This, of course, would never happen even in the name of peace. I am curious though what you propose we do to regain the moral high ground if we have lost it? Would you pull out of Iraq or Afghanistan? How would you alter our policy in general?
Of course we have lost the moral high ground. It is silly to even pretend otherwise. At best we engaged in a ‘preventive war’, which is still in violation of international law.
We really have only a few choices left in Iraq. We could abandon any pretense of a nation building exercise and simply declare we are taking the oil. But we would lose. No western country is going to successfully empirialize a nation in the center of Islam, and the US is not prepared to spend the blood and treasure it would take to even try.
Right now, today, permanent military presence is off the table with the Iraqi’s. So if we keep insisting, we will lose any pretense of legitimacy for our presense at the end of this year. So, what we should be doing is drawing down as fast as the current Iraqi government, such as it is, will agree to.
However, we still need to bite the bullet and make some massive humanitarian investments, this time without the same strings as the last $30-40B. We basically structured our previous expenditures for war profiteering. This time, we need to let all the corruption (and it will be there) flow around Iraq. In this, we could take a lesson from Iran. We tend to focus on a big stick, and only tiny carrots after many hoops. Iran spreads it’s aide around, largely without strings. In other words, we tend to focus on a particular faction and end up with a lot of enemies and a few fair weather friends. Iran plays virtually all Shia sides.
The reason we want to get out of Iraq ASAP is really two fold - better to be the guest people are begging to stay than the one everyone loves to complain isn’t leaving. And, more importantly, we have to get into a strategic position were we are not ‘operationally constrained’ with regards to fighting Islamic Extremism. Think about it, we know where the Taliban is flourishing, but we don’t have the resources to either secure Afghanistan or rebuild it because we are stretched beyond thin in Iraq. Similiarly, we know were OBL is, but we can’t do anything about that because we need to stay in bed with Pakistan to effectively stay in Iraq.
Afghanistan, and safe harbor for terrorists in Pakistan, are problems we have to deal with. Iraq has made that much, much more difficult. Remember, after 9/11 we not only had our traditional allies ready to help us, but very unconventional ones, like Syria (who had long been worried about AQ) as well - even Iran provided us with assistance regarding Afghanistan. We can’t turn back the clock. For better or worse, the silly PNAC wet dream is part of US history. But we can change our strategic position so that we are talking about ‘difficult’, not ‘impossible’.
I don’t know about you, but it bothers me that we have placed ourselves in a strategic situation were our military is at its lowest state of readiness in my lifetime, we’ve doubled our debt for our children, and the folks behind 9/11, like OBL and the Taliban, are largely operating with impunity - especially since we are indirectly paying with it through absurdly high oil prices to the Sauds (from whom terrorism money still pretty freely flows)!
If you wanted to spend $2.5B a week on US national security effectively, you would spend it on getting us off oil. Don’t let the noise about ‘if we only drilled…’ fool you. It takes a decade for exploration to pay off in actual oil, and drilling the @#$% out of our coasts and the arctic will basically be the difference in how much the Sauds are intentionally restricting their ‘tap’ now.
Addressing energy impacts our security in so many ways it is hard to count. Taking us out of the unholy alliance with Saud and the Wahab-types is just a start. We’ve lost 20% of our manufacturing jobs since 2000. How are you going to be secure if you are a nation of unemployed consumers? Look at the world food shortage and the relationship to energy. How are you going to be secure if you are hungry?
Really, my thinking isn’t all that different from the PNAC clowns. The difference is that they focus on using military might to secure a big chunk of the oil that’s left. Unfortunatley, their plan isn’t working, it is actually destabilizing energy cost and long term accessibility. My thinking could also be faulty, but I’d invest in US enginuity and productivity instead of military imperialism. Rather it is coal, new light reactors, or something else, I think that the energy is there, and whoever unleashes it is going to be the economic powerhouse for this century - without unavoidable ties to the most volatile region in the world.
