One word: Yugoslavia.

It's too late to prevent a bloodbath. The best we can do is keep a lid on it until we run out of resources, and then it will erupt anyway. The only question is whether we want it to erupt now or later. That's the devil's choice that Bush has left us with. Avoiding a humanitarian catastrophe is no longer a plausible option. It was never really an option anyway, as the stabilizing force in Iraq, that is, Saddam's tyranny, was limited to his lifetime. If he had ruled until the end of his natural lifetime, there would have been a succession struggle among his sons and the other major strongmen, and the whole thing would have fallen apart the same way Yugoslavia did. Iraq was always an internecine war in hibernation.

To be frank, we're probably better off having it happen now than in twenty or thirty years when technological progress will have given the combatants weapons we can barely imagine today.

---Cthulhu for President: Why vote for the lesser evil?

OK read them. Now what? NYT- "librul rag" New Yorker-"Glossy Librul rag". Again- Now what?I knew this before reading these pieces. The folks that need to read this will either"1-deny the truths or 2- won't read these pieces! Back to step 1! NOW WHAT?
 I try and contribute and I listen and read prodigiously and what I am hearing is that the growing consensus - bot dems and goopers- is: Bush wins!!!!! US loses!! How is that?
 I hear folks telling me that the dems don't have the votes!Well, for anyone who really cares- that is bull!!
 400 days to go but maybe way way way too much time. He and his minions can destroy not ony the USA but might just do the WHOLE WORLD!
 That's what I get from the two pieces.

From the New Yorker piece:

All the Democratic candidates for President have declared that they will end the war. And many Republicans in Congress have embraced the report issued last December by the Iraq Study Group, which called for regional diplomacy and for American combat units to be withdrawn; residual troops, likely numbering fifty to sixty thousand, would be limited to training and advising, counterterrorism, and force protection.

I've heard this song before.  Over and over and over again.

John Mccain Called his wife WHAT??

What about Biden's plan a three way division along ethnic lines? Its what the Iraqis seem to want. Is it unrealistic?...........running for cover now.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; now we know that it is bad economics;" - Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Eight pages of the supercilious George Packer, what a waste of time that was.

I wrote this back in January.

I am convinced that we are rapidly approaching just such a nexus in the Middle East.  Not just Iraq, not just the age-old Sunni/Shia conflict, not just the Iraeli/Palestinian conflict.  These are just the most obvious strands of a great, tangled ball of yarn which no one--no one--outside the region fully understands.  As I watch events unfold in Iraq, I am struck again and again by a sense of deja vu.  It is like watching a poorly made, under budgeted remake of Dune.  Life imitating art, poorly.  I am convinced that anyone who still seriously believes they can accurately predict or control what is now unfolding there is simply delusional.

I've seen nothing since that changes my perception in any way.  All the discussions about what to do now in Iraq miss the point entirely.  What we do now in Iraq is in my view largely irrelevant.  Continue the surge or begin withdrawal now.  Withdraw a few thousand or several thousand or all of them  Six months, nine months, two years.  All of those options are on the margins, deck chairs on the Titanic.  What will happen in Iraq will happen, with or without us, sooner than we choose and whether we choose or not.  We are way past that.

The die was cast when Bush said, "Fuck Saddam, we're taking him out."  It was cast in concrete when General Shinseki was fired for being honest about how many troops it would take to pacify Iraq.  It was recast in fine granite when Rumsfeld threatened to fire the next person who brought up the need for post-invasion planning.

The issue at hand is larger than what happens in this or that neighborhood in Iraq.  It is larger than Iraq.  We are fast approaching a catastrophe greater than any of the twentieth century.  Yes, greater than either of the WW's, greater than the Holocaust.

What will happen in Iraq will happen.  With or without us.  A little sooner perhaps, or a little later, it will happen.  And it will not be contained in Iraq.  Inevitably it will suck in Turkey, Iran, the Saudis, Syria and Jordan.  Does anyone imagine it will stop there?  Israel, Europe, China, Russia.  All have big stakes in what happens in the Middle East.  And, oh yeah, we're not the only ones who have nukes.  

