[Previously posted at Grok Your World by David Caploe.]
It’s so typical of the frighteningly muddled state of US discourse in general – and v-a-v Iraq in paticular – that people are incessantly repeating the inane line: “the presence of US troops is fueling the insurgency … so if they leave, the insurgency will start to die down” – a line taken by the ever-pathetic John Kerry …
This insight WAS true in, say, the first nine months of 2003 when the completely unnecessary and provocative presence of US troops in the first place certainly helped to CREATE the insurgency.
However, once the insurgency got started, the US troops no longer mattered as any “incitement” … the issues became much more specific to the power / legitimacy situation in Iraq, and developed a very powerful dynamic of their own. …
To be sure, US troops continue to be a TARGET … but that’s because anti-US Iraqi elements know that they’re under-protected and there in insufficient numbers … yet ANOTHER reason this insane adventure should never have been undertaken in the first place.
But the troops long ago stopped “fueling” the insurgency … the whole chaotic mess in Iraq has gone far beyond that initial military causes to become a major POLITICAL problem.
And the intractability of those POLITICAL problems is the reason this Bush-created madness is going to continue on into the future.