Twitter
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Delicious
Digg
Newsvine
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiNo 'Victory' in Iraq
Even Barack Obama seems to be embracing the Republican spin on Iraq. Speaking Sunday on ABC's "This Week," the Democratic nominee for President talked about "enormous reductions in violence" resulting from last year's "surge" of American forces in the country.
Obama's comments come after a bruising Republican National Convention in Saint Paul where speaker after speaker took to the podium and attacked Obama, while speaking of an imminent "victory" in Iraq, praising their nominee, Arizona Senator and former POW John McCain for speaking out in favor of a "surge" when it was politically unpopular.
"American combat brigades who made up the surge have returned home in victory," Senator Lindsey Graham told a cheering crowd Thursday night. "We know the surge has worked. Our men and women in uniform know the surge has worked, and I promise you, above all others, al-Qaeda knows it has worked. The only people who deny it are Barack Obama and his buddies at MoveOn.org."
An increasing majority of Americans seem to agree. American casualties are down, as are the numbers of Iraqis killed in sectarian violence, but these numbers don't tell the whole story. Iraq today remains a horrible, dangerous place. What we are seeing is a calming of the waters in Iraq because its people are exhausted. Five years of violence, without clean water, reliable electricity, health care or jobs will do that to a people. Formerly mixed neighborhoods are now ethnically monolithic, with giant concrete blast walls topped by barbed wire separating communities that had intermarried for generations. In many areas of the country, the violence has died down simply because there's nobody left to kill.
When I hear stories about an American "victory" in Iraq, I think about people like Dr. Ali Falah. A young Shi'a Arab who spoke impeccable English, Falah worked as an emergency room physician in the Northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. The oil-rich city, which is ethnically mixed and dominated by two Kurdish militias, has been the scene of increased sectarian violence. As an unembedded journalist reporting in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, I used to call on Falah to learn what types of casualties were coming into the ER.
Most doctors left the city in 2006 after one physician was gunned down inside the emergency room, but Falah tried to stick it out. For a time, he was the only doctor on the floor of an emergency room that received 80 patients a day. But in September 2007, Falah told me he could no longer continue working. Someone had dropped a note off at his home in a Shi'ite section of Kirkuk.
"They threw a letter in the house saying the residents who are Shia have to leave the city," he said. "Otherwise, they said 'What will happen, will happen.' So, most of the people left. Me also."
For Falah, that was the last straw. He left for the southern province of Amara, where he's living nearby his fiancée's family. He's given up medicine, saying it's too dangerous and is keeping a low profile in an effort to stay safe.
Falah's story is hardly unique. According to the United Nations, more than five million Iraqis-20 percent of the country's entire population-have fled their homes since the U.S. invasion in 2003. One and a half million Iraqis now live in Syria, while more than a million refugees have gone to Jordan, Iran, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey and the Gulf States. Others, like Falah, have left ethnically mixed cities like Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk for their ancestral towns and villages. These refugees clearly haven't gotten the message about "victory," because the refugee flow continues. No one has returned home.
The calm we are seeing now will not continue indefinitely, and the longer the U.S. military stays in Iraq the more likely the country is to erupt in horrible violence. In his speech Thursday night, John McCain commended the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, as "brilliant." Petraeus, McCain said, has "succeeded and rescued us from a defeat that would have demoralized our military, risked a wider war and threatened the security of all Americans."
But on the ground, some of the strategies employed by General Petreaus are beginning to unravel. The Sunni "Awakening" militias he founded, armed and funded have begun fighting with the Shi'a-dominated Iraqi Army, which is also bankrolled by the United States.
"The Shiite-led government has recently stepped up a campaign to arrest leaders of the Awakening and dismantle parts of the program, whose members receive $300 a month from the U.S. military," the Washington Post reported Tuesday. "Many fighters have abandoned their posts and fled their homes to avoid detention, stoking fears that some will rejoin the insurgency." On Wednesday, Iraqi troops raided the offices of the influential Sunni clerical group, the Association of Muslim Scholars. In a statement, the Association "denounced this provocative and unjustifiable attack" and blamed the Iraqi government for any negative consequences that may result.
Soon, the United States military will have to take sides in this fight, and when it does, American soldiers will find themselves in the unenviable position of battling with groups armed with American weaponry. The longer the United States stays in Iraq, the worse off the country will be when we finally leave. Today, "victory in Iraq" is as far away as it's ever been.
19 Comments so far
Show AllHave you ever heard of Dien Bien Phu or Tet. These people are regrouping.
Doobie
Obama hasn't "moved away' from any position he didn't hold earlier. The man was calling for missile strikes on Iran two years ago. He is a consistent advocate for agri-fuels, which up to the moment has been a process that has resulted in a rise in world food prices that has been detrimental to the poorer nations of the world. He is an imperialist, and endorses imperial ideology. Some of us have been telling some of you all out there to research the man's actual positions for months now. This is the usual selective amnesia that infects the "left' every four years during election season, but we're suppposed to think it's all different now just because the empire has put a black man on the case.
Some of y'all need to get a little more serious in your studies of this problem.
For months Obama has been moving away from the progressive positions favored by both his base and, according to polls, most of the American people, to embrace large parts of the neocon philosophy and agenda. As the difference between Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin narrows, it increasingly becomes a popularity contest and, thanks to slick marketing, the Democrats' early advantage has slipped away.
Alex
"Victory in Iraq" is akin to the chasing the dragon, it will never happen. What is going on there now is that the various factions are biding their time, positioning themselves as best they can to the inevitable when Iraq turns into the Middle East's version of the Yugoslavia break-up. It might even rival the multi-nation wars of plunder that have roiled Congo since 1998 in terms of the different number of outside players with their armies in on the fighting.
