Yikes! who'd a thunk it?
after the flip, a quote from Cheney's Wolf Blitzer interview in which he makes a very good point. let me add that this good point was like a saguaro in the midst of a mojave desert of bad ideas, lies, obfuscations and wrong-headed personalization of reasonable questions. i want to make clear that i continue to believe that cheney is a f*@king lunatic and the most dangerous man in america.
but still, his point is good.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Remember, remember me -- remember with me what happened in Afghanistan. The United States was actively involved in Afghanistan in the '80s supporting the effort against the Soviets. The Mujahideen prevailed, everybody walked away. And in Afghanistan, within relatively short order, the Taliban came to power, they created a safe haven for al Qaeda, training camps were established where some 20,000 terrorists trained in the late '90s. And out of that, out of Afghanistan, because we walked away and ignored it, we had the attack on the USS Cole, the attack on the embassies in East Africa, and 9/11, where the people trained and planned in Afghanistan for that attack and killed 3,000 Americans. That is what happens when we walk away from a situation like that in the Middle East.
Now you might have been able to do that before 9/11. But after 9/11, we learned that we have a vested interest in what happens on the ground in the Middle East. Now, if you are going to walk away from Iraq today and say, well, gee, it's too tough, we can't complete the task, we just are going to quit, you'll create exactly that same kind of situation again.
Now, the critics have not suggested a policy. They haven't put anything in place. All they want to do, all they've recommended is to redeploy or to withdraw our forces. The fact is, we can complete the task in Iraq. We're going to do it. We've got Petraeus -- General Petraeus taking over. It is a good strategy. It will work. But we have to have the stomach to finish the task.
OK, bear with me here. there is much in that first paragraph that is telling only half the story. i love the passive voice on "the taliban came to power" as if there was no history that preceded that event. as some will know who are students of the region and its history, in fact the taliban were able to gain traction in a largely secular or non-practicing muslim country because of how utterly awful the warlords (the ones with whom we worked, per cheney) were to the people of afghanistan. rape, corruption, rape ("you said rape twice." "I like rape"), arbitrary justice, murder and so on were the daily bread of people all over the country post Najibullah. so there he's half wrong. he's right though that we were involved and then we walked away, and we thoroughly screwed good and decent people in afghanistan by so doing. and we especially screwed the secular liberals (all 20 of them, but still).
part two of what's wrong with what he's saying relates to how the chickens came home to roost. we made a quite specific choice that the hektamayar's and bin laden's of the world were better to have as enemies of our enemies than as our enemies directly. we ignored their theological insanity, and in the case of hektmayar (that spelling may be wrong) we ignored actual behavior in order to fight our fight. what did we get out of that, combined with then leaving these guys trained, armed and out of sight?
9/11.
but of course while he's half wrong, he's also exactly right. just leaving iraq is not a plan, it's a catastrophe waiting to happen and one that the history of afghanistan shows us will lead to terrible consequences.
to say that we can just walk away is to pretend that the last 4 years didn't happen. they did. with the new reality of our attack on iraq in place, we must behave in such a way that we will ameliorate the post-retreat facts on the ground. any discussion of leaving iraq that doesn't refer to the other steps that must be taken in concert with such a step are incoherent or thoughtless, and should be treated with scorn. sorry, murtha, and sorry, hagel, but you've got to do better.
here are the points that must be addressed IMO.
- 1: We withdraw our forces per the murtha plan, to bases and to areas outside Iraq.
- 2: We force Israel and Syria, Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and Iran to all sit down and discuss a comprehensive peace. we do so with the aid of the EU and Asian powers including China and Japan.
- 3: We call a major conference, a real one, Bretton Woods real, on Democratic reform for the middle east. We put on the table our real actual lines in the sand:
- A: Protection of Minority rights.
- B: Freedom of assembly and freedom of the press.
- C: Protection of Women's Rights.
In so doing we support, for the first time, the work of liberals in the middle east, and we put the mubaraks and sauds on notice that they must change and do so now. and we accept that these changes may strengthen islamists, but within the context of the above we accept it. if hezbollah can live with the above, we can live with them.
- 4: We create institutions, and well funded ones, in that part of the world that promulgate such ideas. institutes for research, for democratic thought, for historical understanding (e.g. what we've done to the arabs in the past). we disseminate the information region-wide.
- 5: We pledge to stop buying oil from countries where less than x percent of oil revenues go to the people and infrastructure to help them.
- 6: We start a massive move away from crude oil consumption, announced in such a way as to show the arab world that dependency on oil for revenue is a dead end.
like that. anything less and we screw over anyone who we would want to help in iraq, we create a humanitarian crisis of incomprehensible scale, and we leave behind angry people with guns and no butter. if one doesn't think that will redound to our detriment in years to come, well, santayana said it best:
those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it.