From the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman and Anushka Asthana, on July 20th, there is this article:
GOP Lawmakers Edge Away From Optimism on Iraq
Faced with almost daily reports of sectarian carnage in Iraq, congressional Republicans are shifting their message on the war from speaking optimistically of progress to acknowledging the difficulty of the mission and pointing up mistakes in planning and execution.
Rep. Christopher Shays (Conn.) is using his House Government Reform subcommittee on national security to vent criticism of the White House's war strategy and new estimates of the monetary cost of the war. Rep. Gil Gutknecht (Minn.), once a strong supporter of the war, returned from Iraq this week declaring that conditions in Baghdad were far worse "than we'd been led to believe" and urging that troop withdrawals begin immediately.
And freshman Sen. John Thune (S.D.) told reporters at the National Press Club that if he were running for reelection this year, "you obviously don't embrace the president and his agenda."
"The first thing I'd do is acknowledge that there have been mistakes made," Thune said.
Rank-and file Republicans who once adamantly backed the administration on the war are moving to a two-stage new message, according to some lawmakers. First, Republicans are making it clear to constituents they do not agree with every decision the president has made on Iraq. Then they boil the argument down to two choices: staying and fighting or conceding defeat to a vicious enemy.
The shift is subtle, but Republican lawmakers acknowledge that it is no longer tenable to say the news media are ignoring the good news in Iraq and painting an unfair picture of the war. In the first half of this year, 4,338 Iraqi civilians died violent deaths, according to a new report by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. Last month alone, 3,149 civilians were killed -- an average of more than 100 a day.
I honestly can't remember or find the blog (probably on Dailykos or Rawstory or HuffingtonPost), who took those figures and ratioed them up to what the percentages would be in the U.S., then reflected on what would be the reaction in the U.S. if that were the case.
Check out this math: The U.S. has 300 million people, Iraq 25 million (a ratio of 12 to 1), so the numbers here would be over 1,200 a DAY in the U.S. - over 438,000 over the same period. What in the world would we do with numbers like that??!! How crazy would people be about numbers like that? Well, that is what we have brought upon Iraq.
If we had all known before taking out Saddam that it would turn into this, how many people would have supported it? How many Congressmen would have voted for this? And if they wouldn't have voted for it, why do they continue to drag their feet about getting our boys the hell out of there?
If we had an occupier being the cause of the deaths of that percentage of our people, what would we call the occupier? Stalin? Hitler? Genghis Khan? Pol Pot? Vlad the Impaler? Genocidal maniacs?
The Nazis rained terror on Europe from at least 1939 to 1945 - some would put the beginning in 1937. Using the more conservative value - 6 years - that 438,000 in Iraq would be 2,628,000 dead in 6 years, if it was the U.S. and Hitler was running things here. So, the next time you hear someone go ballistic about comparisons of the Bush regime to Hitler, there isn't much difference at all.
While the U.S. is not doing most of that killing, much of it is certainly being done because the U.S. is there. And every day we stay there, something between 25 and 100 Iraqis die. And the numbers are getting worse.
Is the occupier responsible for what goes on under their watch? If we had 400,000 deaths in a year in the U.S., or 2.6 million over 6 years, would we, the people of the U.S., assign any responsibility to our occupiers for those kinds of numbers?
Well, just think about it. Had the collaborating French government had numbers similar to those in WWII, would the Nazis have been held to a large part responsible for it?
It is not unserious speculation that we would have had Nuremburg-like courts in France, had that been the case.
...A good portion of the article goes on to discuss the merits of staying and the merits of pulling out. At least some sanity has been creeping into the thinking of some on the right, although certainly none of the sanity has as of yet resulted in any actual Congressional action (and won't for a long time to come):
He came to that conclusion after only ONE month? Well, those quotes above might allow for him to have actually thinking himself about going "wobbly".The evolving Republican message on the war contrasts with the strong rhetoric used by House and Senate Republicans recently in opposing a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq. During a debate last month, Gutknecht intoned, "Members, now is not the time to go wobbly." This week, he conceded "I guess I didn't understand the situation," saying that a partial troop withdrawal now would "send a clear message to the Iraqis that the next step is up to you."
The same was exactly true in Viet Nam in the early 1970s, that "if we pull out, there will be chaos and mass killings." Well, there are two responses to that POV:"If we don't take the training wheels off, we will be in the same place in six months that we're in today," he said.
Republicans and some conservative Democrats who have backed the president's call to stay the course are finding it increasingly difficult to square their generally optimistic rhetoric with the grim situation on the ground in Baghdad and other cities.
"This escalating trend . . . represents the greatest danger to Iraq as it threatens to erode the government's authority," Ashraf Qazi, the U.N. envoy to Baghdad, said in a statement. "The emerging phenomenon of Iraqis killing Iraqis on a daily basis is nothing less than a catastrophe."
But it is the nature of the violence that may be forcing Republicans and some Democrats to temper their public assertions about the war -- even as they insist that the administration cannot pull out without precipitating an even worse situation. Masked attackers wielding heavy machine guns have killed Shiite mothers and children in a market and hauled Sunnis off buses to be slaughtered in broad daylight. A suicide car bomber killed 53 Tuesday in Baghdad after he beckoned a crowd of day laborers to his explosives-laden minivan.
- Could it get much worse than it already is?
- If we stay, this goes on and on and on.
Ergo, does anything but leaving Iraq make any sense?
YES, there will be chaos for a while. There is chaos NOW. In Viet Nam, the chaos went on for a relatively brief period, as the Communists took control rather quickly. Collaborators were identified, rounded up, and many of them were killed, while many were sent to re-education centers.
It is my humble opinion that the Iraqi collaborators with the U.S., like their brothers in arms 30 years ago, will lose to the "enemy". Many will be shot. Many will be re-educated, in one form or another. Many will leave before being caught.
But the carnage will begin to end.
"Staying the course" by the U.S. will accomplish nothing - except to get many tens of thousands more Iraqis killed than if we leave.
It reminds one of the saying, "Better off dead than Red".
Oh? Is it really?
If 400,000 Americans were being killed per year under an occupier, I wonder how many Americans would agree with an occupier whose pundits wrote, back in their home country, "Better off dead than under a democracy"?
I cannot think that there is even one piece of historical fact that staying under the current circumstances would DIMINISH the number of dead.
Staying the course is only a way of TRYING to save face.
The only question right now is this:
How long do we follow such logic before we realize it does NOT save face?
Those in the Congress who talk such talk (I won't call it blather, though I was tempted) can be forgiven their innocence.
In the Bush regime, however, they mouth that blather, not because they believe it, but because they still believe that the U.S. oil companies can control Iraqi oil. So, their agenda drives their bleatings. They cannot face up to the fact that it is a lost cause. Only time and reality can ever wake them up to that. And each day goes by is another 10,000 votes against the GOP in 2006 and 2008. So, the clock is ticking on their hopes of salvaging something from Iraq.
And in the meantime, 100 Iraqis a day DIE. And there is no indication that it will change for the better in the future. As Gutknecht said, "If we don't take the training wheels off, we will be in the same place in six months that we're in today."
And six months after that. . . . and six months after that. . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment