War on Iraq

The Decentist philosophy in a nutshell

Decentists and other ex-lefties, War on Iraq
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Jamie has it, in a quote from one Paul Rogers taken from a review in the house organ of the English cruise missile left, Decentiya:

What wretched timing for Rogers then, that his book should be released at a time when American success in prosecuting the War on Terror is possibly at its highest point since the halcyon days of early 2003.

What moves it from standard decentist “we so are winning the war on terror! We are! We are!” boilerplate is the phrase “halcyon days of early 2003”. For most of us, the “halycon days of early 2003” was when a disastrious war was started that so far has claimed the lives of a million or so Iraqis, cost literally trillions of dollars and has left Iraq a wasteland. For the decents this was the start of their glorious democratic crusade against totalitarism and the last time they could pretend that it was indeed a glorious crusade, instead of the clusterfuck it really was. Normally, they are self aware enough to realise most of us don’t share their nostalgia and hence temper their longing in public somewhat, but not Rogers.

Why did the anti-war movement fail?

Antiwar, War on Iraq
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With the disgraceful fifth anniversary of the War on Iraq rapidly approaching, it is a good time to examine why we all failed to stop this war when the vast majority of people in the UK, Europe and even the US was dead set against it. What happened that two million people could march in London on February 15th and yet the war started the very next month?

Which is why I set up an open thread over at Prog Gold, to discuss this question. If y’all would like to hop on over and give your opinion on this matter?

Over one million Iraqis killed, still

Iraqi war deaths
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Back in September, British opinion pollsters ORB released a study showing over a million Iraqis had died in the war and occupation. Now they’ve released a follow-up study, which focussed on rural communities rather than urban areas like the previous one and guess what? the results confirm their earlier study:

Further survey work undertaken by ORB, in association with its research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.

Following responses to ORB’s earlier work, which was based on survey work undertaken in primarily urban locations, we have conducted almost 600 additional interviews in rural communities. By and large the results are in line with the ‘urban results’ and we now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000.

All of this is largely in line with the two Lancet studies, as well as the Iraqi Family Health Study (See Deltoid for more information). No doubt it will be hotly denied by the true believers, but the evidence is overwhelming that the invasion of Iraq continues to be a crime of gargantuan propertions. The solution remains the sme: troops out of Iraq.

Meanwhile, I would like to see similar surveys for Afghanistan, which isn’t looking good either.

Praising with faint damns

Nu Labour, War on Iraq
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That’s what it feels like this this Guardian article is doing, with its amazing revelations that the Blair government was just as clueless as the Bush junta in preparing for the War on Iraq:

The government’s top foreign policy advisers were as inept as their US counterparts in failing to see that removing Saddam Hussein in 2003 was likely to lead to a nationalist insurgency by Sunnis and Shias and an Islamist government in Baghdad, run by allies of Iran, the Guardian has learned.

None of Whitehall’s “Arabists” warned Tony Blair of the difficulties which have plagued the occupation. The revelation undermines the British claim that it was US myopia which was to blame for the failure to foresee what would happen in postwar Iraq.

[…]

Christopher Segar, who took part in Whitehall’s Iraq Policy Unit’s prewar discussions and later headed the British office in Baghdad immediately after the invasion, said: “The conventional view was that Iraq was one of the most Western-oriented of Arab states, with its British-educated, urban and secular professionals. I don’t think anyone in London appreciated how far Islamism had gone.”

Officials alone cannot be blamed. Ministers failed to ask serious questions. Blair never called on the experts for detailed analysis of the consequences of an invasion, officials say. He saw the war as Iraq’s liberation and felt any postwar problems would pale in the face of Iraqi delight.

See? It’s not that Blair and his cronies helped start an unnecessary immoral war that has so far killed between half a million and one million Iraqis, it’s just that they weren’t prepared for those horrible Islamists determined to spoil the liberation party. Nobody could have foreseen that the people of Baghdad would dislike having foreign troops coming in and bombing the powerplants and shooting up the neighbourhoods. Of course not, who could’ve thought that the Iraqis would not be pleased by seeing their American and British liberators?

Oh wait…

The truth is, Blair knew what the consequences of the war were going to be and didn’t care. As long as he could pretend he had personally liberated the Iraqis, he was happy. Now that the situation has become even worse than expected, his media chums are recruited to put the most positive spin on this disaster still possible: we didn’t mean it, it was the horrible Islamists that made us do it.

Bonus paragraph, awe-inspiring in its awful stupidity:

Contrary to the conventional view that the occupation’s problems stem mainly from failure to plan for postwar Iraq, they say there was plenty of planning, from how to react to mass refugee flows and a humanitarian crisis to the fallout from a sharp rise in the world price of oil. The real failure, they concede, was one of political analysis. Officials did not study how Iraqis would react to an occupation and what political forces would emerge on top once Saddam was removed.

They Do it Every Time

War on Iraq
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Phillip Carter explains the challenges facing the US Army’s new post-surge offensive:

All this partly explains the size of the offensive. It’s an attempt to impose security on these warring insurgent cells and sectarian militias by brute force in a very hard-to-secure part of the country. By way of comparison, in April 2004, a task force of three Marine battalions assaulted the city of Fallujah after the brutal killing of four U.S. contractors there. In November 2004, the Marines launched their second assault on Fallujah with six battalions of combat troops and an arsenal of airpower and artillery. Now, in the Diyala breadbasket, U.S. forces are sending seven battalions plus various special forces units and a comparable amount of firepower. This for an area of Iraq previously occupied by only one battalion of about 500 troops –or sometimes fewer– during the last three years.

One truism about the surge has been that where we deploy sufficient numbers of U.S. troops, we prevail. There is no doubt that this quantity of U.S. troops will clear this small area of insurgents and al-Qaida fighters. The only question for the near term is whether our troops will kill, capture, or merely push those fighters out of the breadbasket. This has been the pattern for U.S. military operations since 2003, and yet the insurgency continues. The more important question is whether the U.S. military –and its partners in the Iraqi army and police– can secure the area for the long term, and do so with fewer and fewer U.S. troops as the surge ends.

What was that country in South-East Asia again, in which the Americans were involved for over a decade winning every battle, or so they said, but in which they lost the war?

Oohh yyyeaah…