More on Iraq, civil war, and what to do

Before I begin, I haven't linked to Ted Rall's blog yet. You should really go check it out.

Anyway, I was just reading through his blog, and read this:

The downing of the Chinook helicopter near Baghdad yesterday has pundits chattering about the "difficult choices" we face in Iraq and how we have to stick around until we've won. What these morons don't get, however, is that this war was lost before it started. All those wait-and-see folks were idiots; there was never any chance that the U.S. would go in and not act like assholes, guarding the oil ministry and nothing else against looters was inevitable, of course the place was going to disintegrate into civil war and chaos. We didn't have what it took to do differently, and the situation was bound to degenerate immediately upon our arrival. A brilliant commander-in-chief would have had a hard time taming post-Saddam Iraq; these guys were always too narrowminded, undereducated and arrogant to tame anything. This was always gonna suck, and it's always gonna suck. Every day that passes kills more innocents, and for absolutely nothing--the United States will never, ever win the war in Iraq because it just doesn't know how.

I agree with him on most points. That this war was foolish, that the Administration is too arrogant and ignorant to deal with the situation, and that this was probably an unavoidable situation.

But, I do have to disagree with his implicit point that the situation is hopeless.

It seems hopeless since it'll still be another 14 months before we get someone else in the White House, and it doesn't seem like Bush will be doing much to improve the situation until then. But right now, at least, there are steps we can take to stabilize Iraq.

In that, as I mentioned earlier, the top strategic goal in Iraq right now should be regional stability. It's no easy task, Herculean if done right, and impossible if done alone, but not outside of possibility right now.

So, here I present Raznor's Oversimplified Recipe for a Stable Iraq:

Really, it all boils down to diplomacy. And this will be incredibly difficult. We need full UN support, and that will require swallowing our own pride, without losing face. As well as give the United Nations a way to offer it's support without having to retroactively agree the war was a good idea. We have to give up control of Iraq but still bear a lion's share of the costs, which shouldn't be too much of a problem if we eliminate Bush's tax cuts and eliminate the Missile Defense Shield, neither of which will be easy politically.

This becomes a double edged sword. On the one hand, we need to give the world and the Iraqi people the impression that we don't care about controlling Iraq, and hand control over willingly. On the other hand, we need to do it in a way that cannot be perceived as us showing weakness, or even admitting we made a mistake going into Iraq, or the plan will receive heavy resistance in the Pentagon and military sector, and thus become politically infeasible.

Okay, assume we just found a way to hand power to the UN and get UN support in such a way that it is palatable to the international community, but also the military brass, through some miracle of diplomatic ingenuity. We've still got a lot of work.

Because the important thing is also that the countries in the region will lend support to our efforts in Iraq. We'd need a substantial police force of fellow Arabs, whom the Iraqis can believe are more concerned for them than Americans, and who can speak their language. This takes the assumption that if there is a semblance of order and self-governance, most Iraqi civilians would find actual armed resistance undesirable, hence competing nationalist entities wouldn't have enough sway to declare war on each other.

How do we do this? I'm no expert in Middle Eastern politics, but the most obvious answer to me would be to promise (and fulfill that promise, or at least appear to be fulfilling that promise) to take a harder stand on Israel, and cut off considerable amount of aid, since at the moment, Israel's army is viewed by many in Arab nations as being an extension of the American army. This has a similar problem of having to be packaged in a way that will be acceptable to the Arab nations and palatable to the people at home, in order to make it politically possible.

So there you go. And I'm probably oversimplifying, still it seems like a Herculean task to complete. And the unfortunate thing is we have an Administration with one strategic goal: get re-elected. Regional stability of Persia seems to have little consideration for these people.