U.S. Out Now! (?)
In response to my blog, "Meanwhile, Back in Baghdad," a friend wrote:
“I don't accept the word of 'experts' who say the surge in Iraq is working, and that life there has become stable, and withdrawals is a mistake or now potentially destabilizing. Our troops are the main destabilizers, along with insurgents who want the troops to leave. The experts who say the surge worked tend to be current or past supporters of the invasion, openly or secretly justifying their past errors. If you read Tom Engelhardt's website (tomdispatch@nationinstitute.org) with its many columns by very smart but under-circulated lefty writers, you get the other side of the argument which mainstream press (and the New Yorker) don't carry: Iraq remains in terrible shape, and talk of stability or successful surge is very far from reliable. So please don't take talk of the successful surge as fact, even if Obama or his would-be advisors do.”
Which prompts me to clarify: I don't accept the surge's "success" as fact; I wrote about it as a hypothetical. I don't know the truth about it. What alarms me is that I sometimes find myself wishing the surge to be a failure, wishing for the violence to reignite, wishing for the chaos to continue so the fundamental U.S. strategy of muscling its will onto nations does not prove successful.
I do think anti-war people have to be future-oriented. If a troop withdrawal is likely to reignite slaughter, do we still support it? Is there any sense in our demanding reparations to the Iraqi people, though we know it’ll never happen? Do we support UN intervention, an “internationization” of the conflict? What should we be agitating for? Can we unite around a proposal?
“I don't accept the word of 'experts' who say the surge in Iraq is working, and that life there has become stable, and withdrawals is a mistake or now potentially destabilizing. Our troops are the main destabilizers, along with insurgents who want the troops to leave. The experts who say the surge worked tend to be current or past supporters of the invasion, openly or secretly justifying their past errors. If you read Tom Engelhardt's website (tomdispatch@nationinstitute.org) with its many columns by very smart but under-circulated lefty writers, you get the other side of the argument which mainstream press (and the New Yorker) don't carry: Iraq remains in terrible shape, and talk of stability or successful surge is very far from reliable. So please don't take talk of the successful surge as fact, even if Obama or his would-be advisors do.”
Which prompts me to clarify: I don't accept the surge's "success" as fact; I wrote about it as a hypothetical. I don't know the truth about it. What alarms me is that I sometimes find myself wishing the surge to be a failure, wishing for the violence to reignite, wishing for the chaos to continue so the fundamental U.S. strategy of muscling its will onto nations does not prove successful.
I do think anti-war people have to be future-oriented. If a troop withdrawal is likely to reignite slaughter, do we still support it? Is there any sense in our demanding reparations to the Iraqi people, though we know it’ll never happen? Do we support UN intervention, an “internationization” of the conflict? What should we be agitating for? Can we unite around a proposal?
posted by Jewish Currents at 11:45 AM
1 Comments:
Michael Massing, in an article entitled "Embedded in Iraq," which appeared in the July 17 issue of The New York Review of Books, writes that "no matter what happens in Iraq, the Bush administration doesn't want to leave, since if it does, Iran, in one way or another, will take over."
What do we think about Iran? Former Iranian President Rafsnajani gave the Al-Quds Day Sermon on December 14, 2001. According to MEMRI Special Dispatch 325, "In the sermon, he addressed solving the problem of Israel with nuclear weapons ... the use of nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam."
Rafsanjani, a moderate, is out of office. He was calling on Iran to turn itself into a suicide bomb. Ahmadinejad, his successor, is less moderate.
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