Rachael Corrie's parents escape kidnapping; thoughts on ending the vicious cycle of violence in Iraq.
Craig and Cindy Corrie, Rachael's parents, have escaped a kidnapping attempt made on them while they were visiting Palestine. Their would-be kidnappers, who were planning to kidnap foreign hostages, found out who they were and dropped their plans. This is a perfect example of the ripple effect that can happen when enough people speak out for peace.
For example, who would have thought that the dying Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, a long-time proponent of settlers, would give up land in Palestine? Who would have thought that Hamas would use less violence and more political tactics to achieve their ends? Nobody involved in those decisions would give her credit. But it is clear that these events were unthinkable two years ago and that Rachael created a ripple effect.
War is a vicious cycle of violence which is like two kids in a street fight. If you were to ask them who started the fight, each kid will always say that the other kid started it. Neither kid, in their own mind, is the aggressor in the conflict. In order to stop the war, strong voices, like Corrie's, are needed to push people to end the vicious cycle of violence. Her parents were touring a new library in Rafah which was built in her honor.
In the same way, we need strong voices to break the cycle of violence over in Iraq. One time, I did horribly on two tests in a row and got the exact same score (57%). I thought at first that there was a mistake and that the teacher had given me back the same test back twice by mistake. But that was not the case. I had a similar reaction when reading today's Post article describing today as the worst cycle of violence since the Iraqi elections.
But that was not the case. Today, 130 people were killed in various insurgent bombings around the country along with five US soldiers. This was after yesterday, in which 50 people were killed.
I would not be surprised if these massive bombing attacks were retaliation for the senseless tragedy in which an errant US bomb killed 12 innocent civilians in an attempt to kill three IED bombers. The IED bombers escaped; the Iraqi government and eyewitnesses on the scene said there were no insurgents or bombers in the area.
These bombings were not the fault of the drone operator or the air pilots - there were doing their jobs. I cannot pass moral judgment on them; the only person who can do that is them. But it is our job to pass judgment on our elected officials, and I can easily fault the Bush administration for their disastrous tactics which only inflame the insurgency.
In my heated argument with BlaiseP, he compared the US bombings to the Kosovo War, in which a massive air campaign was used to force the surrender of Miloslovic in 78 days. But there is a big difference between that war and the Iraq War. In order to use technology effectively, it has to be your servant and not your master. Furthermore, you have to understand its limits and its flaws. Wes Clark understood these limits and flaws, while George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld do not.
Reason Magazine, no friend to the Kosovo War, reported that between 500 and 1500 civilians were killed in the Kosovo War. By contrast, if you figure the Lancet casualty estimate of November 2004, the people killed in Fallujah by White Phosphorous, and the people killed since then, you come up with about 150,000 innocent civilians killed. So, the difference is clear - Wes Clark understood how to minimize civilian casualties; Bush and Rumsfeld do not.
You would have thought that with several years of lessons from the Kosovo War and the development of new technology that there would have been even fewer casualties than the last time. But that was not the case. Bush and Rumsfeld did not learn the lessons of the people who had gone before them and who had produced great results. Instead, they thought they knew better when in fact they knew nothing at all.
Kosovo had more of a just cause than Iraq did. But one civilian death is too many for a war like Iraq which had no just cause.
People may argue that we killed three IED bombers that were planting bombs to kill our soldiers. But they ignore the fact that the cure - an air strike against a heavily civilian target - was worse than the disease. Even if three IED bombers were killed, which I don't believe, I suggest that for every innocent civilian killed, at least one person signs up for the insurgency to avenge them. So, for the three IED bombers that we may - or may not - have killed, the Bush administration motivated 12 new people to sign up for the insurgency and do four times as much damage to our troops than if we had not called in the air strikes.
I would like nothing better than to trust the people in charge to run our army. But if I - as a civilian with no military experience - can understand basic facts of human nature that the Bush administration does not, then that does not mean that I have any special abilities. It just goes to show how pathetically little they understand about how to properly use the military. Trust cannot be given blindly. Trust must be earned and proven over and over again. Bush and Rumsfeld have forfeited that trust a long time ago.
