Common Sense

I’m very happy to hear that Sen. Joe Biden (possible presidential contender, just like every presidential year) is going to hold six weeks of hearings on the Iraq War. Wow, if only Congress had, you know, done that before the war, we would be in a lot less trouble.

I wasn’t so thrilled with his proposal on fixing Iraq.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the fact that people with a plan are coming out and offering them since the White House has been “staying the course” with the lack of a plan for almost four years now. I just don’t think Biden’s plan would work.

The central idea there is that these three ethnic groups would even want to be separated. The Kurds most certainly would like that. In fact, I imagine they don’t even see the need for a central federal government. They have their own oil fields and autonomous government, why even bother sharing that revenue with the other groups?

I don’t think the Shia and the Sunnis think that way, though. The Sunnis dominated for so long and now the Shia seems to have battered-wife syndrome. They want to throw their weight around so that they are “even.” Getting even would mean more secratian violence.

The Sunnis, well no one takes losing dominance very well. Look at how white southerners still act like black people shouldn’t get all uppity here in America. It just so happens that they were the ones who also had all the military training and guns and stuff. They were pissed that the Army was disbanded and they began the insurgency.

This bullshit about al Qaeda being the cause of all this is just our president showing his stupidity again. Al Qaeda makes up about 2-3% of the insurgency, about 1,300 fighters. They’re just using Iraq as a training ground so that they have practical knowledge in fighting American forces. New terrorist recruits aren’t going to listen to or respect their terrorist officers unless they say something like “I did a tour in Iraq fighting Americans, and that’s why I know the best way to kill them.”

Dividing those two groups, the Sunni and Shia, would be nigh impossible. Besides creating separate countries in the middle of a civil war where one group might control the oil revenue of the other just seems like a bad idea.

American military forces are not going to stabilize Iraq anytime soon. It’s not stable now and it won’t be without at least another 100,000 troops. I don’t know where those troops would come from, except maybe the girl scouts. If we’re not going to make a real difference in a positive way, there is no point in staying. The Pentagon, almost a year ago, said that if we found ourselves in the middle of a civil war we would begin drawing down troop levels. Well, here we are; time to start leaving.

Interstingly, the Baker-Hamilton Commission now longer has any power. On election night, just about everyone was ready to ‘wait and see’ what they had to say. Almost the moment that the ISG got the spotlight, the White House started an internal audit in the Pentagon for a new proposal so it would look like their own idea. So now the Dems are just going to disregard the ISG and the White House and do their own thing. And I applaud that.

Waiting for some kind of compromise with the White House is a bad idea. Trying to save face for George W. Bush should be our last concern. Doing the right thing so that no other US soldier dies needlessly in this war should be the primary concern. President Bush’s legacy has already been consigned to the scrap heap of history, there’s no use dumpster diving to save it to make his life easier and the lives of soldiers harder.