OK, we just left, and already they’re up to these kinds of shenanigans in Iraq?
Washington— U.S. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and John McCain (R-Arizona) released the following statement on recent developments in Iraq:
“We are alarmed by recent developments in Iraq, most recently the warrant issued today by the Maliki government for the arrest of Sunni Vice President Tariq al Hashimi. This is a clear sign that the fragile political accommodation made possible by the surge of 2007, which ended large-scale sectarian violence in Iraq, is now unraveling. This crisis has been precipitated in large measure by the failure and unwillingness of the Obama Administration to reach an agreement with the Iraqi government for a residual presence of U.S. forces in Iraq, thereby depriving Iraq of the stabilizing influence of the U.S. military and diminishing the ability of the United States to support Iraq.
“If Iraq slides back into sectarian violence, the consequences will be catastrophic for the Iraqi people and U.S. interests in the Middle East, and a clear victory for al Qaeda and Iran. A deterioration of the kind we are now witnessing in Iraq was not unforeseen, and now the U.S. government must do whatever it can to help Iraqis stabilize the situation. We call upon the Obama Administration and the Iraqi government to reopen negotiations with the goal of maintaining an effective residual U.S. military presence in Iraq before the situation deteriorates further.”
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Let’s hope it’s not as bad as Sens. Graham and McCain worry that it is. I mean, hope’s all we have left, right?
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I am soooo sick of these two…why don’t they tell us the deal they would have/could have forced on the Iraqis to allow our troops to remain and HOW they would have done it?
I think they’re saying that they would have tried longer and harder to reach an agreement with Maliki for some sort of longer-term presence.
And I’m sure they would have. Of course, we don’t know whether they would have succeeded.
By the way, this incident speaks directly to something that has concerned Graham since the beginning: The enormous challenge of getting respect for the rule of law, for a government of law and not men, to take hold in Iraq (or Afghanistan, for that matter). That’s always been an uphill battle. And one thing that was needed to get there was time, lots of it.
Why Iraq and not Somalia?
The senators seem awfully quick to award advance credit to al-Qaeda for a “victory” it probably would have little to do with. I guess they wanted to be ahead of al-Jazerra this time?
I’m with you Martin; these two war mongers just disgust me. Let the Iraqis figure it out for themselves. It’s not our concern. Nor is this necessarily bad. There has always been violence in that country and our 8+ year involvement didn’t end it and in fact for much of our time there it was ramped up significantly. So why get all in a snit?
Why Iraq and not Somalia? Because of the “Pottery Barn” rule. We didn’t break Somalia. We found it that way.
The Pottery Barn rule??? That’s about the dumbest comment I’ve seen yet to defend the Iraq war. So now Brad is ADMITTING we broke Iraq. That would imply that before the shock and awe the place was NOT broken. Hence the latest justification is an acknowledgement that we went to war on FALSE pretenses and made things WORSE. That’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to seeing Brad admit he was wrong. So I’ll declare victory and go home.
How did we “break” Iraq, other than by invading it on trumped up charges? Why not invade Somalia? Oh yeah, no oil there. No redeeming the father’s mistake there. Just a lot of pirates and a chaotically failed state, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, which was quite functional in comparison.
We invaded Somalia in 1992, December, a mission authorized by an outgoing George H.W. Bush.
Kathryn, actually we DID invade Somalia, and we were doing some good there when we suddenly decided to pull out after the Battle of Mogadishu.
But we didn’t break the established order there. There was no established order.
There WAS an established order to break in Iraq. An evil, oppressive one. Breaking it was a good thing. But once you break it, you have responsibility for the disorder that follows.
Surely none of you believe that order is always good, and breaking it is always bad. Perhaps most of the time (according to my own rather conservative instincts), but not all the time.
I guess I should never say that… “Surely you don’t believe…” I’ve learned that my friends can believe some unlikely things. And you repeat them as though they were facts, and indisputable. Such as Kathryn saying “on trumped-up charges.” I don’t recall anything that was “trumped up.” Perhaps anyone who believes that should go read this piece by the late Christopher Hitchens, and get back to me… That should save me a lot of typing.
“It’s one of the main reasons why once we went in,”
But you can’t invoke the Pottery Barn rule for WHY we invaded Iraq in the first place and not [pick another country that has an oppressive regime–Iran, North Korea, Myanmar/Burma]. and Hitchens was widely derided among people who know far more than I for his stance on Iraq.
