My Thoughts on Iraq

I've received a lot of requests for my opinion on the Iraq War lately. I've always hesitated to talk about this because most folks have already made up their mind and it's generally rather pointless for me to say anything. First of all, let me say this. Everybody has an opinon about the War. More importantly, everyone thinks their opinion should be taken seriously. So I wish, before anyone says anything anymore about the War, they ask themselves these following questions.

1. What do I actually know about War?
2. What is an insurgency and how do you fight it? (historical preceden please)
3. What do I know about International Relations? Have I ever worked in the field?
4. What do I really know about the political process in DC?
5. Do I have any first hand information about anything pertaining to the War?
6. How do I determine the veracity of a given account? Because it corresponds with what I already believe?

Okay I got that off my chest. I'm just quite sick of stupid, uninformed opinions.

On to the meat of the issue. Do I think we should have got into the War. That's not an easy question to answer. You have to refer to globalization and whether or not you think it is positive. I do because globalization has done more to raise the living standards of more people around the world than anything else. This is inarguable fact. Just look at China. Globalization requires stability and the freer movement of trade. It is largely dependant on the movement of oil. America only gets 7-11 percent of our oil from the ME. The oil we're protecting there is mostly Europe's and Japan's. And rightly so given Breton Woods 1 which formalized the arrangement of the US taking care of Europe's security concerns in return for Europe not arming which presented nothing but trouble up to 1946. Now Saddam, and especially Saddam with WMD, was a huge destabilizer. Whether or not he had WMD isn't the issue. By very virtue of his desire to acquire WMD should be reason enough to put him on the block. What about India and Pakistan? How is that fair? Fair is for fucking children. It has no place in IR. You play with the cards you're dealt and unfortunately, the ME is more important to us than Southeast Asia. Take into account that you cannot contain ambition indefinitely and the UN is not an answer. Remember that our jets were regularly fired upon throughout the 90's when Saddam routinely defied the terms of the ceasefire of the first Gulf War. So there's lots of reasons to depose Saddam and all of them pretty good in the grand ledger.

But I think the war was a bad idea. Why? Because I can't tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shia by looking at them. How can I can be discriminating about who I shoot if I can't do that? And if I can't be discriminating, I going to create tons of ill will without meaning to and there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. So it just doesn't work where the rubber meets the road. But more importantly, Americans as a whole, don't have the intestinal fortitude to run a proper counterinsurgency. It's dirty work and we're much to dainty to do it properly.

A counterinsurgency succeeds when it does one thing. It has to convince the people of the given country that violence on their part is a really bad and untenable position. Why didn't we have very much trouble with this in Japan and Germany? Because of Tokyo and Dresden. We had beat the piss out of the general populace so badly, they could field much if any insurgency. They were so demoralized and humiliated, they both figured they had to try something else. And throughout history back to the time of the Ancient Greeks and the Achaemenid Dynasty the only thing that has every worked. And we don't have the stomach politically for this type of work.

That's why sending more troops is a bad idea. Unless their ROE changes drastically and they are cleared to do what they must, free from media scrutiny, nothing will happen towards quelling the insurgency. In fact, their will just be more opportunities for troops to get killed and commit mistakes that can be spun as atrocities.

So the War is winnable but not as most Americans would like to win it. And that's dangerous for the world and the advancement of the human condition. In our collective desire to makes ourselves feel good, we shirk our responsibility.