How long will "Iraqi violence" be the U.S.'s fault

[Dave_Markell]

@Lum

The only ways to fix this at this point:

A) The “Surrender Monkey” option. Pull out all Western troops immediately and let the civil war commence. It will most likely end in a Kurdish statelet, the Sunni parts of Iraq established as a protectorate by Saudi Arabia and/or Syria, and the Shi’a majority as an Iranian client. Note: for those keeping score, this is not good.

B) The “Damn the Torpedoes” option. Flood the country with occupation troops, overthrow the Iraqi “goverment” and re-establish the CPA protectorate. This will result in enough blood to be comparable to the Tet Offensive. Like Tet, we’ll win it. Like Tet, we won’t want to. Oh, and we’ll still be stuck with Iraq.

C) Whistle in the dark, and hope the problem goes away. Make noises about sending more troops to the area. Don’t send nearly enough. (We probably don’t HAVE nearly enough without a draft, which of course will be political suicide.) Continue to officially support the Shi’a sectarian government which barely has enough de-facto power to control the Green Zone. This seems to be the administration’s policy. It’ll have the same eventual result as A (since we aren’t actually DOING something), only the agony will be more prolonged and with American and British soldiers dead as well.

I’d argue for a D) option as well, deliberate partition. I mentioned this to my wife at the onset of the invasion, since “Iraq” has as much national reality as many other failed states created by Versailles (i.e., none. And yes, I know the Brits administered it for decades, but it was carved out of the Ottoman Empire post-WWI just as Yugoslavia and Czecheslovakia were carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). The end results would be similar to A), but we’d have some say in the final outcome. The process would be messy (just look at India/Pakistan/Bangladesh for an example of how bad it could get), but in the long run the 3 main, mutually antagonistic groups would be out of each other’s immediate hair and across a border.

This, and B), strike me as the “best” of a bad bunch of options–best for the Iraqi’s anyway, though not for our soldiers and treasury.