rowyn

"CNN also has obtained an al Qaeda document that spells out the terrorist group's plan to separate Spain from the U.S.-led coalition on Iraq.
...
"The strategy spelled out in the document calls for using terrorist attacks to oust Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's Partido Popular from power and replace it with the Socialists.
...
"'We think the Spanish government will not stand more than two blows, or three at the most, before it will be forced to withdraw because of the public pressure on it,' the al Qaeda document says.
...
"the Socialists unseat[ed] the Popular Party three days after near-simultaneous bombings of four trains killed 200 and shocked the nation.
...
"Prime Minister-elect Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Monday he wants the 1,300 Spanish troops in Iraq to return home by June 30 if the United Nations 'doesn't take control of Iraq.'

"'I think Spain's participation in the war has been a total error,' he said."

I feel sick.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

jordangreywolf.livejournal.com

What really bugs me is the idea that pulling out of Iraq is the proper way to show disapproval of the war. If one wished to disapprove of the war, the time to show it was when the war was going on. The fact that the US has still been suffering casualties has prompted many to parade around the "since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations" as a joke ... but there's a big difference between tearing a country apart, and putting it back together again.

Right now, if I understand at all correctly, the objective is to restore something resembling order, to provide security, and to restore the "infrastructure" - fix schools, replace bombed bridges, make sure the electricity works before the scorching summer hits, keep patching the oil lines, and so forth.

If the US and all its partners were to unilaterally withdraw their forces, the mayhem wouldn't stop. Any fledgling democracy would be at the mercy of those with guns and bombs and a willingness to use them to advance their own agendas, regardless of any harm it might bring to innocent bystanders.

Furthermore, ending involvement in Iraq certainly wouldn't stop Al Qaeda. (I wonder if some people have forgotten that 9-11 happened before we invaded Iraq?)

And, in any case, regarding the "lies" of the former Spanish government, the reports I heard on NPR seemed to give compelling evidence that could point to either Al Qaeda or the ETA ... or both. I half-expect to hear eventually that some splinter group of the ETA fell in with Al Qaeda sympathizers to pull this one off.

From:

postrodent.livejournal.com

Ending involvement with Iraq certainly will not stop Al Qaida, but it would certainly free up resources for that task. A lot of people in the US national security establishment view Iraq as a tragic distraction from the more pressing issue of catching terrorists.
As for withdrawal... I'm for it, on the grounds that we shouldn't have been there in the first place, and our occupation is clearly not bringing order or stability. But then, I'm not sure what will. It may be that Iraq is a Yugoslavia that needed a tyrant to keep it together; obviously I hope that's not the case. Either way: we shouldn't have made all those deals with Saddam in the 80s and puffed up Iraq's military power, we shouldn't have told him that we didn't have any position on his border disputes with Kuwait, and we shouldn't have invaded with no clear plan of what to do to fix the place once he was gone. But we did all those things, and now Iraq is like a mud puddle that a squadron of third-graders have stomped around in: it's unlikely to be clear again anytime soon.

From:

telnar.livejournal.com

Al Qaeda doesn't have a return address that we can invade (partly as a result of past US military action). It's not at all clear how we might use most of the components of the infantry and armored forces currently in Iraq to fight al Qaeda (there are exceptions for intelligence collection gear and special forces), so I think that the argument that leaving Iraq would free up resources is a red herring.

More fundamentally, our goal in dealing with al Qaeda has to be to make it undesirable to assist them. There will always be terrorists who hate the US and the West generally. We're simply too big and responsible for too many controversial things for it to be otherwise. What matters in the long run is whether those terrorists are perceived at tilting at windmills in a doomed campaign which should be shunned by anyone who doesn't want to face retaliation, or as heroic crusaders against a bloated but weak empire on the verge of collapse. Al Qaeda's ability to get future recruits and state sponsors hangs in the balance.

Because much of this campaign is about perceptions rather than territory, we need to be careful not to take actions which allow us to be perceived as weak. That means following through on our decisions, but it also means choosing targets with care. Incidentally, I was in favor of the invasion of Iraq, but even at the time, I expected that it required a 5-10 year commitment.

For those who think that the strategy of hiding our collective heads in the sand will work (even in Europe), the claim of responsibility for the attack in Madrid mentioned the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan. Even France has faced islamic terrorist attacks for its policies in spite of clear opposition to the war in Iraq.

