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A tale of two speeches
25.1.2007 |
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January 25, 2007
The difference between illusion and reality in Iraq
could be seen in a pair of speeches on Tuesday.
In Montpelier, former ambassador Peter Galbraith of
Townshend outlined the current situation in Iraq to
Vermont lawmakers.
A few hundred miles to the south, President Bush
outlined his plans for Iraq in the State of the
Union address to Congress Galbraith, who spoke to
the Legislature on the invitation of House Speaker
Gaye Symington, said the U.S. strategy for Iraq will
not bring unity to the divided country. Instead, all
it will bring is more violence and death for our
troops and Iraqi civilians.
"It's clear that we have launched a war and lost it
and have no strategy to reverse that," Galbraith
said.
President Bush, in his speech, said that "it is
still within our power to shape the outcome of this
battle." He asked Congress and the nation to give
his plan "a chance to work."
Galbraith, who knows more about the historical,
religious and political rivalries in Iraq than
anybody in the Bush administration, believes that
it's time to dispense with the illusion that
fractious groups of Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, who
have little interest
in working with each other, can create a unified
Iraq.
In other words, the idea that the United States can
send in more troops to stabilize Baghdad and then
hand it off to the Iraqis cannot work as long as the
Iraqis are more loyal to their religious and ethnic
sects than they are to the idea of a unified Iraq.
This is something Galbraith has often talked about
and discusses at length in his recent book, "The End
of Iraq." It's an idea that has been completely
rejected by the Bush administration.
President Bush still believes that we can "find our
resolve and turn events toward victory." But the
president refused to acknowledge the causes of the
rising tide of sectarian violence in Iraq. The
Shiite majority in Iraq, who had been brutally
oppressed by Saddam Hussein's mostly Sunni regime,
has been on a killing spree for more than two years
and the Shiite-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki
has done little to stop the ethnic cleansing of
Sunnis.
The "extremist" militias that Bush spoke of have
used government vehicles and equipment to carry out
the killings and have infiltrated the same security
and intelligence institutions that the United States
has been trying to rebuild.
Bush still believes the Sunnis and Shiites want to
live in peace. Galbraith believes peace won't happen
until each group can agree to an equitable partition
of Iraq and its oil resources, once the U.S. forces
leave.
And there's the rub. Permanent military bases and
the world's largest U.S. embassy are being
constructed in Iraq. The war is being needlessly
prolonged so that it will fall to the next president
to clean up the mess.
And that, sadly, is the best case scenario. The
worst case scenario is that the ongoing civil war in
Iraq, the conflict that our troops now are caught in
the middle of, will spread to the rest of the
region.
The mostly Sunni nations of Turkey, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Jordan and Syria have warned the Bush
administration for months that they are prepared to
take up arms and invade Iraq to protect their fellow
Sunnis from extermination. Iran is prepared to step
up its aid to the Shiites in the hope of gaining
control of the oil fields in nearby southern Iraq.
The last thing the mostly Sunni-dominated Middle
East wants to see is a strengthened Iran.
And, just to make things more interesting, Turkey is
prepared to invade northern Iraq if Iraqi Kurds
achieve their ambition to create a "Greater
Kurdistan" that also incorporates the Kurdish
regions of Turkey and Iran.
Those possibilities, of course, were not talked
about by President Bush on Tuesday. A majority of
Americans now realize that the Bush administration
opened Pandora's Box by invading Iraq four years
ago, and that this nation needs to find a way out of
Iraq as soon as possible.
Galbraith's idea to partition Iraq along ethnic
lines similar to the way Yugoslavia was partitioned
when he was ambassador to Croatia in the mid-1990s,
may be the least worst option. He also also proposed
withdrawing U.S. troops to Iraq's borders to keep
foreign fighters out and be poised to stop ethnic
cleansing.
There remains the need for honest diplomacy,
something the president has refused to do, with Iran
and Syria to ease their concerns and draw them in a
peace process in Iraq. And there is also a need to
assemble a real coalition of our allies to provide
troops and funding to establish and maintain the
peace in Iraq.
This is the real way forward in Iraq. Sadly, the
people who heard the realistic view of the Iraq
situation -- the Vermont Legislature -- has no
capacity to change events. And the man who claims
the right to unilaterally continue and expand a war
that few support refuses to acknowledge reality.
reformer com
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