It's Getting Kinda Hectic

Dear reader: The article we are linking to today builds upon the previous post here on All Panthers Are Black. The Washington Post is reporting that Sunni factions in Iraq are growing disillusioned with the tactics of al Qaeda in Iraq. And why should they not? Who among us likes to have foreigners step into our neighborhoods and begin to dictate what should and what should not happen.

This response can only be described as expected. Still, the presence of the US in Iraq gives the jihadists an inexhaustible source of angry young men that is equally matched by the daily insults to Islam that are used to stoke the fires across the nations of the Crescent. Should the US immediately announce our plans to withdraw - six months, no more - and begin scheduling planning conferences across Iraq and inclusive of her neighbors, the pressure on the insurgents will increase exponentially.

They can only survive in Iraq in the shadow of the backlash against the US; as soon as we announce our plans to depart, the Iraqis will scramble to rebuild their nation - and they have no reason to align themselves with a group that hates the modern world; remember - unlike Afghanistan, Iraq sits atop the most valuable commodity this modern world knows.

Juan Cole has posted a more detailed version of this same concept; read it and send a link to as many folks as you can. This is an idea that deserves action now.

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How to Win in Iraq--and How to Lose

The title is not mine, but that of an article from Commentary; an interesting magazine with a long history of reasoned discourse. Unfortunately, they tossed that all aside to come out with the curve that supports the current "surge" in Iraq. While there are some nice historical parallels included herein, the piece is one of a kind with the current illusionary thinking that we can still "win" in Iraq, as though there were not a major geopolitical blunder currently underway but as though it was merely just a slow start that had us behind at halftime and that we could still pull this one out by putting in the replacement players.

Sad.

Below is my attempt to elucidate the editors; let's see how much of this - if any - makes it into the letters column.

Dear Editor:

Re - How to win in Iraq-and how to lose.

Accepting all of the premises within this article as fact - that it was political defeats at home that led to military defeats for both the US and France in our respective misadventures in Vietnam and Algeria - there seems to be a strangely myopic obfuscation of the outcomes above, which in turn precludes sight of other, better potential outcomes in Iraq.

Who cares that France was forced to leave Algeria? By what right did they have to be there in the first place? How was the second half of the 20th century on up to today diminished because France was not still the colonial master of Algeria?

Who cares that the US was forced to leave and the "country" of South Vietnam was removed from the political map of the world? By what right did the US have to be in Southeast Asia? What "threat" did a communist Vietnam make against the US and when did that threat cease to exist - if it ever did?

Above lies the thinnest thread, by which you might be able to pull yourselves out of the modern day morass of Iraq. There was no threat to France from Algeria in the 1950s; just a reduction in their own mythical self-importance as a colonial empire. There was no threat to the US from Vietnam in the 1960s; merely a theoretical, invisible cold war against the USSR that we chose to wage in other lands for our own reasons (or was it China we were fighting in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia?). Similarly - there was no threat to the US in 2003 from Iraq. There was indeed a hypothetical one from a former ally gone rogue - but Saddam Hussein was effectively contained by the conditions of the cease fire to the Gulf War of 1991. This is now established as fact evident to all by the lack of his ownership or control of any weapons that might enable him to threaten any nation anywhere in the world. If there is one fact that this sad endeavor has proved beyond doubt it is this: Saddam was a paper tiger.

Now - there are those who wish to validate this mistaken effort by claiming that as we have "broken" Iraq, we own it and therefore we cannot leave until it is whole. While I absolutely stand against the notion that people who have made so monumental a mistake are somehow capable of righting the ship (does not the clear incompetence of starting a war against a non-existent threat lay bare the notion that an even more difficult maneuver is even probable of success), to remove Iraq from any historical context and just say, "well, we are here now" is foolish in the extreme.

Yes - there are jihadists or terrorists or whatever term we might choose to anoint upon their heads, present in Iraq. These folks are our stated enemies and there is no question about that. Unfortunately for us, we cannot identify them and separate them from the environment in which they have taken root. Our knowledge of the cultures and ethnicities of this nation so far removed from our own is limited - at best. The good news is: we do not have to separate the jihadists - the Iraqis will do that themselves.