And, another thing, if the surge had not been such a failure for the Iraqi people – who never stopped getting blown up and otherwise slaughtered throughout Petraeus’ “success” – maybe this wouldn’t be popping up now.
But, by claiming all this “success” when we couldn’t even get the electricity back on after 8 years, was just a monumental case of dissembling about exactly the kind of failure this has been.
But, thank God, it is over. No more Americans dying and Iraqis deciding if they prefer the trains running on time – or just not getting blown up – or democracy.
That is something John McCain and Lindsey Graham have no control over and never did despite their hubris.
Hmmm. I could have sworn I had cited the Pottery Barn rule a number of times over the years. It’s one of the main reasons why once we went in, we couldn’t leave before things were stable. Also, I’m fond of quoting Thomas Friedman.
It doesn’t show up in a search of this blog, but then, the search engine only finds terms in the text of posts, not in comments.
Here’s one place at least where I quoted it in a comment on my OLD blog…
And I believe the Pottery Barn Rule was also cited by the Bushies.
Just changing the subject entirely… when I was back on my old blog looking up the Pottery Barn thing, I ran across this entirely unrelated column from 2005, which I essentially ripped a Glenn McConnell op-ed up one side and down the other, and did it pretty well, in the opinion of my latter-day self.
I wrote better back then, when I knew it was going into print. I probably ought to start writing columns again, for somebody, to force me back into that regimen of discipline…
The world is not a Pottery Barn full of merchandise for us to pick up, handle, mull over what we’d like to do with or not, and then decide either to put back, break-and-buy, etc.
Even if one accepts most every premise of Hitchens’ defense in that 2007 article, the principal objection to the war and the reason why it will continue to come back to haunt us in the form of other nations’ unilateral actions is as follows: it was illegal under international law, especially because it was not a case of self-defense. Hitchens did not really address that point at least not in that particular article; there’s not really a defensible argument to be made on that front, other than perhaps Richard Perle’s later at-least-honest admission that the war was probably illegal but the right thing to do nevertheless. (Of course by his reckoning the short-term gain outweighed the long-term damage, whereas many of us think exactly the opposite.)
But Brad, you said yourself that the main problem is “The enormous challenge of getting respect for the rule of law, for a government of law and not men, to take hold in Iraq (or Afghanistan, for that matter). That’s always been an uphill battle. And one thing that was needed to get there was time, lots of it.”
Is that part something we broke?
Back to Brad’s original comment (the arrest of the Iraqi VP) I’m not seeing much about this story in the press or the web. Apparently no one but Brad, Lindsey and McCain are overly concerned about this development. I certainly won’t lose any sleep over it.
Actually, there was nothing illegal about it. We were following through with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441.
And yep, a case can be made to the contrary. But the bottom line is, the assertion that the invasion was “illegal,” which seems axiomatic among my antiwar friends, is at the very least highly debatable.
It seems to me that in view of the facts, the worst thing you can say is that there was no final, 18th resolution positively authorizing the invasion itself, which means we fell back on 1441. But that’s a mushy basis for saying it was illegal.
And Kathryn. I think we’re going in circles: No the Pottery Barn rule is NOT one for going in, under most circumstances. It’s the reason why you can’t leave until things settle down.
We went in, under arms, in both Iraq and Somalia. We left Somalia before the mission was accomplished. I think that was a bad thing, but not because of the Pottery Barn rule, since we didn’t “break” Somalia.
We didn’t “break” Iraq. All the partisan hatred was there. It was calm only BECAUSE a very strong, very cruel dictator was suppressing it. We just got rid of the dictator. Until the people there are ready to live and work together, the only thing that will bring peace there is another dictator.
Of course the invasion of Iraq was illegal. Duh. There was no declaration of war. The UN doesn’t make law for the United States. You can call it axiomatic or whatever idiotic term you want to use. I’ll call it what it is: A Fact.
So, setting aside the gratuitously invoked Pottery Barn rule, were we justified in going into Iraq, as you see it?
Is there a Gap in your reasoning, perchance ignoring that under Bush we were a Banana Republic run by the Restoration Hardware of Old Guard Republicans? The Old Navy of George H.W. Bush and John McCain, going to Lands’ End to bring freedom?
