Are you willing to accept an Iraq partitioned in form or in substance along religious and/or ethnic lines if that's best way to lower level of violence?

Reed, isn't it possible that the US will not have a say in whether the country is partitioned or not?

Are you willing to throw money at the peacemaking, including assigning over oil revenue to various Iraqis

Do you mean that the US would decide  how Iraq's oil money is divided?

And do you want to maintain American bases permanently in Iraqi territory?



I think there is only one answer to this one, and that is, "No".  If we're going to go, then the bases have to go too.

You seem to be saying that we could withdraw some or all of our troops and still maintain a pretty tight control in Iraq.  I don't see that as realistic at all.

I don't know if you are a Democrat or not, but pro-war Democrats need to admit up front that they were wrong about the war.  Not just hide behind the administration's incompetance in conducting the war, but that the whole enterprise was wrong from the beginning.

Iraq is going to be part of the 2006 election, so yes, Sen. Feingold is correct; Democrats need to have a position.

The problem that the Democrats have in forming a position is that they do not have the authority to make anything happen and they are being kept out of the loop on information about what's really going on on the ground.  That's the problem.

If they say we need to withdraw the troops and they make a stand on that issue, the Republicans can either withdraw and blame the Democrats for the chaos of pulling out too early, or not withdraw and blame the Democrats for making our position look weak.  It's also not clear whether pulling out now or later is going to be the best thing for Iraq and our nation.  In fact, it's entirely possible that actually adding troops would be a better option. 

The average citizen does not have enough information to make an accurate decision.  We get the overly optimistic view from the administration mixed with violent images from the press.  But we do not have any sense of what the real situation is on the ground and the administration isn't telling us.

Number Two should only be an ultra-last resort option and that's something that Iraqis themselves should decide or cause themselves, not something that should be imposed. Arguably, most historical partitions have extended conflict rather than solving them.

Sometimes a partition is unavoidable (i.e. Greece and Turkey) but it is rarely just "not totally pacific." The irony is that the two examples you used, Ireland and India arguably had their respective conflicts greatly extended and deepened by partition. Very few analysts believe there would still be a conflict in Northern Ireland today had the entire thing been united early on. Likewise, there would have been no India-Pakistan conflict. The India partition in particular, is believed by most historians (the Pakistani historians a big exception) to have been a gross mistake by a British government that rushed out without a proper handover.

Partitions inevitably lead to massive bloodletting, ethnic cleansing, extended warfare, destruction, and the creation of two or more largely implacable rival nations. Reconciling conflict within a state may seem more difficult, but ultimately is more conducive to peace in the long-term.

 Christopher Hitchens had a good piece in the Atlantic about the perils of partition that is worth reading (if you can excuse him for his neo-con shilling):

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200303/hitchens

 This excellent article in The Nation by Juan Cole explains the perils of partitioning Iraq:

 http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040329&c=1&s =cole

 Perhaps partition will be unavoidable, but I don't think that the US should impose one. If it has to happen it will. But if anything, it needs to be discouraged heavily. Partition rarely solves the problems it tries to - it usually just creates a host of new ones and comes with the cost of millions of lives and lots of ethnic cleansing.

Feingold for President.  It's not impossible!

Wow.  Withdrawal by '08?

As Norman Solomon points out, Frank Rich is premature in calling the war over.  By the time Richard Nixon took office, every honest observer knew that the Vietnam war was already lost, much as Frank Rich knows today.  Yet more than 20,000 American troops died between 1969 and 1973, depite the steady drawdown of the numbers.

Even though the war is hopeless, it's going to be up to a grass-roots antiwar movement to push both the Republicans and the Democratic leadership to withdraw.

As for the questions, the first point to get is that it's not up to us anymore.  The US has totally blown its influence, to the point where if the US advocates X, any good Iraqi nationalist, Sunni or Shiite, will feel pressure to advocate not-X or else risk being seen as a US pawn.  The best we can hope for is that the Iraqi factions can work these points out for themselves.

