Quote from AAAintheBeltway:
I know KymarFye disagrees with me on this, and I have a lot of respect for his opinions. But I think there is a lot of evidence accumulating that we are letting things slip away from us in Iraq.
Well, as you say, I disagree. You might conceivably draw some comfort from Victor Davis Hanson's latest observations, under the apt title "Time Is on Our Side." I think you'd find the entire piece worth reading (as usual, it's great "boring rightwing crap").
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson042503.asp
Key excerpts:
...[F]or the first time in decades, time is on our side in that part of the world. Most would laugh at such optimism. But billions of dollars in world aid will soon pour into Baghdad, as oil revenues now freed from Saddam's clutches are used to finance reconstruction projections. Kuwait and other Gulf states have experience in building businesses and will be eager to invest in Iraq; they themselves are more likely to liberalize than to return to reactionary fundamentalism. And â unfortunately â we have about a year's worth of grisly discoveries to come from some 30 years' worth of Saddam's terror. So it is odd to say that "the war was easy, the peace will be the hard part" â as if defeating Hitler and Tojo had been easier than the postbellum reconstruction of Germany and Japan.
Regarding Iran, specifically:
Iran may think it smart to use its fundamentalist agents to undermine the American achievement in Iraq. But look at the newly constituted map, where it suddenly finds itself surrounded by reformist movements. The omnipresence of the United States, twenty years of failure inside Iran, and the attractions of American popular culture will insidiously undermine the medieval reign of the mullahs faster than it can do harm to the foundations of democracy in Baghdad.
What will the theocracy do when Internet cafes, uncensored television and radio, and free papers spring up across the border in Iraq? How, after all, do you fight such a strangely off-the-wall culture as our own, which turns the villainous Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf into "Baghdad Bob," with his own website and a cult following, replete with T-shirts and coffee mugs â or prints out thousands of decks of playing cards decorated with the names and pictures of Iraqi fascists?
The last illutrations may sound a little flippant, but there's an important element of truth to the larger point on Iran's susceptibility to further cultural "infection."
Next we allowed the Shiites to get a foothold. We should have put the whole place under lockdown and curfew. Instead we have a million potential jihadists getting marching orders and getting their blood up.
* * *
Do we send our troops out into the streets to restore order, even if it means they have to mow down tens of thousands of Shiites, or do we just basically abdicate to them? With Iran, we didn't even have to do the killing, the Iranian military was only too willing to do it. Here it looks like we'll have to do it.
I strongly disagree with you here, and I can't imagine a situation under which it would ever be either in our interests or justifiable for us to "mow down tens of thousands of Shiites." If and when whatever jihadists - likely, as ever, to be a very small number of the most easily manipulated from the ranks of more passive co-religionists - attempt acts of violence and terror, we and whatever Iraqi authority will have every right and reason to defend ourselves and our friends and to go after the perpetrators and their sponsors forcefully. Under any other circumstances, including the temporary assumption of authority in fundamentalist strongholds, we'll do much better to live and let live.
It's worth pointing out also that the Shia of Iraq have every reason in the world not to hand their trust and their interests over to us. We mostly abandoned them in '91, letting Saddam kill an estimated 100,000 of them, and devastate their homelands environmentally, in the process putting down an uprising that we initially encouraged. On a moral level, it made Bay of Pigs look like a practical joke. In a sense, we
deserve to have a hard time (not that our soldiers and our Iraqi allies deserve as individuals to be hurt - but they may be, and it will partly be our own fault). More to the point, over the course of the last 20 years, Saddam is estimated to have killed another 200 to 300,000 Shias during the "normal" exercise of state terror. Even if clamping down on them was practical and justifiable, there's very little we're likely to do, even after putting on our best tough guy expressions, that's going to impress them very much.
Still, for all the typically alarmist and slanted mass media reporting, I've seen nothing yet that contradicts what most experts (including those of Shia background) have stressed - that, though the overall situation is delicate and difficult, it's a mistake to assume that a few demonstrations organized by a few fundamentalists represent the will of the entirety of the Shia population, much less of the majority of Iraqis.
In addition to VDH's piece, others you might find of interest would be David Warren's more cautious but non-despairing essay on post-war matters, and Den Beste's latest thinking (near the end of a long essay written as a follow-up to the one I quoted on the "Why Do They Hate Us?" thread):
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/Comment/Apr03/index133.shtml
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/04/Victory.shtml
I'd also recommend returned Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya's TNR "War Diaries," though they've now gone "subscription required." His reports on the ground are even-handed and revelatory, and in critical ways much more positive than typical mass media reporting.
