I don’t know if it has any prospect for success but at least Joe Biden has a plan. What I like about the plan is that it recognizes that we will exacerbate an already horrible human rights catastrophe in Iraq if we merely pick and go home this instant. At the same time, it is firm on the U.S. being out of Iraq by the end of next year. Implenting the plan would require intense diplomacy and negotiation of the type this administration appears to be totally incapable of engaging in. It also has nothing concrete to say about Iran, which would be a central player in any negotiations.
But as Biden says:
This plan offers a way to bring our troops home, protect our security interests and preserve Iraq as a unified country. Those who reject this plan out of hand must answer one simple question: What is your alternative?
…got exactly zero traction when it was proposed originally. It suffers from two really big problems:
Let me predict that this plan will never fly.
Kurdistan would be the area requiring the most intense negotiation. Whether the Sunnis could be satisfied on revenue sharing is also a problem. Look at major league baseball for chrissakes.
But, even the get out now plan should involve intense negotiations to at least try to avoid wholesale Rwanda style slaughter.
Those concerns all make sense.
Heard something else that makes more sense?
My alternative: Replace Bush/Cheney with people capable of diplomacy; Let our new leader come up with a plan.
As for Biden, I don’t believe a word he ever says. He talks a good game but the actions never follow his own script.
Personal opinion: The only way to preserve Iraq as a unified country is through miltary dictatorship, and I don’t see that on anyone’s list of goals.
Biden’s plan is not one I would support, but more importantly, it’s not one anyone in the region would likely support. I’m glad he has a plan at all, I suppose. I do think partition will be the end result, but only after many years of conflict and negotiations. Someone other than the US would have to take the lead, and frankly we’d probably have to cut a deal that include Turkey, Iran, Jordan and the Saudis for there to be any chance of limiting the violence.
I fail to see what good we are doing by having troops trolling for IED’s intended solely for them. Has anyone heard about any effective uses of our troops to intervene between warring local militias? Mowing down whole cities like fallujah doesn’t count because we inflict more damage to the citizens and secondarily to ourselves by using such tactics than the effort is worth to anyone. If you could convince me that we were actually doing any good whatsoever, rather than repeating unsubstantiated claims that we MUST be doing SOMETHING good there, I would listen to an argument that we shouldn’t leave immediately.
I see and hear of no good reason to believe that we are doing one single tiny bit of good over there that couldn’t be done better by the local people themselves.
Even if we are doing some miniscule amount of good by staying in the short run, we will never stay long enough to do any good in the long run. Apparently, folks in this region of the world don’t have enough tv’s to blow out their long term memories, and there will be hell to pay whenever we leave, now or ten years from now. In the meantime, we are fucking up worse and worse and worse and the violence continues to rise.
If we are going to stay, the only viable means of recovery that I can see is to do what we should have done in the first place and float and fly in massive relief supplies and building materials. Let them build it themselves. It is what they want and what would be most likely to remain standing after we leave or even while we are there if we stay.
Any argument that we should stay for one day longer sounds to me like a sick dysfunctional claim that if we just fix one more thing in this mess that we sickly and dysfunctionally started, that it will convert the sick wasted energy into something good. Ha Ha. Tell me another good joke.
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS, BRING EM HOME NOW!
You know Diane101’s Iraqi friend who has settled here as a Fulbright scholar at KU? She told me that the Americans she has met so far have some misperceptions about Iraq and that one of those is that the country is divided into Sunni, Shiite, and Kurds. “First of all,” she said, that’s a false division. Sunni and Shiite are religions; Kurd is an ethnicity. The actual divisions are between Kurd and Arab and between Sunni And Shiite.” But, she said, there is a further misperception she has noticed, which is that the Americans she has met tend to think the entire country is either Sunni or Shiite or Kurd. “Millions of us are secular or we belong to some other religion,” she said. She is Catholic, for instance. I asked her, “What will happen to people like you if the country is partitioned?” “There will be no place for us,” she said. “We’ll have to leave.”
One sentence should have read: “. . .tend to think the entire country is either Sunni or Shiite.” (Without the Kurd.)