Yes;Yes

Guess it's thank God for the wisdom that elected Obama, huh.

I prefer the original name for this debacle:

Operation Iraqi Liberation

According to my brother (who is in the military, and has been to Iraq 3 times)- not everyone is leaving. There will still be a US presence there for some time. (Think Korea.) All Obama has done is take away support for those who need to move around the country (like my brother's group.)

The war isn't "over", despite statements to the contrary. Over 50,000 troops (about one third the total that has been there) remains. And:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/19/AR2010081905642.html

And, we've built permanent bases, office buildings, and business relationships there. In short: American corporations and military CONTROL Iraq, economically. They've attached like the mother of all leeches and are sucking billions of dollars in profit from it.

That is, until they don't.

As much as I can condense a very complex answer to a few setences, I'll try. The majority of Iraqis value their historically moderate, secular form of government. The US shoulders a lot of blame for upsetting that historic model by allowing conditions for a few to exploit sectarian violence as a means, not to create a theological form of government, but to improve their share of the economic spoils expected with growth over time. The Iraqis rightfully are very critical of the US for its role in the chaotic and unstable environment. Yet Iraqis recently looked over the cliff into the depths of sectarian violence and walked away for the momment. The fear is that if they return to the cliff, they will jump off. That fear resulted in a deep and personal resentment at how some of their own people attempted to exploit an already difficult situation by attacking fellow Iraqis, and there is a deep unsettling feeling that the current government stalemate presents an opportunity for those groups to again exploit the situation. As much as they hate it, most Iraqis do not feel the timing is right for the US to leave as the US is the significant stabalizing force. The fear of sectarian violence outweighs their distaste of the US occupation. That is significant in predicting how the situation will unfold.

One possibility is that the situation will allow a government hostile to the US to assume control of Iraq. However, Iraqis are exhausted of conflict, war, sanctions, and sectarian strife. While there is enough blame to go around, Iraqis spread a lot of the blame for their current situation on Saddam's petulance. Therefore, the more likely possibility is that Iraqis want to move forward and will be loath to allow a similar dynamic as the Ba'ath Party to control the government and expose them to endless strife. Just as the US presents stability at a cost of pride, the US also presents the desire for economic stability and international acceptance. So, my best guess is that the Iraqis will swallow their pride and recognize that ongoing hostility to the US is just not in their interests and thus select a rational form of government that walks a line between resentment and necessity.

As much as I can condense a very complex answer to a few setences, I'll try.

I like your summary. I think I can make an even shorter one: The US left Iraq a much worse place than they found it, for the far foreseeable future. The US, like all good empires built on shadow commerce and utterly dependent on resource control, created an imaginary foe to prop itself up. Now, the US controls the economic strings in Iraq, but seems baffled by that roaring sound coming down the road from the blowback that keeps heading or way.

One possibility is that the situation will allow a government hostile to the US to assume control of Iraq.

Unlikely, I think. The US economic tentacles are buried deeply and semi-permanently in Iraq, just like our military bases, airstrips, fortified buildings, and troops.

Complete waste of time, money, and human life. Possibly the worst foreign policy decision ever made by the US.

dg - You must be young.... we propped up the Shah of Iran (and look what that led to), we messed around in Viet Nam and got far more Americans and Viet Namese killed than died in Iraq and accomplished far less. And it was dumber because the French had already left a quagmire in Viet Nam. But all 3 of these fiascoes involved OIL.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
George Orwell (1903 - 1950)

"The US left Iraq a much worse place than they found it, for the far foreseeable future."

According to who or what?

According to who or what?

The Iraqis, mostly. Anywhere between a hundred thousand and a million of them dead. Several million displaced from their homes, either internally or into neighboring countries like Syria and Jordan, neither of which are prepared to handle those kinds of large-scale refugee problems. Infrastructure in Iraq destroyed and unreplaced after seven years and unlikely to ever be fixed.

Don't forget the thousands of tons of depleted uranium we left there with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

Obama's Vietnamization plan for Iraq will work as well as Nixon's. Just pull everyone out and let them work it out... or not who cares.

While we are at it how about pulling our troops out of Afghanistan, most other *stans, Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, Korea, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Kosovo etc.

The empire has fallen and it can't get up!

The whole Iraq war was an exercise in bringing the US military into some semblance of readiness for a new age of warfare. It may not have been a uniform waste. No pun intended.