"Victory in Iraq" is akin to the chasing the dragon, it will never happen. What is going on there now is that the various factions are biding their time, positioning themselves as best they can to the inevitable when Iraq turns into the Middle East's version of the Yugoslavia break-up. It might even rival the multi-nation wars of plunder that have roiled Congo since 1998 in terms of the different number of outside players with their armies in on the fighting.
But no one can say *what* a definitive victory in Iraq would be!
It's worth remembering that the Bushies/Neocons do not WANT 'victory' as we might think of it - in the sense of "now that's done, we can leave." They WANT to have a perpetual war, and stay there FOREVER...
So we will always have little "victories," "reductions in violence," "terrorist leaders killed," and so on -- or, as Orwell put it, announcements that "the war is within measurable distance of its end!"
SINCE 1492 & GRAPPA: The significance of the points you raise cannot be overstated.
I followed a link a poster offered on Ms. Palin and she's one of those people that demands of subservients "positive news." A lot of the Christian right uses this ploy, the idea that you must remain POSITIVE. It's a very powerful tool of manipulation because what it also manages to do is DISCREDIT actual reality, so that "loyal followers" prove their fealty by remaining positive. This is a bastardization of a spiritual teaching... no Master ever said to look on hell, a hell BEING created by man's inhumanity to man, and then only proclaim the good! The idea is when a human being is challenged, if their mind stays focused on a positive outcome, the power of the mind is sufficient to help sway that outcome.
I have known some of these "positive thinkers" and they DENY reality. Their numbers are now so great, and their paymasters are so prominent in media, that the whole nonsensical "act as if" paradigm is being used as a replacement for what ACTUALLY is.
Iraq is not much more than a war battered prison camp. Tragically, there are parallels with US society more and more as the same border/fence being made to "shut out illegals" is an apt means to keep citizens within the walls, too. The insidious homeland security lockdown state is an egregious inversion of this republic and its ideals. So when the idiots all demand that their loyal adherents remain POSITIVE we are dealing with a reality displacement of inestimable proportions.
Grappa
When you control the airways and the newspapers , you control what is said. propaganda works , its that simple. Nobody will beat the republicans, because they control the message. The ideal that there is a liberal media is ,and has been, the biggest boogy man ever created. People choose to believe the media is liberal.
The only hope we as common people have, is that the economy dies.
.
The American Empire is dying (not yet 7 years old).
The U.S. Military is broken. 250,000 troops are trapped in the Middle East.
Their Mad Emperor and his learning disabled Generals haven't a clue. Our troops are left "hanging".....and the death toll is rising.
Our homeland is more vunerable today than before 9/11.
The U.S. Economy is bankrupt.
Bush, the Idiot-in-Chief says everything is great !!!!!!!!
John McCain still promises VICTORY over the Viet Cong.
,
As I understand it the "enormous reductions in violence" resulting from last year's "surge" was really due to cold blooded, premeditated murder of anyone that stood in the way of our Storm Troopers. The Israelis have been using this 'Targeted Assassination' on Arabs for half a century and the French did the same in Algiers for the same bloody "victory."
It's no wonder that the suicide rate of our child killing "heros" is off the chart.
"Even Barack Obama seems to be embracing the Republican spin on Iraq."
Why not? He is "Republican-Lite".
Obama helped make Bush's illegal spying and wire tapping on Americans legal. What's the difference between a repuglican and a Democrat?
Lipstick?
What about "victory in Afghanistan" - that is what the delusionary Obama is after, and then it will be "victory in Pakistan." It is not just about stopping "the war in Iraq" - it is about stopping the war (period). Both the war parties want to continue, and make things even worse.
http://almusawwir.org/resistance/
Americans win if the oil is flowing and Iraq can never attack Israel. The American only play in their play book protect Israel at all costs and every elected person in America says the same thing in public even before the election
What this piece also tells us is that the republicans and MSM know best how to frame an issue. Americans have been manipulated into a militaristic culture which makes it easier. To be competitive democrats have to follow the script. The occupation in Iraq you ask?? Wake me up when all the Sunni and Shia insurgents have agreed to sign an armistice.
How can anyone imagine "Victory" from the intentionally committed carnage that is Iraq today? Iraqi society may never recover from this man made disaster. How many more American victories can the earth withstand?
Hoa binh
Even Barack Obama seems to be embracing the Republican spin on Iraq. Speaking Sunday on ABC's "This Week," the Democratic nominee for President talked about "enormous reductions in violence" resulting from last year's "surge" of American forces in the country.
Obama's comments come after a bruising Republican National Convention in Saint Paul where speaker after speaker took to the podium and attacked Obama, while speaking of an imminent "victory" in Iraq.
The late John Frankenheimer made a film called "Seconds" in which wealthy people immensely dissatisfied with their lives could go to a sinister corporation (run by a folksy, benign Mark Twain type) who would fake their deaths and then remake them physically, so if you were ugly you could be made to look like a movie star, etc. Apparently, John Kerry located this corporation and had himself remade into Barack Obama. He is about to lose a second time, thus the title of the movie.
[Soon, the United States military will have to take sides in this fight, and when it does, American soldiers will find themselves in the unenviable position of battling with groups armed with American weaponry]
Irony, sheer irony. Back in the early 80's the source for the first weapons used by the Afghanistan Mujahedeen was the army the Soviet Union sent into Afghanistan. Seems that the units they used were from the central caucauses, the 'stan republics of today, and the initial troops 'lost' some of their weapons before they went home.
I take it that the Iraqi's oil revenue is still not paying for this war.