This was how Tony Blair’s Al Jazeera interview was reported in the Sunday Star Times:
Prime Minister Tony Blair has admitted the Irqa war has been a disaster, in an interview on Arab TV channel al-Jazeera. Challenged that western intervention had ‘so far been pretty much of a disaster’, Blair said: ‘It has.’ But he blamed resistance by insurgents rather than failures of planning.
What he actually said was:
He added: “But you see what I say to people is ‘Why is it difficult in Iraq?’ It’s not difficult because of some accident in planning, it’s difficult because there’s a deliberate strategy – al-Qaeda with Sunni insurgents on one hand, Iranian-backed elements with Shiite militias on the other – to create a situation in which the will of the majority for peace is displaced by the will of the minority for war.”
I think the Sunday Star Times summary is awesome, because it points out how ridiculous Tony Blair’s argument is: “There was nothing wrong with our planning, the problem was that there were some people in Iraq that didn’t want to be invaded.” Which is presumably something that they should have planned for.
But he’s right about one thing (I promise this will be the only time I will claim Tony Blair was right) – the problem of Iraq isn’t a problem of poor planning. No amount of planning would have solved the fundamental problem which is that they should have stayed the fuck out of Iraq.
Right now, when people are thinking about ‘other options’ it’s important to say loud and long that the only solution is to end the occupation.
Pingback: jennhi
President George W. Bush, searching for a new approach in Iraq, expressed little enthusiasm on Monday for seeking Syrian and Iranian help to calm Iraq………..Engaging Syria and Iran on Iraq is an idea thought to be under discussion by the panel, and is a strategy promoted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a staunch Bush ally…..Blair suggested a “new partnership” was possible with Damascus and Tehran .
No, no. He didn’t blame it on Iraqis alone. He mainly said the war went wrong because America has enemies who interfered in Iraq, something that nobody could have forseen. None of these people, anyway. See also here.
Maia, what do you think should be done by the U.S. in Iraq, and what do you think the outcome of the actions you propose will/would be?
Pity the left of today. In the past they had such heroes to worship as Mao, Ho Chi Min, Fidel, Che and Daniel Ortega. Now they are reduced to supporting a policy that horrible people like Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, should be left alone. Are there some better ideas about handling of these creeps? It is not good enough to just blame America and Tony Blair for not finding a solution.
Dave-
Are you an actual troll, or are you just trying to do a parody of trolls? I am honestly unsure.
Even though Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, he kept both Islamicist terrorists and Shiite militants at bay by setting himself as an object of their ire.
Pop out the brutal dictator, and both groups are free to prey on their political opponents and terrorize the populace, gaining points by killing American occupying forces.
And Dave – I wonder who was meeting with Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s – hint: it wasn’t a leftie. It was Donald Rumsfeld acting as an envoy on behalf of the Reagan administration.
RonF-
The likely results of a U.S. pullout are either a long, bloody civil war, i.e. what is already happening only bloodier, or a short civil war resulting in the breakup of Iraq into three nations. The northern Kurdish nation will be more-or-less a democracy, just as it has been for a decade and a half already, the middle Sunni nation will be an autocratic nominal democracy, and the southern Shiite nation will be a theocratic nominal democracy, likely functioning as an Iranian puppet.
Questions:
* Has the U.S. shown any ability to do anything other than delay this result?
* If not, is the delay caused by our continued presence worth the cost to us in money, lives, international trust and ability to deploy troop other places they might be needed?
Myself, I would like to see us “withdraw internally”: stop fighting the Iraq war but maintain bases in unpopulated dessert areas from where we can attack Al Queda opperating inside Iraq. If we stop trying to impose a government and leave the warring factions alone except for when they aid or harbor Al Queda, they will have little reason to do so.
RonF – I think the US should pull out right now. I don’t know what will happen after that, not being psychic. But I think that Iraqi people can sort out their problems better than the US army can.
Aaron V – I find the racism implicit in your comment appalling. The only thing that will stop Muslims from killing each other is a dictator? This situation was created, not by an innate desire from Muslims to kill each other, but by a history of dictatorship (supported by foreign powers), sanctions and invasions.
Decnavda:
The likely results of a U.S. pullout are either a long, bloody civil war, i.e. what is already happening only bloodier
What’s happening now is nowhere near a civil war. It’s a bunch of terrorist acts by a bunch of people who’d like to start a civil war. If the Coalition pulls out now what’ll happen next will make what’s going on now look like a Sunday School picnic. It’ll be a full out civil war, with a possible takeover of a good chunk of the country by Iran either de facto or by proxy, and the prospects for any kind of democracy will be pretty much shot.
or a short civil war resulting in the breakup of Iraq into three nations. The northern Kurdish nation will be more-or-less a democracy, just as it has been for a decade and a half already,
Until Turkey invades. The current situation in what would become Kurdistan exists only because it’s still nominally part of Iraq and enjoys the protection of the Coalition. Both Turkey and Iran have Kurdish-majority enclaves next door to it and are fighting with Kurdish liberation forces. It’s been low-key so far, but if that area becomes independent the gloves will come off. Turkey has warned against this very thing already; they’ll invade to stop any support for the KDF from coming from Kurdistan.
the middle Sunni nation will be an autocratic nominal democracy, and the southern Shiite nation will be a theocratic nominal democracy, likely functioning as an Iranian puppet.
Except that there is no clear demarcation for Baghdad, since all the different sects and nationalities mix there, and there’ll be a huge and bloody fight for it.