Though Wikipedia is certainly not the be-all and end-all of information, I do recommend going to their page on “Legality of the Iraq War” if only to follow the links provided therein to other reports and documents and to get a general overview of international opinion on the topic.
Brad’s correct, there is some difference of opinion, but it seems like most of the views believing the invasion to be in accordance with international law emanate, oddly enough, from the United States. Whaddya know?! The balance of world opinion on the matter is tilted significantly the other way.
The UN may be infuriating and exasperating when it does not act according to what we think is right. But how can we expect to build a world in which it is demanded that superpowers like China or Russia or emerging powers like India, Brazil, etc., must conform to norms of international behavior (and NOT decide to simply launch wars NOT involving their self-defense) if we reserve the right to unilaterally pursue our own wars of choice against nations that did not attack us?
Kathryn I really “like” that last comment.
I was trying to think of an answer involving Stein Mart, but I didn’t come up with anything.
Y’all must excuse me. I had lunch at that new Brazilian place on Main Street where they keep bringing you meat, and meat, and more meat. Turns out that barbecue is not the only kind of meat that clogs up your brain…
I got a little queasy typing… that word… over and over just now.
I didn’t know it was possible to have too much… you know. This reminds me of the title of that Hemingway short story, “A Way You’ll Never Be.”
As a Columbian, aren’t you insulted that the previously-existing branch of that restaurant in Myrtle Beach is “Gaucho” Brazilian Steak House, whereas here they felt that was too incomprehensible or something, and thus renamed it “Cowboy” Steakhouse?
I hear it’s good (did you think so?): but I can’t imagine doing lunch there, unless one would abandon any goals for the rest of the day. Besides, I’d have to put away a goodly amount of Malbec or a good Chilean Cab as the proper accompaniment to all that meat and there goes the day, etc…
I’m just starting to recover. For the last few hours, I felt like there were all these fat globules in my veins brutally assaulting and crippling any red cells that dared try to carry oxygen to my brain…
Funny you should mention that. I didn’t know about the MB place, but when this opened, my first thought was, “Why ‘Cowboy’? Why not ‘Gaucho’?”
Then my second thought was, “Gaucho” would say “Argentina.” And this is supposed to be Brazilian. Wrong language…
But then I looked it up, and saw that they use that term in Brazil, too.
So I’m confused. Too much meat…
But to your point… maybe this is like the “Tinker Tailor” thing.
I also felt dissed the other night trying to watch ETV. OK, so if I go to that channel to see Masterpiece Theatre, but it’s not on, because they’re showing some reconstituted beach music group doo-wopping for a bunch of people trying to recapture their youth, what does it say that ETV thinks I’m more likely to give money when they show me THIS than when they show the stuff that I go to ETV for? (And yeah, I know that was a really confused sentence, but give me a break — my head is literally filled with charred meat!)
What’s with this lowest-common-cultural-denominator stuff? I felt insulted… Although I did enjoy the clips of Carole King and James Taylor…
They have done studies. Those are the shows that people donate money for; not Frontline, Nova and Masterpeice. it’s the opposite in Radio. If you hadn’t noticed, they fundraise around the shows in the schedule. Radio listeners give for programs, often refusing the tchochkes; TV Viewers give more transactionally, for specials and tote bags.
Yes, Brad– I have never understood the shift in pledge drive programming–it’s a whole different channel. I suppose they find that people like us give anyway — we’re on the auto-pay plan, but that they can attract new viewers this way.
Somalia was already broken when we went in. We just rearranged the pieces.
Bush made it clear that we were “going in” no matter what. The UN resolution was just legal icing. We were going to do it even if the UN voted the other way. The Bush Doctrine was a way of codifying it.
The reality is that the US was going to react to 9/11 in a big pro-active way, and people were going to get hurt. That’s exactly what ALQ wanted, and the point of terrorism is always to get the other side to over-react.
When I was traveling up the Amazon and the Rio Negro, during a stop in Manaus, my party and I dined at a charming churrascaria. I learned a few things that might be germane here: Make sure you don’t fill up on the cheap gristle-y cuts of meat, hold out for the good stuff. Also, after several pounds of beef, it’s not a good idea to try eating chicken hearts for the first time.