And the fact that even one of the best generals of modern times in Wes Clark could not completely avoid the killing of civilians even though he did all he could means that we need to rethink the way we use our military in deciding when and where to intervene. We need to rethink how we use air strikes and develop a proper understanding of the limits of technology.
That is why we need candidates like Russ Feingold who has a proven track record of raising these questions and who is not afraid to say what he believes in. In fact, he is openly supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for Senate, as the Washington Post link reports. As President, Feingold would continue the work of Wes Clark by finding ways to minimize civilian casualties and find ways to avoid getting into wars in the first place. And as Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders would be a strong ally in this area.
Around the blogs:
He focuses on the equipment problems in Iraq:
Now, in doing this, I am absolutely not trying to say that these brave soldiers died in vain. I've begun paying closer attention to this solely to ask the question, are we truly doing all we can to provide those who are in harm's way on our behalf with what they need? If not, why aren't we moving heaven and earth to develop an adequate fighting vehicle?We can ask these questions of our government representatives. We can ask that someone with the power to change things take this on and make it their work to make sure we as a country are not letting this need slide simply because it is easy to do so, while the military has to bear the burden. This is our fight, too. We owe it to those defending us that we have made every effort to support them.
This is from a Bush supporter. When even reliable supporters of Ann Coulter, Drudge, and FOX (which he blogrolls) are starting to get restless and wondering if Bush has done all he can, you know that Bush's conduct of the war is in deep trouble.
Another right-wing blogger joins the rumblings of discontent and blames the Iraqi government:
While advances are being made in Iraq, these attacks - along with other mass casualty attacks in the last few days and the severe disruption of Iraqi oil production and distribution - show how far we have to go. They also demonstrate the ongoing strategy of the enemy to turn sectarian differences and animosities into a full-scale civil war between the Sunnis and Shi'ites. If these attacks continue, and as US forces draw down in size and move away from the major urban areas, it will become more likely that the Shi'ite dominated security services1 will be used to suppress the Sunnis as a community.We've already seen some of this, particularly in the treatment of Sunni prisoners by the Interior Ministry. Unlike the US, the Iraqi government will have only a limited capacity to absorb constant attacks from elements of the Sunni community once American support is reduced. They will have little choice but to respond with maximum force, engaging in the sort of suppressive activities that we would have a hard time stomaching. That, in turn, will probably lead to more violence from the Sunnis. While often counter-productive, this is the classic way that regimes with problems of stability and legitimacy behave when faced with internal insurrection. That it will probably lead to more long-term violence is of little importance to a government concerned with short-term survival.
The Bush is caught in a no-win situation here. If we stay, we will be there for the next 50 years. If we leave, we risk turning Iraq into a major civil war. That is why we need more and more diaries and more and more people suggesting ways peace and stability in Iraq. In such a grim situation, our best shot is to go for the best-case possibility - developing a peace plan which includes all parties with the exception of Zarqawi and the worst elements of Saddam's former regime.
Returning to Rachael Corrie, I am not asking anybody to become a martyr - each of us has to make that decision for themselves. But a good idea that Cindy Sheehan suggested might be to take one step for peace every day. In that way, we can create our own ripple effect.
This post discusses the 12 mining deaths and the Iraq conflict:
We lost 12 miners and this is much more important. They might as well quit reporting all deaths in Iraq because America has moved on. It is so yesterday.
The media, of course, has played up the 12 mining deaths a lot more than they have the deaths in the Iraq War, even as we experience the worst two days of violence in the election. I agree that the Iraq violence should get more play. It shows that the Bush administration has achieved nothing from its artificial timetable for the construction of the Iraqi government and the elections there.
We have had three different elections in Iraq. In each one, the right-wingers were gloating about how we would be proven wrong. They were showing pictures of Iraqis voting and showing off their fingers dipped in ink. In each case, the violence started right back up again once the elections were over. In each case, the elections turned out to be rigged. In each case, Iraq turned out to be no safer than it was before the elections.
