Various thoughts about Iraq

Two of Saddam's associates were hung recently. One of them was beheaded, perhaps accidently. A spokesperson from the Iraqi qoverment said that this execution showed that they were making great progress in terms of exectutions. This may be true considering that Saddam's had elements of being lynched by Shiites.

Bush apparently thinks that anything Congress tries to do to cut funding of the increase in troops won't have any effect for at least a couple of month's. He is hoping that he will have some positive results to show by then. If he is right about the timing then the possible upside is that when the lawmakers do get around to cutting funding (and if Bush doesn't have any positive results) that they will be so pissed off at him that they will be talking about forcing an overall withdrawl rather than simply blocking the escalation.

In Bush's speech he blamed Iran and Syria for much of the trouble in Iraq. This tactic flies in the face of the independent report that called for us to negotiate with Iran and Syria to help figure a solution. One analyst said that the recent raid on an Iranian embassy was designed to provoke Iran into doing something that the US could use an excuse to retaliate. The scary thing is that if Bush is determined to go his own way despite the lack of public and expert support, then why wouldn't he go ahead and bomb Iran and Syria?

Apparently one unit of the Iraqi army that the Iraqi goverment is promising to send to Bagdad is Kurdish. I've long admired the Kurds since they seemed like such underdogs and don't have their own country. But sending them into this mess - where as I understand it they don't speak Arabic and they are hated by both the Shiites and Sunnis - seems like a huge mistake. In a way it's a microcosm of sending US troops in. Both sides will stop shooting at each other and turn their guns on the Kurds and the US troops as soon as we show up.

Exiting Iraq - My Vietnam experience - 35 years ago

I was visiting my parents in my home town of Ada, Oklahoma last summer and ran across this clipping from the Stanford Daily, November 1971.

What I find interesting about this photo:

1. Where are the women? I don't remember it that way and certainly when things heated up in spring of 1972 that had shifted.

2. It's also strange how these two police trusted us enough to mix in with our little crowd. We even lent one of them our bullhorn according to the caption.

I was part of the group in the photo, a freshman, protesting the war in Vietnam. I'm in the upper left. The year before I played on the state champion football team. But by 1971, even a football player from Ada, Oklahoma knew that we should be out of Vietnam. I got a bad (low) draft lottery number in the summer of 1971 but luckily the draft was winding down and I barely missed that experience. I had no idea of what I would have done.

Iraq makes me very anxious. I protested before we went in, and when we went in. But I haven't done much since. At first it wasn't totally clear that that getting out immediately was the best thing. After all, we brought the war to them and we should stick around to make it right.

Now it's clear that we are just digging a deeper hole. It feels very much like Vietnam where there was a very strong argument that we had to stay to prevent more bloodshed. It's an awful situation but prolonging won't help.

I even remember that we introduced more troops into Vietnam even after the policy of slowly reducing our involvment was announced. As today the justification was that we have to improve the situation to make it possible to withdraw.

I was so glad when the Democrats won the House and Senate. The recent report also lowered my anxiety about the war, feeling that there's no way Bush is going to stay the course when so many are against him. I even imagined Bush asking the Iraqis to vote on whether or not we should stay, and justifying the pull out in that way.

But now the news suggests that Bush is considering a surge of more troops. Even as public opinion surges against having any there at all. I've read some Democrat say that they won't cut funding, that they will wait until the next presidential election. That's too long to wait.

My memory of the end of the Vietnam war came when Congress cut funding. This is confirmed by Wikipedia -

"In December 1974, the Democratic majority in Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which cut off all military funding to the South Vietnamese government and made unenforceable the peace terms negotiated by Nixon. Nixon, threatened with impeachment because of Watergate, had resigned his office. Gerald R. Ford, Nixon's vice-president stepped in to finish his term. The new president vetoed the Foreign Assistance Act, but his veto was overridden by Congress."

I keep asking my friends what they think will happen in Iraq. I haven't heard anything that makes me feel confident about a good solution.While I haven't actively pushed against our involvement since we went in, this feels like a historic moment that offers possibilities.

I'm hoping very much that Congress will cut funding and I'll be trying to figure out what the best way to encourage them to do that.

An interesting coincidence is that my son is 18 and a freshman in college - the color photo below. I know Bush is resisting starting the draft but if another war starts before we get out of Iraq then he might do it. There is nothing that gets me more angry than the thought of him getting drafted into a war like this.