Step one is to make clear that no president is qualified to lead American foreign policy unless that person is clear on the need to get us out of Iraq.  At the moment, we have Sen. Feingold and, surprise, Sen. Hagel.  So far Sens. Clinton and Biden have shown themselves incompetent to lead, because they are staking out positions that are to the right of George Bush on the Iraq war.

The proposal to unleash the Peshmerga would immediately throw the ethnically-mixed Nineveh Province - tense, but relatively quiet since the election - into chaos. 
While a constitution is being hammered out its premature to suggest any alteration to the status quo, flawed as it may be. Changes to security postures can only complicate an already delicate process.

Strange a general put it in pedestrian terms, you break it you own it.
Through how many colonialist centuries multiple economic engines leaned hard on the middle east.
When Iran was engaged in conflict against Iraq outside arms merchants fed fuel to those flames.
The litany is long
Historians and theologists still puzzle over the difficult history since many subsets of Arabic peoples tried to coalesce into nations.
Where does this lead.  Oil peters out in 30 years.  The occupation becomes increasingly benign over another generation and a half.  By then where is China selling lots of armaments.
Is the Russian economy going to take hold democratically and return to vie with the German part of the EU.
Our country still carries too many stereotypes, though many see through them.  In US parlance African American skips Saharan Arab African peoples and Mediterranean rim Arab peoples.
Some Arabs have huge wealth; if they share it with their own populace they will avoid turbulence; though if they attempt to emulate, say, Greek benevolent despots, their system of government might continue its difficult times.  There are several geographically diminutive Arab lands in the Levant with relatively progressive civil liberties.
The cultural divide remains wide.
Arabs have contributed a lot to Western culture, art, math, language, science, for centuries, all before their fuel additives.
If hydrogen is the next combusion engine there will be a pax arabica.  All manner of profiteers want to clinch the last supplies.
Perhaps a strong UN is the only answer, but first we need to examine our enabling and participatory strategies in UN.  Certainly, given French and German as well as British longterm interests in the middle east, those big three along with Russia will need to be at the table.
Arabic students need good universities.  Maybe our Marshall plan for the middle east begins with endowments to the strong and relatively free countries in the region.
If the current WA administration would spend less time discrediting knowledgeable diplomats such as Wilson who understand that part of the world, and put more emphasis on utilizing the diplomatic world's existing expertise on the region, reshaping visions could emerge.
It will take a Democrat in the White House, as well as a Supreme Court which will refrain from altering the balance of power among the three branches of government, to begin to assess a way to disengage in Iraq in a humanitarian manner.
In a way, although politics is everything, the actual development of the region might be sufficiently apolitical that a century of peaceful progress could ensue.
From here it looks like the current administration in WA has got a festering problem.  Well and good if Feingold can rally the votes and force the president's hand in the political arena; 2006-2008 is probably going to be the best timeframe for that leverage from the minority party perspective.  That is only one plank in the platform.  Events occur; there may be a scandal to rattle the administration's resolve sufficiently to weaken them before voters at the ballot box.  It is possible to frame the campaigns in 2006, 2006 in terms other than the tenacity of Bush versus the irresolute Democrats one and all.
We should push the Republicans to pick their own option for an exit, and work with them to achieve that.  They need to make a thirty-year plan now to prepare for the eventual end of the oil empire.
The smart executive will use the oilco's cash reserves to leverage ownership of the next technology, but that may be unrelated to Arabic lands.
UN and even NATO could counsel the US in regards to the most stable way to end the strife.

So far this has been the best post I have read in terms of clarity.  The situation in Iraq is such a mess on so many different levels -- domestically I am incensed the more I learn about Rovergate and how the American people were duped into a preemptive strike in Iraq, and then to hear about young men and women dying every day and wondering how to justify their deaths, to see that here in the USA no one is sacrificing in any way commensurate with what we are told over and over again is a War, and then feeling guilty that I am so angry with the Bush Administration that I have very little anger left over for the terrorists (Al Qaeda) who want to kill us (who are obviously NOT the Iraqis, of course!).  What a hideous state of mind to experience!