Yes - the removal of Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party brethren has dethroned the Sunni Arab minority and left them to the devices of those they used to torment: Shia Arabs and Sunni Kurds. So while I might hate to be a Sunni Arab in Iraq today, their fate is sealed and has been from the moment the US tanks first crossed the border from Kuwait (or as I like to think of it - the 37th province). The only case we should be making today is to encourage our new Kurdish and Shia allies to be wary in their reprisal attempts, as it is still a large world and their vindictiveness will be on display for everyone to see. Currently they feel free to go about settling old scores in the most violent manner possible as the repercussions will not fall upon them, but on the United States - the only remaining superpower. When you have cover like that, who among us would not seek to exploit it?

But should the US and our allies withdraw, those who seek to settle up accounts will be clearly visible and they will not be able to act with impunity. Will the Turks stand by while the Kurds acclaim the birth of a new nation? Will the Saudis, Syrians and Jordanians continue to assume the influx of their Arab brothers - driven from home by pogroms? No, they will not.

The Iraqis must reconcile as to not do so spells doom for their nation; they will be torn apart by their neighbors as surely as jackals swarming over a fallen wildebeest. And whom does a dismembered Iraq favor? The jihadists? Once the US leaves, their presence becomes as visible as a sore thumb - where will they be able to hide? Who will give them shelter? Ipso facto, the jihadists will no longer have tall grass within which to hide and they will not be able to make Iraq their home any longer, as the locals will drive out them as surely as a body repels a foreign invader.

I beseech you; use whatever leverage you might have with anyone who has the ear of this administration and ask them to seek the swiftest retreat possible from the land of Iraq. Removing our presence from the stage will highlight the remaining actors and cause them to seek a new strategy. This is the only way to truly end the madness.

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Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

On this last day of March 2007, All Panthers Are Black would like to return to a riff from an earlier post; debt.

Debt is a powerful force in this world; in many places debtors can be thrown into prison. Certainly being known as a debtor is apt to bring shame upon the heads of individuals; surely the same is true for nations too. Throughout recorded history, debt has been used by powerful nations as a cudgel with which to beat weaker ones.

Just under three years ago, APAB focused on this aspect from the tale of Haiti and as an allegory Haiti is still a perfect example even today; the mighty toy with the dispossessed. This same example scales down to the individual level - where everyday citizens are told of their obligations (debts) to the society in which they live - and on up to the self-named "Worlds Only Remaining SuperPower", which uses debt to finance its wars of expansion (sorry - pre-emptive democracy giving). Truly then, debt is an awesome and fungible force. Physicists should weigh it in comparison to gravity.

But whereas gravity is a natural phenomenon (not created by man and not dependent upon man for enforcement of its bylaws and precepts), debt exists entirely at the will of man; more precisely, it exists at the behest of the arbiters of our societies (btw - that is a lovely word).

An exercise is left to the reader to further investigate these questions:

• Who decides what the terms are for the assignment and the repayment of debt?
• Who decides the penalties for the non-repayment of debt?

Know this and you will know whom are the arbiters.

And yet is not their judgment - almost by definition - arbitrary? It is always their choice (the powerful) to determine which of their edicts to endow with the nomenclature of "debt". Indeed, to state that someone owes you a debt is to simultaneously state that you have power of them. And that is the way the world works. To hold a man's debt is to hold that man's life in your hands; to hold a nations debt is to hold that nations fate in your hands.

Today, there are many people who believe that the nations of Afrika are "debtor nations"; i.e., nations in debt to other nations. Without even knowing the source of those debts, accepting the very adjective as a befitting description colors the thoughts of the listener and the speaker with all of the saddlebags of debt. Most commonly, these "third world" nations (to use an ancient, 20th century nomenclature) are debtors to "first world" nations (and one begets the other). Should the history of that debt be examined, however and it becomes apparent that many assets have been left of the audit trail and that a full accounting has not been done.

If it has never been stated anywhere before, let it be stated here today that the nations of Afrika - and her people wherever they may reside - are creditors across the world over. All of the wealth that exists around us was created by the extraction and the exploitation of the greatest resources Afrika contained: her people. Across the span of centuries hundreds of millions of the strongest of her children, were abducted and taken on the most arduous of journeys - where tens of millions of them died in the passage - and where the survivors were forced into perpetual bondage, even down through generations of her descendants - whereby the theft of one or two was turned into the theft of 10 or 20. To this day - almost a full four hundred years after the arrival of the first 20 Afrikans to the continent now known as North America - a full accounting of this horror has not been done. Indeed, the mighty shy away from calls for this accounting, as they surely know what is obvious to any CPA: the ledger is unbalanced.

