The U.S. in Iraq: Occupiers or peacekeepers

The New York Times reports, you decide:

The Iraqi foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, warned today that an early American withdrawal from Iraq could bring on an all-out civil war and regional conflict, pointedly telling the United States that it had responsibilities to continue lending support to the Baghdad government. . .

Asked if the Iraqi government’s was aware of the growing pressure on President Bush from Congress to impose a timetable for withdrawing American forces from Iraq, Mr. Zebari said his government was holding a “dialogue” with some congressmen.

“We explain to them the dangers of a speedy withdrawal and leaving a security vacuum, and the dangers vary from civil war to dividing the country or maybe to regional wars,” he said.

Remember when Colin Powell warned, in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, about the Pottery Barn rule - that if we did indeed proceed and did any real damage, we'd be responsible for fixing it?

Well, this wasn't the Pottery Barn's policy after all. In fact, the Pottery Barn just writes off broken merchandise. Sounds like Congress wants to do the same thing - that is, write off Iraq.

I wonder if now is the time Iraqis should hold a referendum. Should the U.S.-led coalition forces stay? Vote yes or no.

If Iraqis voted yes, well, hopefully that would silence all the noise about an occupation. That would have to be a morale boost for the coalition forces increasingly in the line of fire.

And if Iraqis voted no? Well, then Iraqis could carry on and fight this civil war of theirs to their hearts' content and without the U.S. imposing all these ridiculous rules of war to make everyone feel guilty. (As if war can be fought by rules!)

And no doubt the 140,000 Turkish forces now amassed on Iraq's border would be happy to step in and act as, um, peacekeepers. But I have to admit, I think Turkey would only do this after getting rid of everyone they perceived to be troublemakers. Now would this mean the entire Kurdish population in Iraq?

And in the south, I'm sure that should the Shiites need help - and even if they didn't - Iran would also happily step up to the plate. The question here would be would Tehran simply want the southern oil fields in exchange for their services or the entire country?

And what makes me think that the Islamic regime in Tehran would care even less about the brotherly rights of Iraq's Sunnis than the infidel U.S.-led forces? Not to mention the rights of the Iraqi Kurds - were any to survive the Turkish peacekeepers.

And, what's really frightening about this scenario is that I doubt most Americans, even ones in Congress, wouldn't bother looking back - and certainly not in regret - once we pulled out.

I mean how many Americans - or Europeans for that matter - have any idea of what happened to the South Vietnames - or the Cambodians, or the Laotians, for that matter - after we pulled out of Vietnam?

Oh no, Pol Pot seizing power had nothing to do with a "domino effect." I'm sure he was indeed totally nervous about the U.S. coming back to help his country people who he was busy exterminating after having been humiliated in Vietnam.

Almost everyone that I know who advocated an American withdrawal from Vietnam remains proud of their position. Did we not exit this war so that everyone could make love, after all? While the seventies did end up being pretty fun in America, I don't think they got this memo in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos.

Maybe the person in the State Department responsible for sending it out was, I dunno, too stoned to remember or something.

Hey, but we have text message, so we could definitely contact everyone in Iraq. How would something like this work:

We're outta here. No more civil war for us. And if you get this message America hopes you'll decide no more for you too.

Even Natan Sharansky is beginning to compare Iraq to Vietnam

Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident writes in today's Washington Post:

As the hideous violence in Iraq continues, it has become increasingly common to hear people argue that the world was better off with Hussein in power and (even more remarkably) that Iraqis were better off under his fist. In his final interview as U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan acknowledged that Iraq "had a dictator who was brutal" but said that Iraqis under the Baathist dictatorship "had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school."

As he continues:

Following in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty and other Western liberals who served as willing dupes for Joseph Stalin, some members of the human rights community are whitewashing totalitarianism.

. . .Consider one 2005 Amnesty International report on Iraq. It notes that in the lawless climate of the first months after Hussein's overthrow, reports of kidnappings, rapes and killings of women and girls by criminal gangs rose. Iraqi officers at a police station in Baghdad said in June 2003 that the number of reported rapes "was substantially higher than before the war."

The implication was that human rights may not really be improving in post-Hussein Iraq. But the organization ignored the possibility that reports of rape at police stations may have increased for the simple reason that under Hussein it was the regime -- which includes the police -- that was doing the raping. When Hussein's son Uday went on his legendary raping sprees, victims were not about to report the crime.

Sharansky is now forced to wonder if in Iraq, we're repeating Vietnam - though not for the reasons you might think. As he writes:

[T]he debate over Iraq is beginning to look a lot like the debate about the Vietnam War in the 1960s and '70s. Then, too, the argument in the United States focused primarily on whether U.S. forces should pull out. But many who supported that withdrawal in the name of human rights did not foresee the calamity that followed, which included genocide in Cambodia, tens of thousands slaughtered in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese and the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of "boat people."