Despite certain optimistic Neocon Hawks assuring us that inside every Iraqi was a Walmart-shoppin' bass-fishin' HOA-belongin' Steelers fan just dyin' to get out, it keeps not being the case.
I'm surprised anybody can hear the gunfire over the sound of everyone who was talking Balkanization eight years ago high-fiving each other for their smug perspicacity.
The whole thing feels like a 2014 DJ playing a '90s grunge cover of a '70s stadium rock favorite.
We've got the '75 Spring Offensive, with outside-backed forces reinforced from a safe foreign enclave sending the running dog Southern lackeys of Uncle Sam fleeing, overrunning piles of US equipment that had been left behind to arm our wobbly ally.
We've got the setup for future generations of antiwar liberals and libertarian skeptics to repeat the "You created Bin Laden!" argument because, hey, how many of those fighters streaming in from Syria are packing heat that may or may not have been funneled from post Ka... Qa... Gaddafi Libya.
The Kurds, seeing that they better get what they can get while the getting is good, are grabbing Kirkuk. May as well set up your own 'Stan while everybody else is, I guess. That's gotta make Turkey all kinds of warm and fuzzy.
Let's see how sporty this gets.
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And we're going to end up allied with Iran in the coming civil war. Now let me go back to the music video I was watching. . . http://youtu.be/Jne9t8sHpUc
ReplyDeleteAs long as the wogs don't start rebuilding Babylon we will be ok.
ReplyDeleteLast thing we want is to be smitted.
I noticed a lot of similarities to the last two years of South Vietnam's existence. I suppose we could send troops in, but to what end?
ReplyDeleteSo...I'm just trying to get a sense of when was the last time we pulled the majority of our forces out of a country and left it in semi-decent shape in our wake. Was that Germany, Japan, or South Korea?
ReplyDeleteDoesn't matter, at best the last time we pulled out of a country, after arming them and didn't fornicate the dog was about 50 years ago. Since then we have had Vietnam, pretty much the whole of Central America, Afghanistan I and II, and Iraq I and II.
Yea, we're doing well here...
-Rob
All we need now are "boat people" coming out of the Shatt al-Arab to complete the picture.
ReplyDeleteSomeone remind me of how bad an idea partition was?
ReplyDeleteCan't we just release memory serum and reset them so they don't remember why they were fighting?
ReplyDeleteOh wait, I'm having a hard time distinguishing between real life the audio books to which I've been listening for 2+ hours a day during my commute.
Thank you, Churchill, for arbitrarily drawing lands in the sand those many years ago.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's just from re-reading The Last Centurion, but, hell, let the Kurds carve out their own piece of territory.
I was deployed to Kirkuk in '11, COS Warrior, and I gotta agree. The Kurds are good people, and the old school Peshmerga are card-carrying badasses. We had a big map in the TOC tracking mortar impacts and origins, and nothing was coming from north of Kirkuk, and they did a decent job keeping the roads up north clear of IEDs. Good on'em I say.
DeleteI wonder if there's a Pittman Apartments building in Bagdhad?
ReplyDeleteJohn said...
ReplyDeleteAll we need now are "boat people" coming out of the Shatt al-Arab to complete the picture.
Jeff Scwartz discussed that in "The Consultant"
excerpt:
'The burly, unwashed security guard at the metal detectors refused to pop the
gates so I could walk around them. He stood there, staring at me with a look
only a Relocated Palestinian could stare. The influx of RePal's after the
Arab/Israeli war had brought a whole new ethnic group of minimum wage
earners to the US of A. I only hoped that, someday, they'd settle down and
do the melting pot thing to the degree that they'd rise out of it like the
people who fled to the US at the start of WW II had. It was a faint hope;
there'd been yet another article in that morning's news about RePal street
gangs in New York City rumbling with Young Zionists. The casualty figures
were as lopsided as one would expect.'
No self-congratulatory high fives here, although I predicted much the same thing. More just sad headshaking and sighing that the government seems bound a determined to do the stupidest possible thing at any given point in time. :-/
ReplyDeletePartition was inevitable. But now we have no control over who does the division.
ReplyDeleteWinning! .... no ...
Reputedly, the proto-Kurdistan Kurds (in what is arguably still N. Iraq) have an agreement in place with the Turkish government that grants them formal recognition by Turkey (and I'm not sure what else) in return for their not supporting separatist efforts by ethnic Kurds within Turkey. Just another factor in the sporty-ness matrix, but worth mentioning, I think.
ReplyDeleteIn '75 I was sitting watch the news with my frat brother and Vietnam Vet.
ReplyDeleteHis words then still ring true.
"You don't get to keep what you wont fight for."
We could run some sorties to give the Iraqis some breathing room but in the end it sure doesn't look like their willing to fight for their homes or country.
Could be wrong.
Gerry
Let's see, George H.W.Bush takes on an invasion in the area where a large amount of the worlds energy resources originate. He loses his nerve and doesn't finish the job.
ReplyDeleteSlick Willy Clinton, not wanting to actually have anything to do with Iraq, does containment. Further destabilizing the country.
W comes in and decides the US should try to fix the mess, waffles around listening to poor advice for too long, but finally stabilizes the country (to the extent likely possible considering the tribal conflicts etc)
The ONE comes in declares he's won the war and bails out. Then he draws pretty red lines in the sand, but doesn't actually aid the opposition in Syria. Thus leading to Assad's recover (with help from Iran). The Sunni Islamic extremists fighting in Syria look next door and decide it's probably easier over there and we arrive at today.
Sound about right?
We won in Vietnam. It just took longer than expected.
ReplyDeleteThe United States and Iran ought to be natural allies. Our interests geopolitically have generally been one in the same. The problem is that the regime is blinded by hatred for the Great Satan.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's a bloody shame too. The Persians are historically a civilized people. We could work with them far more easily than the Arabs if they weren't warped by their religious leaders.
Son spent most of a year around the Kurds; said about the same thing. The Peshmerga you don't piss off, and they flat hated al Queda & Co.
ReplyDeleteDid a very good job of keeping things quiet in their region.
Back when this _was_ GWB's mess, I suggested that he needed to announce plans A and B:
ReplyDeleteA. What he was trying to do, which was to form a sensible, responsible government that would give different sects and ethnic groups a fair shake - with an Arab majority.
B. "If" the Arabs made that impossible, partition Iraq into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd areas, and put the Kurds in overall charge - with the weapons to hold that power.
I would have been very surprised if even that prospect would persuade Arabs to cooperate and make plan A work, but we could live with plan B.
See Dr. Boli's description of the situation:
ReplyDeletehttp://drboli.com/2014/06/14/dr-bolis-press-clipping-bureau-40/