What Have We Done
I read this in today’s NYTimes:
“Many militias and terrorist groups are just waiting for the Americans to leave,” said Salim Abdullah, the spokesman for the Iraqi Accordance Front,… "This does not mean the presence of American troops in Baghdad is our favorite option,” he said. “People in the street say the United States is part of the chaos here and they could have made it better and safer. Still, we need America to make the country more stable and not leave Iraq in the trouble, which they, themselves, have caused.”
It’s Salim’s last sentence that’s the shocker, when he says, apparently in all seriousness: “we need America to make the country more stable and not leave Iraq in the trouble, which they, [the Americans] themselves, have caused.”
In other words we have created the trouble and now we have to stay to eliminate the trouble we have created. How do we do that? Maybe a bad marriage of our own creation can be made better by our staying, but the country, Iraq, will be better by our staying? We’re in our fourth year of believing this with a total absence of evidence for that belief. Our being there creates the trouble. Our continuing to be there will somehow do away with the trouble? I don’t think so.
Unbelievable, isn’t it, first Vietnam, and now Iraq. We have shot ourselves in both feet, and at this time we can hardly walk. In both instances we have created situations for which there is no solution other than our walking away (if our feet would allow it) and thereby making a bad situation, of our creation, even worse. Unbelievable that we have done this to ourselves. What horrible chain of reasoning adopted by our leaders enabled this to happen?
Then further on in the same article I read this:
“The conditions that need to be achieved before a major troop reduction, General Odierno said, are a reduction in insurgent and militia attacks and an improved ability by Iraqi security forces to protect noncombatants.”
Now haven’t we heard this before, probably each year, since the President’s “Mission Accomplished” speech on the USS Abraham Lincoln, in May of 2003? What has led General Odierno to believe that anything we have done during the now four years since the President’s ill-chosen words on the Carrier deck has led to anything but an increase in insurgent attacks? What has led the General to believe that the ability of the Iraqi security forces to protect noncombatants is improving? Perhaps he is new to Iraq?
He must be, for I see no other explanation for the continual folly of his and others’ pronouncements, than the fact that our military personnel is constantly changing and that with the arrival of each new contingent in Iraq comes the belief that with our help the security conditions can be improved and the responsibility for the country’s security can eventually be placed in Iraqi hands.
But those with the long view, many journalists among others, realize that with the passage of each year the only significant changes taking place in Iraq are in the numbers of the dead and wounded and the numbers of those fleeing the country. What have we done?