Now that we are no longer on Bush's artificial timetable for Iraq, Bush is at the end of the rope. He can no longer point to accomplishments along the timetable as proof that we are making progress in Iraq. Now that even right-wingers are getting restless and asking intelligent questions about the conflict, Bush has been forced to acknowledge the painful reality that his grand Middle East adventure is winding down. And these bombings are a painful reality of that.
Strats-Phere continues to drink the kool-aide:
Sounds like the insurgents want us to stay or they have been listening to cues from the liberals in our country. The bombings tend to strengthen the resolves of the massively larger pro-democracy elements in Iraq. These killings are enforcing the will of Iraqi's to put in place their democratic government.
If the insurgents feel this is impressing the Arab street, then they are not listening.
So what could it be? Well, they could want us to stay longer and kill more of them. Or they could think, incorrectly, that all the Democrat wailings in front of our liberal media indicates more bombings and we leave sooner.
This is why the liberal pols and their amplifiers in the media need to be careful when they lash out. Unfortunately, it is becoming clear the far left doesn't care if their words confuse the terrorists and they bomb 100's of innocent people.
Anybody can accuse someone of wailing or inciting people to kill hundreds of innocent people when they can't answer the argument. As I suggested above, these killings may be revenge for the errant bomb that killed 12 innocent civilians - one of many such errant bombs. Of course we condemn the killings of the 200 civilians in the past two days as well as the killings of our soldiers. But the way to go about stopping it depends on us taking positive and noticeable steps to end the cycle of "he started, she started." It is clear that the insurgency is unwilling to break the cycle of revenge that is at the heart of all wars and conflict. That is why it is up to us. And many right-wingers simply don't understand these basic facts of life about war and conflict.
And to any people who would demand that I shut up and that I don't know anything, you accomplished the exact opposite of what you intended to do. Tell me to quit criticizing the war and let the soldiers do the fighting, and I will be sure to write more about it. Tell me that all I am doing is wailing and caterwauling, and I will be sure and write more, because I know that the right-wingers are losing the argument. This is why even the Bush administration no longer agrees with them, although they are doing everything they can to drag their feet on withdrawal from Iraq.
100 today so far. This begins to sound like an answer to the question I posed yesterday as to whether or not the insurgents ans their supporters were going to accept a negotiated but subordinate role in the government being created by the Shia and Kurd winners of last month's election. I hear people saying things like, "Well, they will just have to GET OVER IT and learn to live with minority status.."
Sorry, but they have another option and that is to continue to wage a terrorist war against us and the Iraqi government in the belief/hope that eventually something will change in the situation and a-the country will break up and they achieve independence in the Sunni Arab heartland north and west of Baghdad or b- they can dominate the same area with lines of communication running out of the region into Sunni run countries. In either case they will, by now, believe that eventually we will leave and that our departure will "level the playing field."
If the United States leaves a smallish (less than 100K) force in garrisons in country and increases the number and intensity of TACAIR strikes in support of government forces this will have only a moderate effect on the scenario described above because 1-Our garrisons will become more and more occupied with securing themselves and the embassy and 2- TACAIR in the hands of the Iraqi forces will be a double edged sword, protecting those forces and at the same time adding to the recruiting efforts of the insurgents.
You can see the disastrous results of this strategy when an errant bomb killed 12 innocent civilians instead of their intended targets. I see another difficulty as well - Many Iraqis value loyalty to tribe above loyalty to country. This means that someone in the Iraqi army with the authority to do so could call in an air strike not to take out a legitimate terrorist, but to wipe out a long-time rival. This is very likely to happen; here, I discussed how Kurds within the Iraqi army were plotting to turn on their ethnic rivals to get their way if negotiations break down.
Given the fact that the US is planning to give the Iraq army more authority to call in air strikes, given these attitudes within the Iraqi Army, given the fact that Kirkuk could be a bloodbath between the Kurds and the Sunnis, and given the fact that many insurgents are also Sunni, it is highly likely that the Kurds could call in US air strikes to assist their efforts to weed out Sunni rivals in Kirkuk in the future.
We have talked about peace negotiations and how a good peace plan must give all parties an equal voice at the table. So far, the Bush administration and the Iraqi government have failed in these objectives, as displayed by the massive violence.