- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
There are no good options for Iraq - if you mean the ones that will make everyone there hold hands tomorrow and sing Kumabya - but there are some suggestions that I am not hearing that seem to me more "realistic" than the most.
1) Get the Price of Oil down - The wind that funds the fires in the middle east is the oil money - buying guns, arms and political influence in the world (Think of the oil for food program of the UN or the Wahabi funded mosques spreading all over the word). Cut the price and the options for mischief drop enormously. Conserve, add production, biomass, coal conversion , you name it - but until you cut the demand for oil in some manner, you are just giving gasoline to the maniacs.
2) Recognize historical animosities and deal realistically with them - There is a huge Shia/Sunni struggle going on in the middle east (Iran/Hezbollah) versus (Wahabi/"secular" (Syria/Jordan)). Add the Arab versus Persian factor to this mix and it is more complicated.
The point is that until we start using these pressure points - Putting the Sunni states on notice that we will abandon the Iraqi Sunnis to their fate or pressuring Ayotollah Sistani in Iraq to neutralize Sadr or let the Persians take over Shia control, we are going to be running against the tide in the middle east.
3) Either eliminate or side with one militia in each ethnic community in Iraq. No democracy can live when a political party uses militias to enforce its aims. In Iraq, most of the political parties have dark sides that run in the militias - Malaki and Al-Sadr being the most obvious, the Kurds and their Peshmerga being the most stable. Stop playing games and either go after the militas or choose a few and arm them until they impose control over their areas - making Iraq a stable warlord run state.
4) Reexamine the military doctrines for fighting wars and our intelligence strategies. The US Military may be the strongest power on earth, but unless it develops a new strategy to combat "asymmetric warfare", we are going to keep winning battles and losing wars. We won the peace with our "enemies" during WWI by grinding them down so they realized that fighting was counterproductive to long term survival. Winning wonder wars in a few weeks now produces no similar realization - just a pause before the next scrape. This has to change unless we intend to keep repeating the same patterns. Same for intelligence - the CIA has miserably failed in the past 20 years - from the collapse of Soviet Union, to the rise in Islamic Fundamentalism to the basic information of our adversaries capacities - something has to change if we are to make realistic judgments on policy.
5) Small Steps - Spreading democracy is the right path for the middle east and is the only long term way to make this part of the world functional. But Iraq has shown, if anything, that the local sectarian divisions are still too wide to make cooperation between the groups work at this point. As I said in #3 - Warlords for stability in the area where the groups coexist, but for all means - push and support Democracy where you can - a free Kurdistan may be the only "victory" from the current implosion of Iraq - at least it would be something.
Or we could be like the previous poster, Jamshid - just blame it all on the Jews. That post should win the vile star for the day.
