Or we could try for another Zimbabwe.

Well, we could still get that South Korea or Phillipines result. After all, the present governments of South Korea and the Phillipines only happened after the people of those countries kicked out the dictators we supported.

Heres a better story with more experts analyzing Iraq: Beyond Quagmire

How bad will the coming explosion be?
TIM DICKINSON
"The war in Iraq isn't over yet, but -- surge or no surge -- the United States has already lost. That's the grim consensus of a panel of experts assembled by Rolling Stone to assess the future of Iraq. "Even if we had a million men to go in, it's too late now," says retired four-star Gen. Tony McPeak, who served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War. "Humpty Dumpty can't be put back together again."

Those on the panel -- including diplomats, counterterror analysts and a former top military commander -- agree that President Bush's attempt to secure Baghdad will only succeed in dragging out the conflict, creating something far beyond any Vietnam-style "quagmire." The surge won't bring an end to the sectarian cleansing that has ravaged Iraq, as the newly empowered Shiite majority seeks to settle scores built up during centuries of oppressive rule by the Sunni minority. It will do nothing to defuse the powder keg that an independence-minded Kurdistan, in Iraq's northern provinces, poses to the governments of Turkey, Syria and Iran, which have long brutalized their own Kurdish separatists. And it will only worsen the global war on terror.

"Our invasion and occupation has created a cauldron that will continue to draw in the players in the Middle East for the foreseeable future," says Michael Scheuer, who led the CIA's hunt for Osama bin Laden. "By taking out Saddam, we have allowed the jihad to move 1,000 kilometers west, where it can project its power, its organizers, its theology into Turkey -- and from Turkey into Europe."
How bad will things get in Iraq -- and what price will the world ultimately pay for the president's decision to prolong the war? To answer those questions, we asked our panel to sketch out three distinct scenarios for Iraq: the best we can hope for, the most likely outcome and the worst that could happen...."

...It took over a century for America to turn into a democracy...American Hawk at 2:43 PM

Iraq before was a fascist state that was a backwater of religious fundamentalism.

It sure is amazing how religious fundamentalist backwaters are able to crank out nuclear weapons, eh?

AH, you forgot to add that William Kristol reports the Surge is also acheiving success in Iraq proving the naysayer and liberal bloggers to be completely wrong.

Link

"It may well be that Gen. David Petraeus is going to lead us to victory in Iraq. He is certainly off to a good start. I"

"This sense of momentum is confirmed by many other reports in the media, and from Americans and Iraqis on the ground. "

Saddam's hero was Stalin, not a fascist. Iraq was an anti-Communist, yet Arab socialist state under Saddam. By AH's standards, the late Weimar Republic was just fine with Hitler in power because Hitler was democratically elected. Elections don't make good governance all by themselves. We didn't have foreign troops on our soil between the Boston Massacre and, say, the Civil Rights Act.

AH,

You obviously have no idea what Fascist means.

I'm not going to say that Hussein was good - he wasn't - but he wasn't a fascist. There was not a sufficient degree of social and economic regimentation, no tripartatie 'iron triangle' between the party, the state, and industry, and citizenship was not defined by identity (race, religion, clan, etc). There are more political systems than just 'democracy' 'communism' and 'fascism'. Perhaps you should ditch the highschool world history text and read something scholarly.

Mussolini - Fascist
Hitler - Fascist
Franco - Fascist

Hussein? Ahmadinejad? Sorry, not fascist. When you throw the word fascist around like it doesn't mean anything, then you actually make it meaningless. Fascism is not something that we should be forgetting, or using synonymously with 'authoritarianism'. You should read some Juan Linz and get your terminology straight - only Presidents and Shakespeare are allowed to make up words.

Always be careful when lowering goal posts. People have been known to get hit on the noggin.

Another total fool, advocating the depletion of American lives and coffers. Why, oh why, are these people still being listened to?

Iraq before was a fascist state that was a backwater of religious fundamentalism.

Fascist. You use that word but I do not think it means what you think it means. How was Iraq fascist? It was not a corporatist entity.

As to backwater of religious fundamentalism...Iraq was secular.

Iraq before was a fascist state that was a backwater of religious fundamentalism.

What is Syria ?

It took over a century for America to turn into a democracy

Which foriegn army was occupying the US at that
time ?

I want to know what problem Adelbrained has with SKorean democracy.

It would be a hoot if we found out these trolls really believed the things they say.

Or we could try for another Zimbabwe.
Posted by: Peter

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

Just so long as Iraqis don't wind up having to settle for Rwanda or Cambodia.

Iraq before was a fascist state that was a backwater of religious fundamentalism.

