Ralph Peters - Last Gasps In Iraq

[Peregrino]

Is the writing on the wall? Will we have to pay another butcher's bill for GW III? With commentary like this from thinkers of RP's stature (and he isn't the only one) I'm not looking forward to Nov. 8.

Food for thought - Peregrino



USA Today
November 2, 2006
Pg. 13

Last Gasps In Iraq

I supported this war, but the deteriorating situation is starting to convince me that we can't win. Those of us who hoped that the Iraqis could achieve democracy were wrong — and their failure has implications for the entire region.

By Ralph Peters

On Tuesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki obeyed Muqtada al-Sadr's command to withdraw U.S. troops from Baghdad's Sadr City. He halted a vital U.S. military operation. It was the third time in less than a month that al-Maliki had sided with the anti-American cleric against our forces.

President Bush insists that we have no conflicts with the al-Maliki government. The president isn't telling the truth — or he himself doesn't support our military's efforts. He can't have it both ways. Bush appears increasingly desperate just to get through the upcoming elections.

I supported the removal of Saddam Hussein. I believed that Arabs deserved a chance to build a rule-of-law democracy in the Middle East. Based upon firsthand experience, I was convinced that the Middle East was so politically, socially, morally and intellectually stagnant that we had to risk intervention — or face generations of terrorism and tumult. I still believe that our removal of Hussein was a noble act.

I only wish the administration had done it competently.

Iraq is failing. No honest observer can conclude otherwise. Even six months ago, there was hope. Now the chances for a democratic, unified Iraq are dwindling fast. The country's prime minister has thrown in his lot with al-Sadr, our mortal enemy. He has his eye on the future, and he's betting that we won't last. The police are less accountable than they were under Saddam. Our extensive investment in Iraqi law enforcement only produced death squads. Government ministers loot the country to strengthen their own factions. Even Iraq's elections — a worthy experiment — further divided Iraq along confessional and ethnic lines. Iraq still exists on the maps, but in reality it's gone. Only a military coup — which might come in the next few years — could hold the artificial country together.

This chaos wasn't inevitable. While in Iraq late last winter, I remained soberly hopeful. Since then, the strength of will of our opponents — their readiness to pay any price and go to any length to win — has eclipsed our own. The valor of our enemies never surpassed that of our troops, but it far exceeded the fair-weather courage of the Bush administration.

Yet, for all our errors, we did give the Iraqis a unique chance to build a rule-of-law democracy. They preferred to indulge in old hatreds, confessional violence, ethnic bigotry and a culture of corruption. It appears that the cynics were right: Arab societies can't support democracy as we know it. And people get the government they deserve.

For us, Iraq's impending failure is an embarrassment. For the Iraqis — and other Arabs — it's a disaster the dimensions of which they do not yet comprehend. They're gleeful at the prospect of America's humiliation. But it's their tragedy, not ours.

Iraq was the Arab world's last chance to board the train to modernity, to give the region a future, not just a bitter past. The violence staining Baghdad's streets with gore isn't only a symptom of the Iraqi government's incompetence, but of the comprehensive inability of the Arab world to progress in any sphere of organized human endeavor. We are witnessing the collapse of a civilization. All those who rooted for Iraq to fail are going to be chastened by what follows.

Iraq still deserves one last chance — as long as we don't confuse deadly stubbornness and perseverance. If, at this late hour, Iraqis in decisive numbers prove willing to fight for their own freedom and a constitutional government, we should be willing to remain for a generation. If they continue to revel in fratricidal slaughter, we must leave.

And contrary to the prophets of doom, the United States wouldn't be weakened by our withdrawal, should it come to that. Iraq was never our Vietnam. It's al-Qaeda's Vietnam. They're the ones who can't leave and who can't win.

Islamist terrorists have chosen Iraq as their battleground and, even after our departure, it will continue to consume them. We'll still be the greatest power on earth, indispensable to other regional states — such as the Persian Gulf states and Saudi Arabia — that are terrified of Iran's growing might. If the Arab world and Iran embark on an orgy of bloodshed, the harsh truth is that we may be the beneficiaries.

My disillusionment with our Iraq endeavor began last summer, when I was invited to a high-level discussion with administration officials. I went into the meeting with one firm goal, to convince my hosts that they'd better have Plan B in case Iraq continued to disintegrate. I left the session convinced that the administration still didn't have Plan A, only a blur of meandering policies and blind hopes. After more than three years, it was still “An Evening at the Improv.”