Yes, it's about the oil, but not just the oil.  We have opened a door we cannot close.  Our children and our grandchildren will live with the consequences.


Have I ever told you about my poor memory?

If you realize that the policy for a long time, but certainly for the last 7 years has been to set the seperate factions to warring against one another, wait til their competing fanaticisms have weakend their militaries and their civic institutions, and then step back into the ruins to salvage the remaining resources from the wrecked societies.

anyway, that's how you'd hafta read the policy if you read it off the consequences of the the policy.

this is exactly the epistemological stance one needs to adopt to understand that the Busheviks are NOT really the consumate fuck-ups they appear to be; but given the damage to all the important institutions and instruments of democratic self-governance they have wrought, without any significant opposition, they have been remarkably astute users of their power in the service of their CorpoRat masters.

The interruption of oil and gas from the region could create a humanitarian crisis in the developed world that would surely ripple across the international markets and cause widespread hardship everywhere.

This means what exactly?? Forgoing the daily trips to McDonalds & Starbucks? Having to give up the "two cars in every garage" (& three parked on the street) mentality that has governed this country for 40 years?

Spending far less on automobiles & related infrastructure and much more on public transit (like "personal rapid transit" - google it) and its related infrastructure?

Not being 2% of the world population & consuming 25% of its resources?

Yeah - the expression "humanitarian crisis in the developed world" is a hard one to pin down, but I think it means that the "We are the world" generation might be a little bit inconvenienced.

Talking reality is cheap.
There`s nothing anyone can do about reality. No one is going to make a new reality & that while we study that one, a new one will be created.
No matter what anyone comes up with, the reality will always be, that this was/is the most vile, irresponsible waste of human lives for , (name your poison), bush`s legacy, the corporate machine, oil, war profiteers etc, & no matter when the US leaves, that reality will forever remain, an ugly stain on the page of history. Further, it is bush`s war, & I will never accept, that this reality is by design. There is no time or place in the future, that one will be able to say, "We did the right thing". Never, ever.
I read 8 pages of talk, that I knew before the US went into Afghanistan to get Osama. Funny how he`s still the same recorded artist now.
Flag draped coffins on a moebius strip.

The difference between theists and atheists is that the atheists don't set the theists on fire for refusing to agree with them.

Okay, I've read the articles now -- and thanks for linking them, Boo.
It would appear that what we have here is a major paradigm shift. While Bush & Cheney continue to prattle on about victory, the military is strategizing for withdrawal, where victory is not only unachieved and unachievable, but virtually indefinable. Victory against who or what?

First reaction: It would be hard to find, in the entire history of the world, more pseudo-intellectual, brain-dead morons than the neocons and the oil industry. No, what they planned for was "mission accomplished." The fact that this is what they actually wrought is an index to their utter intellectual and moral bankruptcy. This country has been run by carnival barkers, card sharks and other assorted con-artists, and the only reason some people still believe that this is just what they were planning is because they still can't accept that such powerful operators don't know what the f--k they're doing.

Second reaction. Back to paradigm shift. Although it seems that victory is off the table, and exit is hardly less of a challenge, the geopolitical factors, little discussed in these articles, are still there. In short, any degree of success in the withdrawal/stabilization process will bring renewed efforts on the part of the US to take advantage of whatever degree of stability is achieved. Which is likely to exert new destabilization pressures, if not from Iraqis themselves, then from other actors in the neighborhood. It's like the famous monkey trap. Big oil has its hand in the box, and theoretically could remove it, but cannot let go of the banana.

The logical conclusion to this puzzle is this: along with the efforts to internationalize, stabilize, and withdraw from Iraq, must come an effort to prosecute the power-hungry traitors whose combined brilliance actually brought us to this pass, put them in prison, throw away the key, implement stringent government controls and at least partial nationalization of the oil industry. These guys have had their fun long enough at out expense, I think we've had enough of it.

Or does anyone have a better idea?

Sorry, that should have been "at OUR expense."

creation of debates on what to do in Iraq obviously can not be solved until we sift through every grain of sand on the planet earth but while we are doing that we fail to notice the meteor about to hit earth.
Weapons of Mass Distraction.