Chalk up more evidence that "American Hawk" is a parody: Iraq was one of the more secular states in the Middle East, given that Saddam wasn't exactly a big fan of rivals to his power, religious or otherwise. Sheesh!

In addition to the charge of incompetence with regard to the Bush team, I would add immaturity.

Note the reporting four years ago when Bush announced his war:
----------------------------
Bush pumps fist, “feels good� as attack on Iraq begins

by Martin Merzer, Ron Hutcheson and Drew Brown,
Knight-Ridder Newspapers

March 20, 2003

WASHINGTON -- War erupted Wednesday night as the United States launched dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles and aimed 2,000-pound bombs at Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and other "leadership targets" in Baghdad.

The strike was aimed at "decapitating" Saddam's regime and specifically targeted him, his two sons and other senior leaders of the Baath Party and Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council, according to a senior Bush administration official.

Saddam's fate was not immediately known, though Iraqi television early Thursday broadcast what it said was a live statement by him. Looking wan and drawn, the man mentioned Thursday's date and vowed enduring defiance.

U.S. forces also took control of the frequencies used by Iraqi state radio and began broadcasting messages in Arabic, officials said. The message said the Iraqi people's day of liberation had arrived.

But a fearsome array of U.S. and allied troops and weaponry poised for action at the Iraq-Kuwait border did not appear to have been ordered into combat as of Wednesday night.

President Bush announced the attack in a four-minute television speech to the nation. "On my order, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war," he said. "These are the opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign."

Minutes before the speech, an internal television monitor showed the president pumping his fist. "Feels good," he said.

------------------------------
For Bush, "if it feels good, do it" seemed an adequate justification for starting a war.

My prediction is that Iraq will end up like Pakistan, an authoritarian military dictatorship in truth, but a faux-democracy in the eyes of the warmongers of the right.

So, after the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and, at a minimum, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, not much will have changed.

Just so long as Iraqis don't wind up having to settle for Rwanda or Cambodia.
Posted by: RT

The billionaire profiteers will have their Blackwater private army and you'll have... candles?

Honestly.

We've devolved (read Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs and Steel' for the reasons). Or 'Collapse'.

McCord: For Bush, "if it feels good, do it" seemed an adequate justification for starting a war.

Sounds like Bush needed some war abstinence education. He needed to learn how to resist temptation and confine himself to his lawful war in Afghanistan instead of whoring around in Iraq.

American Hawk isn't a parody, but he is a joke.

Wasn't Iraq pretty much like Syria under Saddam anyway?

So the best we can hope for is to return to exactly the same state we had before?

Er, so the best we can hope for in Iraq is a Baathist dictatorship? Umm....

ah: ...Iraq before was a fascist state that was a backwater of religious fundamentalism.

pretty good description of bush ally pakistan now...

except pakistan actually has nukes...

The billionaire profiteers will have their Blackwater private army and you'll have... candles?

And a chemistry degree. I could do some damage with candles and the right chemicals.

Damn straight...but you're da bomb.

William Kristol reports the Surge is also acheiving success in Iraq...

Wow. And here I thought that this report maybe proved differently:

Monday, Mar. 19, 2007: 8 Dead in Shi'ite Mosque Bombing

An explosion ripped through a Shi'ite mosque during prayers on Monday in Baghdad, killing at least eight worshipers, while a series of car bombs struck the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in northern Iraq, killing 12 people, police said.

The attacks on the fourth anniversary of the war highlighted the challenges facing U.S. and Iraqi forces seeking to curb sectarian violence with a month-old security crackdown that has led to a drastic drop in execution-style killings but failed to stop the bombings.

About an hour later, four blasts occurred in a 35-minute period in different areas of Kirkuk, 180 miles north of Baghdad, killing at least 12 people and wounding more than 30.

A car bomb exploded near a market in a predominantly Arab neighborhood, killing eight people and wounding eight, police Brig. Sarhad Qadir said. A mortar shell landed on a house in the same area, wounding five civilians, he said.

A parked car packed with explosives then blew up as a police patrol passed by in a mixed Kurdish and Turkomen area in the center of the city, killing four policemen and wounding 19 people, according to Qadir, while another parked car bomb exploded near the house of an Iraqi army officer, wounding two people.

Many blame the recent increase in violence in Kirkuk on insurgents who have fled the security crackdown in Baghdad.

Thank Gawd we have the Weekly Standard and Bill Kristol's opinion available to counter all that faulty reality.

Grape - i can top that. Check out Novak's newfound indignation on earmarks...warning, Will Robinson, danger!

Earmark Subterfuge

By Robert D. Novak
Monday, March 19, 2007; Page A15

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/18/
AR2007031801053.html

William Kristol reports the Surge is also acheiving success in Iraq

You mean, the one his brother advocated? Color me convinced...

