Letters to the Editor
-
Simple question for Joan
Why do you think this is a war? Why do you keep saying it is?
In war, the problem is to find the enemy and defeat the enemy before they defeat you. So who are we supposed to defeat in Iraq?
The insurgents are far too nebulous to constitute an 'enemy.' There's no leader of the insurgents that we can crush or negotiate with to make the insurgents stop what they are doing. Every time we take down an insurgent, we probably create a dozen new insurgents to take his place--mainly his relatives. The insurgents are basically freelancers and are in no real way organized or necessarily linked together. So how do we defeat that?
Futhermore, there's a three way circus going on in Iraq. The Sunnis insurgents are fighting the Shiite insurgents and the Kurds are mixed up in it too. Should we defeat the Sunnis, the Shiites, or the Kurds or all three or what? What is the combination that results in victory? And why would it be a victory?
The 'war' in Iraq simply isn't a war problem, it's a policing problem. The insurgents should ideally be treated as criminals, not as warriors; they need to be captured, prevented, identified, discouraged, punished, made to realize that insurgency is a dead end occupation. They shouldn't be elevated to the status of possible rulers of Iraq, which is what treating them as 'enemies' actually accomplishes.
Policing is how you promote security and order in a society. Warring is about breaking things and killing people. Warring is not what we are supposed to be doing in Iraq. Instead, we are supposed to be building a new nation.
However, we don't have enough troops on the ground to do any kind of serious policing in Iraq. And we probably never will, because the cost will just be too ruinous. Our troops are just running around from thing to thing, hoping that the Iraqis will eventually take over for us and solve our problems so that we can go away. But that's just not going to happen. The insurgents seem to have infiltrated the Iraqi army and government, a consequence of there not being any sort of order in the country.
'Cutting off the funding to stop the fighting in Iraq' is just not what it's about. What we should be discussing is how and whether we want to keep order in Iraq.
In fact it's not surprising to me that the Democrats would be reluctant to cut off funding. After all, even though the Democrats may like to say they are opposed to the 'war,' they have not in any way come out against providing security for Iraq. They still subscribe to the goal of building a nation in Iraq. So cutting off funding is a contradictory position for the Democrats, because they are not actually opposed to what the funding is for.
What the Democrats (and the country) are really against is the lack of progress in Iraq. The whole 'cutting off the funding' discussion is really just an evasion of the real issues, if you ask me.