The other purpose was to stop Saddam in his quest to turn Iraq into the next theocracy, Saudi-style, with him as the godhead. After the war in Kuwait, Saddam decided to avert his own demise by capitalizing on the tide of fundamentalism that was successfully seeping into the pores of the region, driven by the Saudi-supported clerics and Iran. So suddenly, the Iraqi flag had a large Allah logo inserted on it where none was before. Suddenly, Saddam was doing a lot of public praying. Suddenly, Saddam was building the biggest mosque in the Middle east, bigger than any of the religious bunkers in Saudi. And presto, suddenly Iraqi women took the hijab, which they had cast off two generations before...

I sometimes wonder if the goal of the occupation was to mire the country in so much marketplace bloodshed, readily available to be widely examined on the internet, that the bulk of normal people in the Middle East would start to reject the blood sport of religion.

I sometimes wonder if the goal of the occupation was to mire the country in so much marketplace bloodshed...

It wasn't suicide car bombers that leveled Fallujah and killed tens of thousands of civilians there. And the biggest explosions -- the ones that have left the most people dead and the most damage to Iraqi infrastructure -- were from American bombs and shells. Or have you forgotten "Shock and Awe"?

The idea that Saddam Hussein was establishing some sort of theocratic state in Iraq and that the only option to stop that was a whole-scale invasion is simply laughable. You claim that there was some sort of fundamentalism "driven by the Saudi-supported clerics and Iran" without even realizing that the Iranians think the Saudis are heretics and vice versa. It's like George W. Bush having to be told after the fact that there were different kinds of Muslims. Maybe you missed the whole Shia vs. Sunni war that was unleashed in Iraq by the US invasion but you'd think that seven and a half years after the fact people would have learned at least a little about what was going on in that part of the world instead of indulging in their fantasies about how they can justify the invasion to go after WMDs that didn't exist.

And if Iraq and Afghanistan are the templates for a "new age of warfare", I'd like to put my vote in for the old model, where there was a plan and the wars were won in three or four years rather than the "new" Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan model where we blow up a country, perform some sort of ineffectual occupation for a decade, and then skedaddle leaving them on their own.

http://firedoglake.com/

. . And everybody knows what the commission’s targets are. They won’t recommend ending the wars in Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. They won’t suggest closing a few hundred of the thousand military bases the U.S. maintains in foreign lands, or scaling back the hundreds of billions Uncle Sam spends on militarizing Africa, or propping up its client regimes in Israel, Egypt or Colombia and elsewhere. The commission won’t try to get back any of the trillions the Fed has given away to Wall Street, or stop it from handing out more. The commission is not about to close the banking loopholes that let wealthy corporations and individuals move trillions offshore to evade taxation, or shut off the many forms of corporate welfare. The commission’s targets are Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security. .

darrell,

I am well aware that Iran and Saudi Arabia are religious enemies. It doesn't matter. They are the forces in the region that have promoted God, whether a Shia or Sunni version, and specifically, the kind of God who oversees the minutia of human activity, as enforced by the ruling class of mullahs, through Sharia.

The point is simply raised, has the American-led unleashing of the Sunni-Shia conflict in Irak led to some basic questioning of the role of religion in government, on the part of Irakis and other Arabs? I hope so, or Jack is right, the whole thing was a waste.

And no, the incompetence of the American military leadership is not in question, and I NEVER said that invasion of Irak was the ONLY way to block the expansion of Islamist hegemony in the region. But tell me, darrell, do you have better ideas for confronting that problem, or do you think we should just stand by and let whole societies revert back to the 8th century?

The winner of oil contracts in Iraq? China, according to MSNBC recently. No doubt there's a good backstory on this development. I wonder how long before we get a book that explains it all for us.

The point is simply raised, has the American-led unleashing of the Sunni-Shia conflict in Irak led to some basic questioning of the role of religion in government, on the part of Irakis and other Arabs?

Based on Fox News and voting records the past several years, the war has sure led to some questioning of the role of religion in government in America. And the answer seems to be "more, please!"

I'm trying to imagine what a TV watcher in Iraq or Saudi Arabia must think of our criticism of theocracy when they hear American press hotly debating whether Obama is a "proper Christian" or a "Muslim", news of Quran burnings and Senators questioning whether Armageddon will arrive soon, "Jesus Camp"-style fundamentalist ravings, and similar lighthearted stories.