Maia:
I think the US should pull out right now. I don’t know what will happen after that, not being psychic. But I think that Iraqi people can sort out their problems better than the US army can.
You think the Iraqi people will be left to sort out their problems without a huge infusion of guns, money, fighters and propaganda by Syria and Iran? It won’t be a sorting, it’ll be a bloody culling, “ethnic cleansing” writ large, and a gross betrayal of all those people holding up purple fingers. The U.S.’s presence is the only thing that will allow the Iraqis to sort out their problems with any kind of independence.
This is the real world, Maia. You can’t base foreign policy on a wishful thinking statement. There are too many lives at stake. Not being psychic is a handicap, but we have to do better than “I don’t know what will happen.”
Aaron V. – I find the racism implicit in your comment appalling. The only thing that will stop Muslims from killing each other is a dictator? This situation was created, not by an innate desire from Muslims to kill each other, but by a history of dictatorship (supported by foreign powers), sanctions and invasions.
I don’t see where it’s a racist comment. It happens that both the actors in this would be Moslem, but history shows that his estimate of what happens when a dictator looses control over a nation of groups with mutual emnity is on target. See what happened in what used to be Yugoslavia for the most recent example. I realize most people like to pass over that, since it was an example of the U.S. stepping in to defend Moslems against outside armed forces, which doesn’t fit in with the picture of the “war against Moslems” that a lot of people (not you in particular that I’ve noticed though, Maia) like to portray.
* Has the U.S. shown any ability to do anything other than delay this result?
A non-sequitir. The fact is that it has delayed this result, which means that it may well never occur. If we pull out and allow it to happen, then we’ll never know if we could have stopped it.
* If not, is the delay caused by our continued presence worth the cost to us in money, lives, international trust and ability to deploy troop other places they might be needed?
Yes. And as far as deploying troops other places (and I’m glad to see that you think that’s desirable; Darfur would be a good place to start), maybe the solution is for other countries like Germany and France and Spain to step up to the plate. Or for that matter, Egypt, Iran, North Korea (if they show up, we’ll feed them) or China; they’re a lot closer to Darfur than we are. Maybe they could do something useful for a change.
Decnavda – Your “ refutation” of my opinion consists of simple dismissal. Crusaders against subtle injustices against minorities resort to rapier verbal puncturing, if not disembowelment of critics. Minorities such as trolls should not be the victim of such unfair treatment.
Seriously,there are all sorts of ways to look at the problem of Iraq. It does look, in retrospect, that invading wasn’t a great idea. Then there is the issue of post- invasion the fiasco. Is it poor post invasion planning? Is it a Viet Nam situation where outsiders sneak in weapons, keeping the fight going, but are never required to share blame for the resulting suffering?
The challenge now is to find the most humanistic solution to the problem. This should be right up the alley of the peace and justice loving left. Instead all I here from them is recrimination. The US and the world at large have a responsibility to not allow a blood bath. The US is willing to rebuild the country but is being prevented from doing so. It is not too helpful to posture morally about decisions of the past. I don’t understand the lack of outrage against the terrorist killers who are slaughtering innocent humans daily. Saying the US should let the Iraqis settle their disputes among themselves doesn’t sound safe in a world of Bosnias, Darfurs and Rawandas.
The overwhelming majority of Iraqis want our military out of their country. Perhaps their analysis of the political and military situation in their country is slightly better informed than ours. And, RonF, you can keep distorting the definition of civil war as far as you like, but it doesn’t change the situation on the ground.
No one disagrees with this. The question is, do we have the ability to prevent a blood bath?
I’m not convinced we have that ability. And the people who are assuming we do have the ability, have already proven themselves to be unrealistic incompetants in how they ran the occupation of Iraq. Why should anyone think that the people who thought occupying Iraq was going to be a cakewalk have any credibility?
If there were a realistic and viable plan to prevent (or, more accurately, to curtail) the bloodbath in Iraq, from people who aren’t proven incompentants, I’d support it. But there is no such plan, that I’ve seen — just more of the wistful, reality-challenged thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.
I think we have the ability. What I’m not convinced is whether or not we have the will. We’re trying to fight a sanitized war, without taking advantage of what advantages we actually have and without involving most of the U.S. public.
There’s a piece running around the blogosphere proposing a winning strategy in Iraq. Here’s a link. It does not propose that we’ll be out in 6 months. But it has some very interesting ideas. There are 6 major points, which I’ll post here, but there’s detailed discussion of it in various places.
1. Encourage innovation by emphasizing small-scale technological solutions and rejecting peacetime bureaucracy.
2. Improve pre-deployment training realism and abandon Cold War-era checklists.
3. Allow local commanders to buy what they need and nationalize the war effort by connecting the American public with the troops and their mission.
4. Strengthen intelligence sharing between tactical and national levels, and develop a national insurgent database.
5. Take the offensive by reducing predictable patterns on the ground while conducting operations that hunt, rather than chase, the enemy.
6. Accept the realities of warfare in the media age by decentralizing the sharing of information with both the Iraqi and the American public.
I’ll not try to argue the points further here; check it out. Most of the milblogs have links to it and have discussions on it.
Aljazeera.com is unrelated to the satellite TV channel Al Jazeera,
which operates websites in both Arabic ( http://www.aljazeera.net ) and English english.aljazeera.net (i.e. Aljazeera TV sites are hosted at .NET not .COM). The people who own Aljazeera.com have no connections to aljazeera TV channel.
For more info, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aljazeera.com