Then, last month, as Iraq's prime minister seconded al-Sadr's demand that our troops free a death-squad mastermind they had captured, I knew a fateful page had turned. A week later, al-Maliki forbade additional U.S. military raids in Sadr City, the radical mullah's Baghdad stronghold. On Tuesday, al-Maliki insisted that our troops remove roadblocks set up to help find a kidnapped U.S. soldier. Iraq's prime minister has made his choice. We're not it. It's time to face reality. Only Iraqis can save Iraq now — and they appear intent on destroying it. Après nous, le deluge.

Iraq could have turned out differently. It didn't. And we must be honest about it. We owe that much to our troops. They don't face the mere forfeiture of a few congressional seats but the loss of their lives. Our military is now being employed for political purposes. It's unworthy of our nation.

Ralph Peters is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors and the author of 21 books. He is a retired U.S. Army officer.

[CoLawman]

Ralph Peters has always been credible. What is unnerving is my inability to offer even..........oh yeah, well... in reply. Could this be the beginning of the tipping point?

[aricbcool]

Originally Posted by Peregrino

Will we have to pay another butcher's bill for GW III?

I'm sorry Sir; my googlefu is weak today. What/who is GW III?

--Aric

[Pete]

Originally Posted by aricbcool

I'm sorry Sir; my googlefu is weak today. What/who is GW III?

--Aric

Global War III

WW I was The Great War

[Team Sergeant]

Originally Posted by Pete

Global War III

WW I was The Great War

I'm thinking "Gulf War...III

(We've not taken this global yet... )

Just for the record, I would not use USA Today to put in the cat's litter box, that paper is not worth the paper it's printed on.

Team Sergeant

[Pete]

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant

I'm thinking "Gulf War...III

(We've not taken this global yet... )

Team Sergeant

I was thinking that we had WW I, WW II and the the chatter about the Cold War as WW III and now the Global War on Terror. We had Gulf War I and Gulf War II. I think Gulf War II is Round I of the Global War on Terror, AKA Islamic War of Expansion.

The pot is simmering.

[The Reaper]

Even if you think you are defeated, it is never a good idea to let the enemy know. They might be about to give up too.

I do not normally disagree with Ralph Peters, but IMHO, he should not have written this right now.

I do believe that PM al-Maliki should have gotten a very special phone call after the first incident asking him how long he thought he could continue to be PM without us, and if he preferred al-Sadr's militia to US forces.

TR

[Team Sergeant]

Originally Posted by The Reaper

I do believe that PM al-Maliki should have gotten a very special phone call after the first incident asking him how long he thought he could continue to be PM without us, and if he preferred al-Sadr's militia to US forces.

TR

Just what I was thinking. If you're going to be head of a nation you'd better start thinking about all the people, not just your own little "tribe". I was also thinking it would take about two days to get everyone out (to Kuwait) if this meathead pulls another one of these bonehead stunts.

[x SF med]

AL-
clear your inbox, wouldn't let me send you a pm

if you can, delete this after you read it.

[Five-O]

+1

Originally Posted by The Reaper

I do not normally disagree with Ralph Peters, but IMHO, he should not have written this right now.
TR

I am not sure if Mr Peters is trying to show that he is the smartest guy in the room or what but it is way too premature to say we should withdraw. In my mind he is irresponsible for voicing this opinion at this time. Will Iraq turn out the way POTUS wanted to? Absolutely not. Can America show the Iraqi people that living in the 12th century may not be the best choice for a prosperous future for their children and try this here thing called democracy...even an arab style democracy? Its worth the continuing effort. If the military is allowed to take the gloves off things would be different. Give war a chance.

[bluebb]

On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.
“Adlai E. Stevenson”