So reading about Feingold's simple points was quite a relief.  As far as what we should do in Iraq, I just don't know, for all the above confused reasons.  But Feingold's ideas are a good beginning and I am grateful to him for cutting through all the spin and culture-war babble.

I am intrigued by the comments by joe Buck referring to Feingold and Hagel onthe one hand and Clinton and Biden on the other. I am hoarse from yelling at Democrats that the country will respond to plain and frank talk about this war and not to a calculated political positioning (a la Kerry). Someone in another post put it beautifully: by the time the next elections come there will probably be only one pro-war party, the Democrats. How sad. How disgraceful. One doesn't have to go off the deep end, but it is necessary to say that the war was based on a pack of lies and that it was not just incompetently conducted but wrong.

Here's a slightly different take on Reed's questions, and my answers:



1. Does a withdrawal of some or all troops by 12/31/06 make the U.S. more or less secure? More secure for some troops (they're needed home and elsewhere), less secure for all troops.



2. Does a withdrawal of all troops by 12/31/08 make the U.S. more or less secure? 100% of the troops? Less secure. Over 90% of the troops withdrawn? More secure, and that should be our objective.



3. Are you willing to accept an Iraq partitioned in form or in substance along religious and/or ethnic lines? Yes, if it becomes clearer that's what thoughtful Iraqis on all sides support to bring some stability to their lives.



4. Are you willing to invest money in a greater order of magnitde in peacemaking, including oil revenue to Iraqis and U.S. cash grants? Yes. 10x more.



5. Does maintaining American bases permanently in Iraqi territory make the U.S. more or less secure? Less. But don't think that means U.S. security will be served by pulling them out sooner than 5 or 10 years. The concept of permanency itself is more of a problem than duration.



By the way, I want the troops home now, especially my friends and family. But that's not the right question to ask of a policymaker.

-- The Duke, blogindigo.blogspot.com

The other thing to keep in mind is that if the country was broken down along the factional lines, there'd be a MAJOR problem.

It will be up to the Iraqis to decide if they are to break up the country along any lines at all. The most we can do is encourage them to follow some path we haven't marked out yet. Our country has absolutely no authority to dictate the form of government that Iraq ends up with, and our attempts to do so will only make the situation worse.

I'm a little late to the game here, but #4 really jumped out at me.  First of all, we better be willing to throw money at peacekeeping and trying to get other nations involved.  We destroyed the place.  Don't we have some obligation to pitch in?  Even if we do pull out?

How about some shoe on the other foot.  Would you even fathom for a moment that the United States would tolerate another nation deciding how our natural resources were divided?  And to whom do the spoils go?  #4 only makes sense given the backdrop of the Iraqis sitting on top of exactly the type of resources that the U.S. really needs.

It makes sense if think like an oil man:  "If hey have the second largest reserves, we need a say."  And I would NOT argue that that's why we went there, although I still haven't heard the first really coherant argument as to why we did.

We helped take out Mossedegh in Iran in '53.  Think they've forgotten about that?  Not likely. 

We get the overly optimistic view from the administration mixed with violent images from the press.  But we do not have any sense of what the real situation is on the ground and the administration isn't telling us.

Aren't pictures of car bombs going off enough? Or stories about people in line gettng blown up?

It's not once in a while. It's every day.

It doesn't take a genius, or even an "average citizen" to know that things are fucked.

Your arguing that both elected Democrats, because it's politically wrong, and citizens, because they don't have the information, just shut up and let the Bush Administration do whatever they want.

And you're OK with that?

I'm not.

I'm with Russ on this one. I want to hear more Dems talk about getting out.

The country wants us out.

I don't think its impossible at all.

At the least, he is keeping an exit strategy on the agenda. More Democrats need to talk about getting out. It forces the issue. And if we don't force it, the Republicans won't do it.

What was that about permanent bases?

