Exit Strategy

I've seen many threads on how to get out of Iraq. 'We can't just leave.' 'That would lead to civil war.' 'It's the Democrats job to come up with a way to get out of this horrific murderous mess created by Republicans and the longer the killing goes on, the more it's the fault of Democrats.' Well, something along those lines, give or take a bit of bullshit.

Ya know what? It's easy to get out of Iraq and look good.  The problem is that the "easy" way isn't the way that we really want to follow. Certainly the Republicans don't want to follow it, though they claim to.  How's that?  Give 'em freedom and democracy. The problem is that "we" don't want that. What we want is another Afghanistan. A puppet regime with a pretense of democracy but one that knows who keeps them alive and who they should obey.

So first I'll try to describe the solution, since that's the "Democrats" job. Enable the Iraqis ability to defend themselves against anti-democratic insurgents.  Again, how's that?  Train them. Arm them.  But aren't we doing that? No we're not.  We're trying to create a police force to combat a very motivated, very well armed, funded and trained paramilitary force. No police force can be effective against that. Don't think so?  I saw the streets of Manhattan during the recent Republican National Convention. Thousands and thousands of police doing extensive "crowd control" (a euphemism for illegal arrests and detentions in many cases).  Thousands of police against a small group of protesters. (The large pre-convention Sunday protest parade was completely peaceful and had nothing to do with any protests after the convention began.)  Armed, organized, billy clubbed cops against kids on bikes. But what if those kids had AK-47s and rocket launchers and mortars?  All those thousands of cops wouldn't have been able to stop thousands from being killed including many many of the conventioneers.  Maybe the core Republicans would have been safe with military level protection, but everyone else would have been in danger. Even with all those cops. A police force cannot match a large paramilitary force.  

Enough of this example. Look at what's happening in Iraq. Are we supplying the Iraqis with armored vehicles? Tanks? Helicopters? Command and control for this level of combat?  I'm guessing but the impression I've gotten is that we definitely aren't.  The large scale operations that involved Iraqi government forces seem to be supported by American military command and control and American manned military level hardware.

Simply, we don't want the Iraqis to have a fighting force that can actually fight the insurgency. We want to limit them to a police force and keep them ultimately, especially at the level of government officials, dependent on American military forces for survival.  The Iraqis are to be cannon fodder on the ground and the American forces are to be there to enforce American will, subtly but inexorably. That's why I "say" that "we" don't really want what we claim, freedom and democracy for Iraq.  Freedom would mean the right to tell us to leave. Training them on a military level would enable them to make us leave, or at the least make our stay there even more tenuous than it currently is.

That's my solution. Arm and train Iraqis to the point where they can defend their choice for a future.

OK. I'm sure there are those that will say I've not only ignored the civil war problem but made it more likely and more deadly.  But we've already got a civil war and only one side is armed. The side that doesn't want a democratic nation.  Oh, the Kurds are armed and have for the most part achieved a stable condition, but they're tertiary to the situation, though they represent a problem regarding a stable single nation, primarily because of oil and Turkey. I'll leave out the Kurds for this argument. Frankly I don't know much about the factions. I'm basing this post on the glaring "elephant in the room" inconsistencies that always seem to be ignored in proposed exit strategies.  So back to the point of this paragraph, civil war. There already is a civil war there and the nation killers are the most heavily armed. So arm the nation builders.  That's what we'd do if we really wanted to spread freedom and democracy.  Let the freedom fighters win.  

Again, the problem in that logic is that "our" being there, in heavy military terms, represents a contradiction to anyone's idea of freedom.  Maybe it's a bit fuzzy from our view, but think about what we'd think and feel if heavily armed Iraqis roamed all over America, shooting us at whim and will, saying it's all to help us. Add to that taking our natural resources and building military bases all over the country.  Would anyone here think that's freedom?  Bring back the red coats then.

Fundamentally the Iraqis would have to believe that our intentions aren't self-serving and there's no way the current American regime could project that impression.  Maybe we could get foreign support, including Arab and Muslim nations, if we truly were going to leave.  That international presence might help ease the civil war problem.

But this all depends on an honest America looking to spread democracy rather than take control of oil in its final decades of significance.

I know. I'm a dreamer, delusional maybe.