This started as a comment on the current diary, Juan Cole’s response regarding “the UN option”.
Mr. Cole’s suggestions that others fight this war for us, a war, apparently, a guerrilla war, that has to be won, in his opinion, strikes me as uncharacteristically naive.
I haven’t heard of guerrilla wars ever being won. Have you?
His suggestion that the global south fight this war, well, have we asked the people of the global south if they want to die in Iraq to keep factories open in India and Pakistan?
Perhaps he has a clue as to how to fight a guerrilla war and win it, because if he does, I wish he’d share it with us. Right now we are losing one guerrilla war outright, Iraq, and performing questionably in Afghanistan. We all know how the Vietnam guerrilla war ended up. We are also funding a guerrilla war in Colombia with terrible consequences.
If Mr. Cole thinks that by simply replacing our foreign troops, with foreign troops from other countries, will somehow shift this conflict from its current direction…then I would suggest he is not thinking rationally about this.
I don’t see this as a war that can be “won”, no matter who steps into our boots there. It is up to, it has always been up to, the Iraqi people, as to what direction they wish their country to move in.
Mr. Cole, we can take any global situation, and jump to the worse possible consequences. Indeed, we do this all the time, often to drum up support for our ideas and solutions that we propose.
In this situation, Mr. Cole, you are proposing ideas and solutions that involve having other countries commit to sacrificing some of its young people to stave off these possible, horrible consequences.
This to me is a distraction from dealing with the current, horrible consequences, and its only viable solution: withdraw the troops now, stop the killing on our part, and allow the Iraqi people to decide the fate of their nation.
I would support bringing in the UN as a police force, but not as an army to fight the insurgency. No army can win against the insurgency, without a horrible, horrible bloodbath that would be endless in its scope.
Withdraw the foreign, occupying army, and you take away a good part of the incentive to fight in the insurgency. Replace the foreign, occupying army with another, and you simply replace the color of the helmits that serve as targets.
You are forgetting that the insurgency if fighting because they believe there’s is a just cause, just as the North Vietnamese believed. We could not match their commitment because in our hearts, we knew our’s was not a just cause.
This will prove to be true for any occupying army that you send to Iraq, from whatever country. These young men and women will also ask: why am I fighting? Is this a just cause?
I believe, Mr. Cole, that you have been caught up in the fear of consequences, the fear of the future, if we withdraw. Fears must be acknowledge and examined, but I don’t believe we ought to necessarily base our actions on fear.
I do believe that actions should be firmly rooted, as much as possible, into current reality. This was an illegal war to begin with, and an unjust war. Extending this war with another foreign, occupying army will not solve the unjustness of this war in the minds of the Iraqi people.