From:

postrodent.livejournal.com

I grant you that the forces stationed in Iraq would not, if withdrawn, be immediately set to chasing after Al Qaida. I'm thinking more in terms of money, time and energy expended -- tens of billions of dollars, millions of intel man-hours, months and months where Al Qaida was on the back burner because Iraq was on the front burner.
I also don't agree that the terrorists and their supporters see things as tactically as you would paint them; it is not whether the US is strong or weak, but whether it's right or wrong. There is a tactical battle, certainly, but there is also a battle for, to use an overworked phrase, hearts and minds. Invading Iraq was bound to be a dead loss in that battle. If being perceived as weak isn't any good, being perceived as an arrogant bully isn't that great either, and it was inevitable that the invasion would increase the ranks of those who see America that way.
I'm curious about those terror attacks on the French -- could you cite an example?

From:

telnar.livejournal.com

Sure, here are a couple of articles describing an attack on a French owned oil tanker in 2002:

http://www.ict.org.il/spotlight/det.cfm?id=837
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/06/world/main524488.shtml

The merits of invading Iraq is a big subject, and one which was rendered moot by the passage of time, so while I disagree with you there, I don't want to bore everyone with a rehash of everything I had to say a year ago.

One thing I will say, though, is that fighting al Qaeda is not a type of job where unlimited resources are all that useful. There is only a certain amount that we can reasonably do (which is determined in part by the level of cooperation we get from the countries where the fight is going on).

I agree that there is a battle for hearts and minds, and there are a number of things that the West could do to improve life in the third world (cough -- agriculture policies -- cough). It isn't al Qaeda's hearts and minds that I'm interested in fighting for, though. They hate us not because of what we do wrong, but in significant part because of many of the things we do right such as giving women equal rights and encouraging religious and political freedom.

From:

postrodent.livejournal.com

Thanks for the link. I missed the news of the Limburg attack the first time. However, I can't find too many theories about *why* that tanker was chosen for attack. It's worth noting that the Iraq invasion was being planned at that time; the only theory I've turned up, on an Islamic site that reeked of craziness, is that the bombers wanted to make the point that tankers, even modern double-hulled ones, are vulnerable, and it would be difficult for the US to profit from Iraq's oil if they decided to invade. Pretty thin stuff, admittedly, but I'm still not sure whether the tanker's nationality was all that significant to the attackers.
I concur that it's useless for us to debate the right or wrong of the Iraq invasion. However, people who know a lot more about terrorism than I do are saying that the Iraq war took resources away from hunting al Qaida (link, link, link, link.)
You bring up the "they hate us for our freedoms" theory, and while I'm sure Al Qaida and many Arabs think that we're decadent and immoral, that is not the root of their resentment for us: I think it's pretty unambiguous that most anti-American sentiment in the Arab world stems from our past misdeeds there -- including our support for Israel, a thorny question I'd rather not get into, but google up some information about the CIA's role in the coup against Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 sometime.

From:

telnar.livejournal.com

Your phrasing lumps "our support for Israel" with "our past misdeeds." In fact our support for Israel is far better known and more frequently criticized than our other actions (which include things like supporting the Shah of Iran, but also include defending Egypt's territorial integrity against Britain and France in 1956).

The problem is that I would count support for the only democratic non-European country in the region as one of the things we do right -- not a misdeed (I'm not counting NATO member and EU applicant, Turkey). Most Arab states have no interest in peace with Israel except to the extent that it can't be defeated militarily (admittedly, a possibility to which they are increasingly becoming resigned), and their public opinion strongly favors eliminating the state in its entirety.

There are legitimate differences of opinion on the appropriate borders for Israel (although the only reason that Israel conquered additional territory in 1967 was because it was it was invaded by every major neighboring state, and the reason that much of that territory was not quickly returned was that at the time, Israel's neighbors were committed to its destruction and invaded again in 1973). That said, the Israeli Supreme Court remains the only (domestically controlled) court in the region where Muslims can expect justice. I happen to think that the US has a moral responsibility to assist small free states threatened by larger undemocratic neighbors, and that doing so brings practical benefits by making attacks on those states less likely in the future. Based on that, I support defending Israel just as I support defending Taiwan.