2008 is a long way off. It's definitely not impossible for Russ.

The Vietnam war was overshadowed by the cold war.  For this war, Bush is struggling to have it overshadowed by what he calls the war on terror.  We were able to sustain our super power status beyond the Vietnam war mostly because of the cold war. It had a uniting effect. Our super power status could be the worst casualty of the Iraq war.

Missing above is the option to bring the troops home by Thanksgiving 2005.

Excuse my pessimism, but Iraq is a hopeless disaster of a quagmire. A delicate country waiting for an event such as our invasion, we broke Iraq and now it cannot be fixed. Much like the harm the reckless tax cuts and deficit spending have done to our economy for future administrations, there is nothing we can do for Iraq save to leave them to their own civil war and eventual division; a war that is long overdue, given the appalling ethnic & religious divisions that exist in that unhappy country.

Looks like the debate has overtaken the debaters

Antiwar Populism:
>The Floodgates Open

Russ Feingold, Chuck Hagel, and Cindy Sheehan give voice to the pro-peace zeitgeist
by Justin Raimondo 

It's amusing to watch the utter powerlessness of the neocon attack machine as they try – without success – to smear Cindy Sheehan. Matt Drudge is heaving spittle at his computer screen, and Karl Rove must be having nightmares about this courageous albeit heartbroken housewife from Vacaville as she faces down his attack dogs and skewers them with the sheer simplicity and moral authority of her message. Amid all the debate and speculation – is she losing her "authenticity" as MoveOn.org moves in on her, and the professional handlers start to hover? – antiwar conservative Pat Buchanan had the most astute (and timely) analysis on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews last night:

"Something like 60 percent of the country do not believe the president is doing a good job in leading in the war. And I think she has given a voice and a face and a certain moral authority and authenticity to this giant protest movement. And Norah [O'Donnel], I'm telling you, I believe that some Democratic candidate, or some Democratic senator or governor is going to try to step forward the way McGovern did and Gene McCarthy did to give political leadership to this movement."

Even as Pat was speaking, his prediction was coming true: Senator Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.), a prospective Democratic candidate for president, was telling U.S. News it's time to set a deadline – Dec. 31, 2006 – for withdrawing our troops from Iraq. He'll make the announcement today, at a "listening session" in Marquette, Wisc. Said Feingold:

"I call what I am doing breaking the taboo. The senators have been intimidated and are not talking about a timeframe. We have to make it safe to go in the water and discuss this. A person shouldn't be accused of not supporting troops just because we want some clarity on our mission in Iraq."

The Democrats, Feingold avers, are too timid when it comes to confronting the president on the war, and he's right about that: it was, after all, two Republicans, Reps. Walter Jones (R-N.C.) and Ron Paul (R-Texas), who took the lead in introducing a resolution calling for the beginning of a U.S. withdrawal no later than Oct. 1, 2006 (although it was co-sponsored from the start by two Democrats, Neil Abercrombie and Dennis Kucinich, Jones, being a Republican, was more visible and took the most heat). With national polls showing support for the war plummeting, it's time for the Democrats to play some catch-up, but the party honchos are slow to realize their opportunity – or have ideological problems with doing so. As Ari Berman, writing in The Nation, put it:

"The prominence of party leaders like [Senator Joseph C.] Biden and [Hillary] Clinton, and of a slew of other potential prowar candidates who support the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, presents the Democrats with an odd dilemma: At a time when the American people are turning against the Iraq War and favor a withdrawal of U.S. troops, and British and American leaders are publicly discussing a partial pullback, the leading Democratic presidential candidates for '08 are unapologetic war hawks. Nearly 60 percent of Americans now oppose the war, according to recent polling. Sixty-three percent want U.S. troops brought home within the next year. Yet a recent National Journal 'insiders poll' found that a similar margin of Democratic members of Congress reject setting any timetable. The possibility that America's military presence in Iraq may be doing more harm than good is considered beyond the pale of 'sophisticated' debate."