A long read but worth it
Blue

No Viet Cong Followed Us Home, Al-Qaeda Will
November 2nd, 2006
“No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”
That was the battle cry of my generation, or rather it was the retreat from battle cry of my generation. The great Mohamad Ali said it, and like so many other things he said, he was of course right about this one. No Viet Cong ever did use the N word against him and truth be told no Viet Cong ever did a bad thing to me. That is because the Viet Cong stayed in Vietnam and once we left they didn’t follow us.
That perhaps is why it is so frightening to see the ghosts of the Vietnam War protest movement haunting the current war in Iraq. Bring the troops home. End the war. Stop the carnage. Throw the Republican bastards out. I embraced it the first time around. To do so this time, however, I believe is suicide.
Unlike the Viet Cong, Islamo Fascist terrorists have done a good deal worse than use racial epithets against us. They killed close to three thousand of us on 9/11. They tried to do the same in the first World Trade Center bombing, same characters, same building. The only problem was the placement of the bomb. They have announced their intent to do it again, only worse. And they are not alone. It is not only Al-Qaeda but the Iranian Islamic revolution and the terrorist organizations they now back. And please don’t kid yourself that this is a result of Iraq or Afghanistan or George Bush. The first act of the Iranian revolution was to kidnap an entire embassy full of American hostages. The current President of Iran was one of the hostage takers in his halcyon student days. That was his coming out party, and now he’s the one who not only envisions a world without Zionism but a world without America as well.
I know you don’t like Bush. I don’t like Bush. Nobody likes Bush. Fair enough. He lied to you. He mangles the language. You can’t trust him. He’s in hock to Haliburton. He has some weird daddy complex. Whatever you want to believe about him, believe it. Fair enough. You win. No arguments.
And you don’t like the war. You were lied to. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Bush and the neocons made it all up. They duped us. They duped you. They duped me. They duped Hillary and Kerry. They duped us all. Dupe, dupe, dupe, dupe, dupe. Done deal. Not only did they dupe us, but they dicked it up, made every mistake in the book.
Pick whatever argument you like. They should have had more troops. They should have had less troops. They should have listend to Chalabi. They shouldn’t have listened to Chalibi. Bremer was right. Bremer was wrong. Rumsfeld’s a bozo. Bozo could have done a better job. I’ll sign on to any part of it you like. They said this is a part of the war on terror, and of course that’s a lie too.
Ooops.
What do you mean, oops?
Well, what I mean is that part is actually true.
What part?
The part about Iraq being a part of the war on terror.
You’ve got to be kidding. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11! There was no connection between Iraq and Al-Qaeda!
Maybe not, but there is now.
Well, who’s fault is that?
Doesn’t matter.
What do you mean it doesn’t matter?
I mean, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how we got there. It doesn’t matter how you think you were lied to. It doesn’t matter if you think there was a connection between Sadam and Al-Qaeda. The only thing that matters now is that both Al-Qaeda and Iran and the terrorist groups they back and inspire believe that Iraq is their decisive battle. They have chosen it as the place where they will defeat America, and unlike the Viet Cong, they will not stay put. They will follow us home.
Bush opponents like to quote the National Intelligence Assessment which stated that America has been made less safe because its involvement in Iraq has become a recruiting aid for terrorists. That is of course true. But those same people ignore the flip side of that equation, which the National Intelligence Assessment made equally clear. If the Al Qaeda and Iranian backed terrorists win in Iraq they will be further encouraged in their war against us. If they are defeated, then the defeat will go heavy with them; and we will indeed be the beneficiaries.
To put it in its simplest terms, we can quit the battle field but the battle field will not quit us.
Whether we like it or not, we are in a war with Islamist terrorists. It is not a “supposed war,” or a war with quotation marks around it. Al-Qaeda declared its war against America years before 9/11. 9/11 was simply their Pearl Harbor. To suggest, as some have, that America and its actions in Iraq are the only thing that stands between us and peace with the Islamo terrorists would be like saying that after Pearl Harbor the reason we were at war with Japan was because we engaged the Japanese at Wake Island. The truth is much more uncomfortable. We are at war with Islamist terrorists because they want to kill us. That is not hyperbole, nor is it metaphor. They have announced it as clearly and as plainly as humanly possible. Al-Qaeda has declared we have the following choice: convert to Islam or die.
Well, the intelligentsia amongst us would have us believe that is just a Karl Rove ploy meant to frighten voters into voting for Republicans. There also lurks behind the knowing condescension the assumption that no matter what Al-Qaeda or the Ayatollahs might want in their demented fantasies, they can never really accomplish it. Maybe a few thousand die here or there, but the rest of us will still sip our lattes and shine it on. They can’t, after all, cripple America.
Actually, that’s not the case.
Just as the Spanish Civil War was a preview of what European Fascism had in store for the world, so too was the recent Israel/Hezb’allah war a preview of what Islamo Fascism has in store.
Consider this, right now as you read this, northern Mexico is by and large ruled not by its own government nor its police, nor even its military. It is ruled by drug cartels who cut off the heads of policemen and stick them up in American tourists resorts like Rosarita Beach. Like those drug cartels, Hezb’allah makes a good deal of its money which it uses to finance its terrorists activities, in the drug trade, primarily out of the Beka Valley.
Hezb’allah today has hundreds if not thousands of its terrorist operatives already in place in South America. It would be a small matter indeed for Hezb’allah units to collude with the drug cartels now ruling northern Mexico. Then with little more than the rockets already in Iran’s arsenal, with even a modest nuclear warhead (the kind which most estimates believe will be within Iran’s capabilities to produce in no more than a few years) those same Hezb’allah cells could take out the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. While a similar unit, operating from southern Canada could just as easily take out the Port of New York and New Jersey.
Those two acts by themselves would plunge the United States into a depression which would last decades. Such a scenario is not only possible, it is highly probable; especially if the US is defeated in Iraq and the Islamist terrorists believe they are on a roll. And make no mistake about who it is they want to kill. If you are a Christian they want to kill you. If you are a Jew they want to kill you. If you are a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Taoist, or a Jain, or a Muslim of a slightly different creed, they want to kill you. If you a secularist and believe in gay marriage, gay adoption, gay rights, or gay pride, they want to kill you. If you watch movies and like rock n’ roll, if you read Playboy, or Cosmo, if you wear mini-skirts, or “allow” your daughter, wife or girlfriend to do so, they want to kill you. When they say convert to Islam or die, they mean convert to Islam or they will kill you.
I know you don’t like that. I know you don’t want to believe that. I know you would like to believe only a cross eyed, red necked, right wing, apocalyptic, bozo hick like George Bush would believe such a thing, but that won’t let you off the hook. However much you don’t want to believe it, however much you would like it to go away, however loudly you whistle in the dark and comfort yourself with the sweet thought of Nancy Pelosi hanging her drapes over Denny Hastert’s fat, dead, humiliated body, it is still true.
If we quit Iraq they will follow us home. If they are defeated in Iraq, it does not mean the end of them. It does mean, however, that the wind will be knocked out of them. It means they will have suffered a set back that will take them almost as long to overcome as it took us to get over Vietnam.
But you say that we’ve already lost in Iraq. If you don’t believe it just watch CNN.