Incidentally, I have rarely seen more hypocrisy than in the way UN and European organizations criticize Israel. That country is held to an almost impossibly high standard (e.g. being criticized when it's forces inflict civilian casualties by using small arms firing at combatants who are shooting at them from buildings containing civilians even when the Israeli forces specifically avoided using artillery because of those civilians), while there is at most token comment for events which occur in Arab states like Saddam Hussein’s attempt to eliminate the Marsh Arab culture by diverting rivers after the first Gulf War or Hafez Assad's decision to sack the town of Hama in 1982 and exterminate its 20,000 inhabitants as a response to perceived disloyalty.

From:

telnar.livejournal.com

I know that you said that you didn't want to get into the question of whether our support for Israel was wise, but it goes to the core of whether we can reasonably expect to win a short run battle for the hearts and minds of those in the Arab world who oppose us.

The problem as I see it is that Arab opposition to Israel isn't geopolitics. It represents hard core hatred. The snippets that I've seen from secondary school curriculums in the Palestinian Authority and in Arab countries are extremely anti-Semitic and include libels that the authors almost certainly knew were false (a recent Egyptian television program, for example, claimed that Passover Matzoth required human blood as an ingredient). News is routinely spun in a massive way by the state controlled press in the region (and Al-Jazera is far from friendly to Israel as well). Attempts to kill Israeli civilians are seen as heroic. A June 2002 poll of West Bank and Gaza residents by the Palestinian Jerusalem Media and Communication Center found that 51% of respondents think that the goal of the intifada should be "liberating all of historic Palestine" (i.e. including Israel proper).

The only nation that I can think of which took close to as much criticism was South Africa under apartheid (and even there, the intensity of the critics didn't rise to the post 1967 criticism of Israel until the 1980s). Yet Israel has a better human rights record than any equally threatened country I can name in history. It's true that Switzerland doesn't make some of the mistakes and moral compromises that Israel does in fighting the intifada, but it also doesn't have to confront those decisions. Look at how much the American attitude towards the trade off between civil rights and security changed after 9/11 for a sense of what we might have done if we faced the far greater threat that Israel lives with.

If this were a question of geopolitics, then we could consider shifting our position marginally to one which was more balanced and perceptions of us would change accordingly. Unfortunately, I think that the US's well know commitment to Israel having a right to exist is seen by many on "the Arab street" as a problem in itself.

From:

elusivetiger.livejournal.com

Isn't it the truth. It is PC to suggest that Israel is equally guilty in their dealings with the Palestinians, who are themselves oppressed not by Israel but by their own militant gang of Islamic "leaders". If it weren't for the brutal, senseless tactics of the PLO these people would all have exactly what they want, peace and a sense of identity. The Palestinian leadership, not by any stretch the people themselves, have polarized the Israelis and forced them to act, yet they still don't stoop to the level of their enemy and deliberately target civilians.

This is the approach of the Islamic states - their own people are cattle, suitable for suicidal runs into the enemy's territory while they sit on the sidelines and stir the pot, spreading lie after lie about the Israeli agenda. And this is why they have no moral authority of any sort to lead even their own people, let alone have a say in the governance of others. They are the worst element in any society, and the true Islamic leaders need to do everything in their power to stop this representation of their religion, this obscene distortion of their beliefs.

From:

makovette.livejournal.com

I just wanted to say thanks to Telnar and Postrodent for the very interesting and excellently written dialog above.

Good, thought provoking ideas, it makes for most excellent reading.

Thanks,
Mako

From:

rowyn

Right now, if I understand at all correctly, the objective is to restore something resembling order, to provide security, and to restore the "infrastructure" - fix schools, replace bombed bridges, make sure the electricity works before the scorching summer hits, keep patching the oil lines, and so forth.

If the US and all its partners were to unilaterally withdraw their forces, the mayhem wouldn't stop.

Needless to say, I agree with you. I am heartened that it is possible for the US to improve the situation by the success last century in transforming Japan and Germany from dictatorships to democracies. The same thing might not work with Iraq, and even if it would, America may not have the will to implement it.

But I think it's better to try, then to give up and allow a new tyrant to assume control -- which is almost certainly what will happen if we withdraw completely.