From the Desk of the Liquid Engineer

For the last several months, I have held off any serious discussion of the Iraq War in this space because I am firmly in the camp that it needs to end yesterday, and prolonging it without any real change in plans or discrete goals isn’t just lunacy, but amounts to an almost criminal waste of lives and treasure for a failed policy. I seem to share this opinion with a great majority of the American public, and more eloquent, informed people than me have been quite active on television, radio, and the web expounding upon it. Talking about it endlessly myself seemed like beating a dead horse. But recent developments and decisions by the Bush Administration combined with Democrats’ paralysis in Congress (in all fairness due to a razor thin majority that’s just too small to really push things) have reminded me that, in fact, some zombie horses do deserve to get the tar kicked out of them. As hardheaded as the current White House is I can’t say raising public awareness will lead to tangible results in the absence of a strong Congressional anti-war majority, but it sure can’t hurt. To quote the fictitious President Andrew Shepherd in The American President, America is “advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad.” Making this nation work for you means taking an active interest in what’s going on here and elsewhere in the world, being well-informed, and being willing to think critically about issues, even when they’re complex. If all you want is diametrically opposed, oversimplified thirty second sound-bytes that turn political analysis into an exercise in frustration and political debate into something more resembling the Jerry Springer Show because you like it for entertainment, you’re not really interested in being truly involved in the direction of this country, and in a democratic republic that is a sad and potentially disasterous thing indeed.

At the very least, I more and more feel the need to speak occasionally to settle my own mind, and that’s what spurred the writing of this message. I am, quite frankly, appalled at the arrogance of the current Administration in thinking it could pass off the recent recommendations to withdraw the surge-level troops (about 30000) as a new policy. This is a lie. The surge was meant to be a temporary increase, primarily in Baghdad, to stabilize things long enough for the Iraqi Parliament to consolidate the political system and make the government functional. The Iraqi government has been on vacation most of the summer, and this political progress has largely not happened. Now the US military needs to pull the troops out not because of any specific strategic changes, but because having them in Iraq indefinitely is impossible because it puts too much of stairn on the entire apparatus of the armed forces. If they weren’t pulled out, the entire system would shortly begin to collapse. And yes, I suppose I’m also appalled that the citizens of this country, and the Congress, do not in larger, louder majorities demand to know why the surge is considered successful when political reconciliation hasn’t progressed in any meaningful fashion.

It hasn’t been so long since General David Petraeus’ report to Congress, replete with very nice charts and graphs and statistical ninjutsu that made things in Iraq look very positive indeed (not that most people bought it*), that the situation should have had any time to change significantly. Yet, according to a Pentagon report released September 17:

“The security environment in southern Iraq took a notable turn for the worse in August” with the assassination of two governors, said the report, which covers June through August. “There may be retaliation and an increase in intra-Shi’a violence throughout the South,” it said, whereas previously the violence was centered in the main southern city of Basra. 

I would dearly love to be able to link directly to this report, but I don’t know where to find it, and The Washington Post doesn’t provide a link. The closest thing I could find was this one from September 14, but that’s not the same thing. If anyone knows where the newer report can be found, I’d like to be able to link to it here.

The Washington Post article also contains a few interesting comments about Iran, which I’m not going to go into here because that’s a whole other kettle of fish. At least a lot less people are trigger happy this time around. Meanwhile, the potential pitfalls of having private security firms so heavily involved in the Iraqi occupation are on display this week. Blackwater USA has had its operating license revoked by the Iraqi Parliament after a violent shootout that left eight dead and wounded thirteen. In addition, there is some confusion over just what started the incident. Blackwater and the State Department say there was an attack of some sort, whereas many bystanders report everything happened in reaction to a car bombing. The US is apparently trying to smooth things over, but Iraq has promised a criminal investigation and I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to get Blackwater expelled from the country completely. Let’s see if the State Department lets them.

In short, things in Iraq are fabulous as usual.

In the spirit of raising awareness about casuality levels, and because I don’t think the information is publicized enough by the mainstream media, I will very shortly after making this post add a pair of widgets obtained from The Washington Post to this blog listing not only US causalities in Iraq, but Iraqi civilian casualities as well. I encourage others to do the same, because it’s not just about dead American soldiers–it’s about the maimed soldiers, and thousands upon thousands of civilian casualities. (It’s also rather difficult to look at the numbers and then listen to President Bush talk about how the US is part of a larger coalition in Iraq, when our partners have collectively sustained, as I write this, 298 casualties. If the President wants to wage war in Iraq, he should at least have the decency to admit that it’s our war, and this “multinational force” business is little more than a sham. A pathetic, sick, kind of sham used to confuse and mislead the citizenry into thinking we’re really part of some larger, internationally supported effort, while we suffer the overwhelming majority of loss of life (and quality of life, for wounded veterans) and money, and damage to military infrastructure that will take decades to recover from.

Is it 2009 yet?

*If you’re really interested in the polling data on the reaction to General Petraeus, Pew Research makes available the full analysis as PDF.

[tags]iraq, war, iraq war, troop surge, surge, politics, bush administration, president bush, bush, george w bush, george bush, petraeus, general petraeus, general david petraeus, iran, blackwater, blackwater usa, blackwater security, casualties, widgets[/tags]

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