Marc Choquette
Assistant Perspectives Editor
Silent for so long, the comparisons of the war in Iraq to the Vietnam War have returned. They have come out of context as usual, this time from the President’s interview with ABC reporter George Stephanopoulos aired on Oct. 18. The media jumped all over it, diverting us nicely from the issue at hand.
The issue at hand should not be finding a prior war to compare the Iraq debacle to, but rather to figure out how we are going to get out of this conflict without Iraq descending into the prime terrorist hotbed of the Middle East and without us looking like fools to the rest of the world.
According to the president, this issue is black and white like most other issues. Either you are with him and the United States, or you are with the terrorists and freedom haters. Democrats want to cut and run and Republicans say we must stay the course.
As with most things in life, however, this issue is not black and white. Let us step back from political allegiance and examine this predicament.
The idea of cutting and running might just be the dumbest term ever used to describe an exit strategy. It oversimplifies the issue. As Bush describes it, though, this is not a viable solution.
Most Democrats do not believe we should pack up and leave tomorrow if we had that option. We would be doing a disservice to the world and ruin our already dwindling reputation by going into a country, seriously messing things up, then saying “whoops” and taking off.
On the contrary, “staying the course” is just as insane of an idea. How long do we need to “stay the course” before we figure out that the course is taking us down a road we should not be going down? The answer to this question is at three years and running.
The evidence that this “course” is not working is enormous and has been enormous for too long. As of tuesday, 90 U.S. troops have been killed since the beginning of October, which is already the highest monthly total for 2006. And still another week is ahead. Times are troubling when the Iraqi military and police to are being told to take control of a country when the people training them — U.S. troops — cannot even keep control.
The best solution for this problem is to rewind to 2003 and send in about two to three times as many troops. Unfortunately, the geeks in the Silicon Valley have yet to develop a time-travel device that fits a few thousand troops, so we will have to think of a Plan B.
The troop levels we have now are inadequate to keep control of a country in religious and sectarian civil war. And make no mistake, it is civil war now. We have three factions that all want power and all want the other ones dead. If that is not civil war then perhaps we should eliminate the term altogether and now settle for the friendlier term “sectarian violence.”
The problem with redeployment is that we cannot send in more troops because the Bush Administration knows very well the move would equal political suicide. Announcing a huge deployment before elections is probably the last thing you can expect the White House to do in the next month.
Some have talked about splitting Iraq into three separate countries, so that Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis could all co-exist. The White House got it right in assuring that this will not happen. Further segregating society into three completely separate autonomous countries would be political disaster, in that the idea of a unified “Iraq” that this administration has been working toward for three years would be scrapped on the spot.
Cue reality. Even in the most rosy, optimistic outlook for Iraq, it is not promising to think that these three sides will drop their running conflicts that have existed for much longer than “Iraq” as we know it has existed.
Unity in Iraq was only achieved under Saddam, and was achieved with the brute force that now has him on trial. Combine that with unbelievable levels of violence, and it seems that complete unification is unrealistic at this juncture.
The idea of separation on the lines of religion is scary, yet intriguing when it is done in a different way than previously explained. Split the country into three separate states that act semi-autonomously under a federal government. This way, each state could have their own specific laws that comply with their religion.
With leaders on both sides of the aisle admitting change needs to happen now in Iraq, and with elections coming up which could actually bring change, people need to think about what should be done in Iraq. The current dialogue of cutting and running versus staying the course is a waste of time and is only getting more of our troops killed.
Unless the problems of sectarian violence are dealt with in an alternate fashion, Iraq could be as disastrous for America as Vietnam was.
It will be the Vietnam of our generation, except this time more of the blame will be on our ambivalent selves for letting it carry on so long with more being killed everyday and still no viable plan for transfer of control to Iraqis.
10-26-2006