late. We should not compound our betrayals of Iraqis who put their hopes in our hands.”
Let them all come, even if it is in the millions. There is plenty of land in Texas, Utah, Idaho, and Mississippi. It is quite literally the least that we can do. Failure to plan for this will be as great a moral disaster as failing to plan for the original occupation.
Categories: Iraq |
