Let’s say the Democrats press the issue and manage to force President Bush, somehow, into setting a timetable for leaving Iraq shortly. Maybe they cut the funding, maybe they rally the country.
And let’s say we do leave Iraq.
I have a few questions:
Then what?
- What do we do with our military? Do they come directly home? Stationed in an adjacent country? New airbase(s) built? Completely deactivated? Held on standby?
- When the Iraqi Civil War starts in earnest, do we react? Or sit and watch the bodies pile up and float by en masse?
- When foreign American targets begin exploding, how do we react?
- When domestic American targets begin exploding, how do we react?
- When Iraq is not the focal point of the War On Terror, what is?
- Or should we simply wait until another American building goes down, our own “Madrid Bombing?” Our own “London Tube Bombing”?
What will defeat look like?
Some in the Blogosphere have indicated this not defeat, but a logical result.
I would ask: there is retribution for Bush’s mistakes and there are the overarching consequences from various policies. Balance “getting out of Iraq” vs. what I call “the logical extension.”
And that’s only the threat from without — the external threat. What about the threat from within?
Already we in the US are being corrupted from within. Already Muslim taxi drivers in Minneapolis, Minnesota are refusing service to fares who carry alcohol with them. Already the scope of demand made by Muslims in Minneapolis is expanding:
Beryl Dsouza was late and in no mood for delays when she stopped at a Target store after work two weeks ago for milk, bread and bacon. So Dsouza was taken aback when the cashier — who had on the traditional headscarf, or hijab, worn by many Muslim women — refused to swipe the bacon through the checkout scanner.
“She made me scan the bacon. Then she opened the bag and made me put it in the bag,” said Dsouza, 53, of Minneapolis. “It made me wonder why this person took a job as a cashier.”
In the latest example of religious beliefs creating tension in the workplace, some Muslims in the Twin Cities are adhering to a strict interpretation of the Qur’an that prohibits the handling of pork products. Instead of swiping the items themselves, they are asking non-Muslim employees or shoppers to do it for them.
Never forget.
Vegetarians don’t apply for slaughterhouse jobs. Pacifists don’t go out of their way to get hired by the military.
If the libs get control then what?
1. The military is all but disbanded and thrown out. No new weapons programs no upgrading of hardware.
2.Blame Bush for the mess he left in Iraq and the rest of the region
3. Claim it is Bush’s fault for the retaliation because of the mess he left in Iraq and the rest of the region
4.How did this happen its Bush’s fault for not preparing for and stopping this from happening
5. the US itself
6. you mean like the Sears Tower, or LA or Seatle? Where planned strikes have been intercepted and stopped already.
Anonymous: and men need women like fish need a bicycle, okay?
WMD: yeah, like that.
BZ
What does defeat look like? Three articles of mine I use as a basis for the following description (here,here and here):
Consder the Balkans and the divisions seen there – Spread all of those ethnic and religious differences from the Empty Quarter to the Steppes of Russia, from Sinai to Western China and India, add in hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the hands of the various divisions.
Shake well.
Retreat and defeat in Iraq does *not* have zero cost to it in terms of global stability and violence. In fact both of those rise faster than has ever been seen before in human history because the US has been putting forward cheap goods as a path to liberty, while that has, instead, spread cheaper and more deadly arms on a global basis. Unaccountable trade, cheap and deadly arms available from multiple suppliers globally, and various fanatical groups and semi-Nations and organizations all scrambling after petro-dollars and using *that* to buy arms globally.
Consider the extent of Hezbollah, alone, without any other groups considered: Lebanon, Chechnya, Bosnia, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Kosovo, Turkey, Russia. Picture enhanced money flow to ALL of them simultaneously. Remember Hezbollah in Lebanon? How would you like *that* in Mexico via the Hezbollah contacts with Mexican drug gangs and far eastern Triads? Spin up time? How fast did Hezbollah go from *nothing* to US Embassy Bombing in Lebanon… less than a year.
Picture the Kurds expanding into Iran, Syria, Turkey, Jordan… all to get the ethnic homeland they were *promised* by the West after WWI… and *who* is going to *stop* them? The US? We just *left* and backed out on promises *again*. Consider massive wars in Turkey, Syria, the ex-Iraqi territories and Iran to be a ‘done deal’. Throw in the Azeris for for fun and consolidating *their* homeland.
al Qaeda will rapidly expand and use its “Management of Savagery” documented concepts to expand across the fractured Middle East. Syria will be hard pressed, but it has prime negotiating tools with Chemical Weapons and possible Bio Weapons… if they have the triad of nuclear devices as seen by their hard work inside Syria with Iran, then they also have IRBMs to threaten the entire Eastern Med for extortion. Athens, Istanbul, Cairo, Riyadh, Baghdad, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Mecca, the Suez, Alexandria… all under Syrian capability to attack.
What does that world look like where the US thinks there is *no cost* to defeat AGAIN?
Consider all the deathtolls to all the wars in the 20th century.
Put two zeros at the end.
Because this time it is thoroughly and completely global. No Nation escapes.