The Accountant of Justice strokes with a mighty pen and as it is true for the smallest of households so it is for the grandest of nations: the books must balance.

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Insanity

I thought I had covered this before, but apparently it is so easy for black writers to be published by positing a lack of support from African Americans for Barack Obama that instead of the surgical strike I had hoped I am going to have to follow a strategy more akin to whac-a-mole.

Let me say this again, this time as slowly as possible: as much as some folks would like see a divided Black electorate - it just does not exist. Descendants of slaves, immigrants from the Caribbean or South America or Europe or Africa - we all vote the same way: in our best interests. And in a country where people's voting interests can only be given voice through one of two outlets - Democrats or Republicans - is it really so surprising that black people would be so united?

This latest Time magazine article posits that a polling advantage for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama among black voters more than a year before the first vote is cast for the Democratic primary, translates to a lack of support for Obama from some in the black community - due to his biracial and non-slave descended heritage. This conclusion is no more than a theory, of course, and I happen to have one of my own: Senator Clinton is a former two-term first lady who has been on the national political scene for more than 15 years, whereas Senator Obama is a first term senator who has had national exposure for little more than two years. Instead of a national poll of black voters, how about a poll of black voters in Illinois - the state where Senator Clinton was born and raised and the adopted home of Senator Obama? Until someone shows that Clinton has a 40-point lead in Illinois amongst the black electorate, perhaps the difference is solely due to comparative knowledge of the candidates.

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Poor Christopher Hitchens

One of the saddest things to see is watching someone you had long admired cast themselves off into the great unknown. "Sure," you tell yourself, "he has wondered off alone before and he always makes it back." But for each of us, I guess, there comes that time when we sally forth to return no more.

It is time to bid farewell to Christopher Hitchens. Yes, he has had a long and stormy career tilting at windmills; and he has felled a few (why people still book Kissinger to talk shows amazes me endlessly). Yet for all his successes he has allowed his once erudite mind to become consumed by the fear engendered by the attacks on his adopted homeland on 11 September 2001. Since that time, he writing has been consumed with vengeance. And while we all lusted for the blood of Usama bin Laden, Hitchens enlisted with the neocon cabal, into the seemingly mindless "War on Terror" and now he continues to release periodic drivel based upon nothing more than the ever shifting sands of "we must not allow ourselves to lose".

Lose what? What are we fighting? How can one wage war on a tactic?

In the article linked to that is the basis for this post, you can witness the degraded Hitchens of 2007 before your very eyes as he takes the tiniest shred of truth ("Iraq's problems existed long before 2003") and weaves them together with classic neocon fables to build the case for continuing this catastrophe. Here are some simple talking points that you can use with those you love, should they also be experiencing the same degree of delusion that has engulfed our President and timid folks like Christopher Hitchens:

• Of course, Iraq's problems existed long before 2003.
• Indeed, this was the main reason given by opponents of this war plan back in 2003. Do not to topple that particular house of cards as it will be exceedingly hard - if not impossible - to resurrect.
• The problems with Iraq are irrefutably linked to its creation by the British Empire, cutting it whole cloth from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after WWI - something a child born of the United Kingdom should know in depth.
• Starting a war against a Sunni dictator - and really the last holdout of Arab Nationalism - only to now find ourselves enmeshed in a Shia/Sunni power struggle - for which we blame the Persian Shia's of Iran - was imminently predictable from the beginning.
• How many times will we allow ourselves to be told, "No one could have foreseen"?
• The last best hope for reasonable adults is the prescription provided by the Iraq Study Group - although I would not give it more than 1 chance in 10 of leading to a peaceful, stable Iraq.

Salon has a riposte to Hitchens et al that we all should read - several times a day. This author - Gary Kamiya - has the historical context to place his thinking on a solid foundation, as opposed to the fanatical rantings about an all powerful al Qaida that has been created in Iraq by American actions merely to provide the basis for conducting a war against a nation that had never caused harm to a single American citizen and possessed neither the ability nor the intent to do so in the future.

$1 Billion a day for war in Iraq, all charged to a debt to be paid by generations yet unborn. Shame on us America.

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