The peculiar American view of the rest of the world is worthy of much snickering when the lens is turned towards us. The worst part of it all, in my opinion, is the astounding American arrogance that believes that we must "do something" about problems of religion and government in the Middle East. The only reason we are involved is economic, not philosophical. And oh, the fierce, hot wind of the blowback from *that* kind of arrogance will be in our faces for many, many decades (or perhaps centuries) to come.

And won't the Middle East be a lovely place for solar and wind power generation? Not that anybody in America is thinking about *that* now, right?

Right.

ecohuman,

In principle, I agree with some of what you say regarding the corruption of American motives and the likelihood of bad, bad, fallout from a horribly run operation. As my father-in-law, who narrowly escaped internment in Germany during the war, famously said in the buildup to the Irak war: "I wouldn't trust these guys to run a chicken coop, let alone a war."

The problem I have with what you say is that I cannot agree that American religious craziness in any way equates, or is even slightly comparable to, the iron grip of oppression exerted by Islam in certain areas of the world. Maybe because I am a woman, I identify more fiercely with an entire population of women who are essentially little more than slaves. (This identification probably results from being born in an Arab country, and raised in my early years by an Arab woman; later, as a teenager I went to an Arab country in North Africa for my first year of college and saw a lot of stuff that made pretty indelible impressions. My country of birth, Lebanon, is a place that was once a cosmopolitan paradise in which I revelled as a young child. That country was crushed, destroyed, by a religious war. This is all a far cry from some crazy preachers in Florida burning Korans.)

A second thought about our recent disastrous intervention in the region, that does a little bit of a somersault with your statements.

As a superpower, The US essentially created, made possible, fuelled, the Islamist monster through decades of bad, bad foreign policy in the Middle East. If you accept that as truth, don't we, as a culpable nation, have any responsibility to the restoration of a just order in those societies?

The problem I have with what you say is that I cannot agree that American religious craziness in any way equates, or is even slightly comparable to, the iron grip of oppression exerted by Islam in certain areas of the world.

You see, you practice the classic maneuver of assigning a personality and behavior to a "religion". That's no more valid than those that do it to Christianity. A religion isn't a person, and there's no religion in the world whose adherents see it all the same way. Islam, perhaps much more than Christianity, values the role of religious scholars and their role in understanding and debating their religious system. Yes, really.

And on oppression: how many advanced military bases does "Islam" operate in the world? America operates several hundred; some have the economy and operation of a small city. The US functioned as an earlier version of Nazi Germany in its serial domination of the Pacific between 1800 and 1940. Yes, really.

Maybe because I am a woman, I identify more fiercely with an entire population of women who are essentially little more than slaves.

Then you've got an extremely narrow view of Islam, and one that allows only for your definition of what the male-female relationship should be, and you assume that over a billion people live and relate in exactly the same way. Do you not realize that you've got Muslims living near you? Working at businesses near you? At Intel? At a restaurant? And so on? Seek some of those women out and ask them about their "slavery".

I wonder what Islam thinks of the role of women in fundamentalist Christianity? You know, where the men lead the household, command the woman, and so forth? The orthodox biblical interpretation?

(This identification probably results from being born in an Arab country, and raised in my early years by an Arab woman; later, as a teenager I went to an Arab country in North Africa for my first year of college and saw a lot of stuff that made pretty indelible impressions.

I'm sure it did. I'm sure you also know that (a) not all Arabs are Muslims,(b) most Muslims are not Arabs, and (c)Arab Muslim women live all all over the world.

My country of birth, Lebanon, is a place that was once a cosmopolitan paradise in which I revelled as a young child. That country was crushed, destroyed, by a religious war.

If you're referring to the war in '82, you're almost entirely wrong--the war was not over religion, or even dominated by religious forces. I'd strongly suggest looking into what happened. But maybe you mean the Lebanese civil war? Nope--not really about religion either. Or maybe you mean the founding of the *country* of Lebanon? When the British and French and a complex web of political favors and resource ownership established a *Christian majority* country? Maybe that?

Or maybe you're unfamiliar with the war, invasion, and domination that went into the British and French securing domination of oil resources in Iraq and other locales, and essentially dealing all the cards of oppression for empirical ends? No?

No. I doubt you mean any of that.

This is all a far cry from some crazy preachers in Florida burning Korans.)