continued...

[bluebb]

Well here is the odd truth, which for some reason, absolutely no one seems to realize. Precisely because Iraq is such a mess, the terrorists now believe it is all but inevitable that they will win. They can smell victory. They can taste it. They are ramping up the equivalent of their air craft carrier landings under the banner “Jihad Accomplished.”
But for the first time, since World War II, for some insane reason, the previous paradigm is reversed. In every other conflict of this type one always hears the sentence “All the Viet Cong have to do, or Hezb’allah has to do, or all the Resistance has to do in order to win is simply survive.” Thus by having outlasted the lumbering oaf, the West will be defeated. Well, guess what, in Iraq of 2006 precisely because they so smell victory, for the first time since World War II, all America has to do in order to win, is not lose.
Let me say it again, in Iraq, all America has to do in order to win is not lose.
All America has to do in order to defeat Al-Qaeda and the Iranian backed terrorists is not lose to them.
And all we have to do in order to not lose to them is not to leave before the Iraqis can bring the violence to a manageable level.
They don’t have to end the violence.
They just have to be able to bring it to a manageable level, a level in which they can maintain an elected government and manage their affairs with a minimum of help or indeed presence of US forces.
All we have to do to win is not leave until then.
Why do I believe that this is so? Because it is precisely what the terrorists are telling us. This is their Tet offensive. This is their attempt to influence our elections. If they can help elect a Congress that will cut off funds for the war, then just as was the case in Vietnam, that is precisely what will happen. And when it happens we will leave. In defeat.
All we have to do to win is not lose.
All we have to do to not lose, is not leave until the Iraqis can manage the violence.
Not defeat it.
Not eliminate it.
Just manage it.
If we stay till then it is the Islamo terrorists who will be gasping for breath.
It will be Midway instead of Pearl Harbor.
Dan Gordon is the writer of such films as The Hurricane, Murder in the First, Wyatt Earp, and The Assignment. He served as a captain in the reserves in the IDF during the recent war.


Dan Gordon

[bluebb]

The above was posted by Dan Gordon on the web site American Thinker.

http://www.americanthinker.com/

I believe we cannot quit, we may have to change our tactics but we must win this one.

Blue

[Peregrino]

Originally Posted by bluebb

The above was posted by Dan Gordon on the web site American Thinker.

http://www.americanthinker.com/

I believe we cannot quit, we may have to change our tactics but we must win this one.

Blue

Good find. That's what I like about this "Forum" - smart people sharing provocative thoughts that stimulate rational thought/discussion. It's nice when there are enough free thinkers here filtering and highlighting the flood of available information that I don't have to try to "do it all" myself just to stay informed. Course we usually wind up with a somewhat "biased" view - the left (yes I like bashing the left) is grossly underrepresented. Peregrino

[Gypsy]

Outstanding article, thank you Blue.