Argh.
As news starts to come out from Iraq about the growing discontent among the population on the ground, I am finding myself becoming increasingly frustrated and pessimistic.
Look:
I really want the U.S. to achieve it's goals in Iraq. I believe that, at this point, there really is not a good alternative to staying and trying to rebuild Iraqi society along a line that is favorable to U.S. interests. I did not support the Iraq War as it was set up and carried out by the Bush administration, though I had a suspicion somewhere that getting Saddam out of power by means of war could be appropriate under other circumstances (for example, with real internation support -- as in the U.N., the E.U. and Russia).
The problem now is this:
We can't go back.
And we can't seem to go forward.
We have not been able to get key stakeholders on the ground interested in following along with our plans. We seem to be doing okay with the Kurds, but religious Shi'ites in the south and partisan Sunnis in the center of the country have things on their mind that are more important to them than figuring out how to participate peacefully in a U.S.-occupied country.
I want the U.S. to achive its Iraq goals. It's better than nothing and better than leaving the country in violent chaos, which I believe will be the result if we withdraw militarily.
What are we going to do now, give the Iraqis democracy at gunpoint? We will not succeed without strong support on the ground.
My money is on the U.S. creating a new Saddam Hussein in the person of Ahmed Chalabi and withdrawing still substantial ground troops to mega-bases outside of the major cities in the country, where Chalabi can use them to terrorize his people when necessary.
Bringing in Chalabi as the new Iraqi dictator is just going to bring us back to the starting point of where we were with Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s. Back to what we started with, with hundreds of dead Americans and thousands of dead Iraqis.
The Chalabi Solution will not be success. Instead it will be a stalemate and a pretty poor one.
How can we get ourselves out of this mess?