As long as you're willing to see the religious and corporate foundations of American aggression as equal to "some crazy preachers", but all of Islam as practicing an "iron grip of oppression" and making women into "slaves", you'll be like the rest of the majority of Americans--utterly blind to history, to motivations, and to the presence of propoganda.

(You see, you practice the classic maneuver of assigning a personality and behavior to a "religion".)

I do. Practices like clitorectomy and assigning capital punishment to blasphemers are sanctioned by Islam, and only Islam, and modern day Islamic leaders are the ONLY religious leaders that still sanction those practices. The old men at Al-Azhar until very recently were pronouncing clitorectomy an honorable practice. Mohammed is quoted in the Hadeeth as saying that the clitorectomy cuts shouldn't be too deep, because husbands like it when their wives still enjoy sex.

(Seek some of those women out and ask them about their "slavery".)

The subset of women I am referring to live in places like Waziristan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, northern Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. I do not need to talk to a woman who has been sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery to find out if she feels oppressed. Go talk to feminists in the middle east, they'll set you straight.

(But maybe you mean the Lebanese civil war? Nope--not really about religion either.)

If you think the civil war in Lebanon in 1975 wasn't a classic sectarian war defined by religious groupings, then you weren't there or paying attention at the time.

Practices like clitorectomy and assigning capital punishment to blasphemers are sanctioned by Islam, and only Islam, and modern day Islamic leaders are the ONLY religious leaders that still sanction those practices.

You've contradicted yourself within one long sentence. Which is it sanctioning this practice--Islam, or "modern day Islamic leaders"? If you can't see the difference, then I'll just claim that all Christians are Quran-burning idiots, and all Democrats are gay-loving government haters.

But let's get to the facts, okay? From that link (which is the United Nations):

Contrary to popular belief, female genital mutilation or cutting is not required by any religion. In fact, many religious leaders and scholars and faith-based organizations from around the world have called for the practice to be banned.

And Muslim women are not silent, gaye.

And about this:

I do not need to talk to a woman who has been sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery to find out if she feels oppressed.

Then I suppose you won't be interested in reading about the Danvers Statement (look it up) that many Christians have adopted, affirming that men essentially have "headship" over women. Or the significant amount of domestic violence perpetrated by men on women for "Christian" reasons (look up the Freedom for Christian Women Coalition, for example). Or, for another example, abuse of children by Christian priests. I can only assume that Christianity condones all of these--right?

If you think the civil war in Lebanon in 1975 wasn't a classic sectarian war defined by religious groupings, then you weren't there or paying attention at the time.

Wikipedia (for starters), says this:

There is no consensus among scholars and researchers on what triggered the Lebanese Civil War. The antecedents of the war can be traced back to the conflicts and political compromises reached after the end of Lebanon's administration by the Ottoman Empire. The Cold War had a powerful disintegrative effect on Lebanon, which was closely linked to the polarization that preceded the 1958 political crisis as well as the heightening tension that preceded the collapse of 1975.

And for more information, you might visit reputable websites that lay out the history of the conflict in excruciating detail. Or, you can adopt a pop culture-soundbite view of the war, and make it out to be nothing more than a religious war with no roots anywhere but in religion. Even the most average of honest historians knows otherwise.

I know more about the Lebanese war than I would like to add to. Just because scholars don't agree on root causes and contributing factors, blah blah, doesn't discount the fact that militias during the war IN GENERAL organized along lines of religious identity, with few exceptions.

And just because the United Nations plays nice with wording doesn't mean that brutal practices aren't directly fuelled by Muslim men who are powerful and influential religious authorities. These are the authorities that condemned Salman Rushdie to a lifetime of hiding, for example.

Yes of course there are wonderful tolerant thinking loving intellectual humanist Muslims for God's sake. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the conservative mullahs and their barbarian edicts. Did you hear Khamenei just pronounced recently that all and any music was evil and young people shouldn't listen to it? You don't think this has a profoundly oppressive effect on Iranian society? This is Persia, we are talking about, people descended from one of the most refined and artistically cultivated societies the world has ever known. I remember one of the most moving concerts I ever heard was performed by two Iranian string musicians in Tunis in 1981. Just THINK of the generation of young boys in Iran who will be discouraged from picking up the oud over this. The whole thing is just heartbreaking.

Ecohuman, I wish we could come to better terms over all of this, but I'm afraid I am just a whole lot more concerned about the direction that Islamic religious LEADERSHIP is taking than you are.