And that is just from basic, historical analysis of post-war situations, their failures, and outcomes along with examining the last time the US left a war and Ally with the idea that *no cost* was involved. Israel can extract a *cost* in lives, but taht will not stop the disintegration and only add to the death toll as she goes under. India will be hard pressed to survive and it will be under Pakistani nuclear war and getting its nuclear ‘pound of flesh’. China will face unrest in the west and that will fracture all the way to Beijing. Russia will face the same from the south and it may just survive, but barely in any form. Turkey will fracture. Syria can retain some semblance of itself with WMDs and extortion. Jordan gone. KSA gone. All the small gulf and arabic states, swept up in the fracturing. If it heads into Africa, thing will get horrific on a scale not seen by anyone on this planet, ever. Ditto SE Asia. And S. America.
For *that* is how far the extremism has gone.
The US can counter it, roll it back, make it less of a threat and harder to do. But not if we leave Iraq.
The Domino theory met the sea in SE Asia and we were very lucky to only see Cambodia and Laos go under along with S. Viet Nam with only millions dead amongst three Nations.
This time we are stuck with the luck we *make*.
If we leave it will be bad luck on a global scale.
And the war here because of that will start at a *true* Civil war as areas secede from the Union, and devolve as Hezbollah, al Qaeda, FARC and other groups expand and prey upon the weak. Not this phony ‘civil war’ in Iraq, but the real, nasty, alternate governments each armed with nuclear devices sort of deal. Real Civil War. The reason we avoid using the term for lesser things is that it has meaning and unheard of death toll *attached to it* so that we do not get a warm and fuzzy calling minor ethnic struggles by that name until they step up and form *real governments*.
Because that is what we have *bought* by decades of not doing the right thing on a global basis. Encroaching tyranny, despotism and not being able to call them by name and confront them. Might cost some money, you know?
Can’t have liberty without free trade!
Whatever happened to *this* order:”No Taxation Without Representation”? Seems that those folks saw freedom and liberty *before* trade to *control it*. Thanks for NOTHING President Wilson, for changing that around so that both sides could start destorying freedom and the basis for freedom with it. And the place that he started it? The joke is on us!! He did it because he didn’t want to interfere with trade with the OTTOMAN EMPIRE during WWI!!
Worked so well, didn’t it?
WOW! Great post, BZ… and there’s no way I have anything to add to A Jacksonian’s comment; he said it all and said it truthfully. That is, unfortunately, the way it is. 🙁
Rush brought up recently that he is convinced that a huge majority of this country is not going to wake up to the seriousness of this threat until we get hit again, even harder than 9/11. Unfortunately I think he is exactly right.
Not to be arrogant but I feel like those of us conservatives that still understand the seriousness of the global war on terror and keep shouting to the deaf masses are like Winston Churchill. Not enough people are going to listen until things get really bad. How frustrated was Churchill that no one listened to his warnings? Thats how I feel.
I believe that Rush is correct, LMC, and I said it again just this morning, in the comment section of another blog: I don’t think we’ll “get it” until there is a mushroom cloud enveloping an American city — and even then I feel some will beat their breasts and say “we deserve it” and STILL will be unable to understand just how precious IS this thing we call freedom.
BZ
AJ: Wilson and free trade with Persia? I’ll have to read about that one, brother!
BZ
You pull out, and eventually we fight… simple as that.. eventually, appeasement becomes enslavement, and so on and so on… The LIEberal lemmings will only last long enough for them to expand their agenda….
Fight them there or fight them here. One way or another we’re going to be fighting them. The left simply cannot comprehend violence that is not connected to the “class struggle” which means they will understand this when . . .
shoprat said…
Fight them there or fight them here. One way or another we’re going to be fighting them.
*************
SR, we’re going to end up fighting them here too, I’m surprised it hasn’t already taken place, but what would I know, being a fake vet and a paid shill for the Dems and the MSM…
Right??
Mr. Z – Not Persia… the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. The folks with the Armenian Genocide going on at the time which Pres. Wilson *knew about* and did *nothing*. America, as always, had sent *lots* of personal, religious and support committee aid to the Armenian areas and other folks repressed by the Ottomans there. Pres. Wilson would not even back going to war against the Ottomans citing *trade* and the inability of the US to get any effective force there. The very same US that had 1 million men under arms at the *end* of 1918. THAT President Wilson and his League of Nations ideal that would let problems fester even worse. The one who had little say in the Post-War plans because he was, as Teddy Roosevelt pointed out, seen as a ‘junior partner’ that had not committed fully to the war against the Kaiser by going after the allies of Germany.
The very roots of the Right and the Left in their ‘do nothing’ outlooks all is harshly seen from that one man and his decision to do *nothing* against the Ottomans. His Transnational ideal of the League of Nations and ‘body above Nations’ is eroding the Nation State to this day from the Left. And the Right uses unregulated free trade to promote freedom after it has demonstrably *failed* in the Middle East since 1917.
I have had it with *both* those outlooks as neither can show where it has done one bit of good… while our enemies show us how they can exploit *both* to go after us. We fought in a bad war, poorly, with high reservations and not intending to *win* but *not lose* it. And so we *lost it* in the long run where we would not fight when the forces were available, the Nation was surging in production and the enemies were weak and unable to muster modern armies… and we could have landed anywhere from Sinai to Constantinople and had ready supplies via the British.
Too bad we put ‘trade’ first.
Now we pay.
AJ: thanks for the correction, you’re obviously correct.
TF: this is another Joe Haldeman “Forever War.” We’d best get used to it.
BZ
Consider one more possibility with question one: In the private sector it is called a reduction in force.