Danger, Will Robinson!

I'll wait here.

"Fascism" means what I want it to. If it doesn't serve my purposes, I make it serve my purposes. It is my bitch.

Excellent parody of Henery. An even better parody of Henery than Henery himself.

Hey, MsN - you were right. As per usual.:)

(Smiles and waves towards Acadiana)

"American Villge" in Erbil, Kurdish Iraq:

http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001407.html

But of course. How could you think of doubting me.

The anxiety is contagious...the anxiety causes your endocrine (para-sympathetic, thus not under your control) system, in this case probably the hypothalamus, to flood your blood stream with hormones which may have adaptive on the Savannah of 500,000 years ago but which now, in competitive situations, work to your disadvantage.

Trust me.

Earmark Subterfuge

Nah; whining about earmarks is nothing new for Novak..just another opportunity for Republican shills like Novak and Cal Thomas to take a dig at the Dems in Congress:

This is the Democrats’ first opportunity now that they’re back in the majority to prove they meant it when they promised to do things differently. This after 12 years of Republican control in the Congress and its failure to do anything about the misspending it derided when Democrats ran the place before.

This is terrible! Definitely nothing like ongoing Congressional investigations into outing a CIA operative or firing prosecutors because they weren't partisan enough or widespread legal lapses concerning the use of national security letters to demand information about private citizens:

On March 9, the inspector general for the Justice Department sharply criticized the F.B.I. over its heavy use of national security letters, saying it had found many instances in which the bureau had improperly and sometimes illegally used them to demand personal records from telephone companies, Internet service providers, credit companies and other businesses.

The report has provoked angry reactions from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, some of whom have charged that the bureau ran roughshod over civil liberties.

Unlike a search warrant, which must be approved by a judge, a national security letter can be approved by the agent in charge of a local F.B.I. office. The bureau has issued more than 20,000 such letters since it received authority under the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act of 2001.

One of the report’s biggest criticisms was that top bureau officials signed off on many of the demands for information without properly justifying a specific national security need, like a clear link to a specific counterterrorism investigation. Mr. Kohn said that Mr. Youssef had had a long familiarity with national security letters from earlier work on counterterrorism investigations, and that he began reviewing recent letters and spotting legal deficiencies almost immediately.

I mean, the F.B.I was alerted to it two years ago! Surely it's irrelevant by now!

Earmarks...I think I'm gonna faint...

grape - Yeah. Gee.

I called this fiasco a bug-hunt on my site when I live-blogged the presidents "speech" today, and a pro-war reader told me the analogy was "cute."

Okay, can someone kindly bring me up to speed on 'bug hunt'. Since Darwin, I mean...

Starship Troopers.

More recently, Pvt. Hudson in Aliens asked "Is this gonna be a stand-up fight, or is this gonna be another bug-hunt?"

When you have to ask that question...you know the answer.

In Iraq, setbacks for Iran?

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/2007/03/is-irans-honeymoon-in-iraq-over.html

Why doesn't anyone make the obvious Middle East comparison? That Iraq is now like Israel, with the Shia majority substituting for the Jews, and the Sunni minority the Palestinians.

I have seen neither of these. But thanks for the link to the reference.

Haldane: God must have had a distinct preference for beetles.

Coeleopotera.

J. S. Haldane - I cannot speak directly to the likelihood of the existence a Creator. But He'd have to have had a distinct preference for beetles.

all who have read Terry Prachett's disc world series know...

I'll put that on my summer reading list...

Terry Prachett rocks. Start with 'The Color of Magic'. You'll laugh 'till it hurts.

Then again you could read J. S. Haldane... this would not be time ill spent.

The thing with beetles is in 'Lost Continent'

"Fascism" means what I want it to. If it doesn't serve my purposes, I make it serve my purposes. It is my bitch. Posted by: American Hawk on March 19, 2007 at 4:27 PM

Yes, your transformation to the dark side is almost complete. Hawk, I...am your father. said Darth Cheney.

Not 'distinct' it's the correct quote is 'inordinate'.

An inordinate fondness for beetls

I'm guessing Iraq is going to end up like Afghanistan. It really is too bad that Bush has turned Iraq into a haven for terrorists.

I'm guessing Iraq is going to end up like Afghanistan. It really is too bad that Bush has turned Iraq into a haven for terrorists.

'too bad'?

Mistakes were made?

The author spends "the better part of two weeks in conversations with some of the most respected voices among the neoconservative elite. What I discover is that none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played."
Sorry--easy to escape blame by distancing themselves after suckering this nation into a disasterous war. Unprincipled motives, all of them, and dishonorable. All partners in a brutal exercise of neo-conservative power, all furthering a Bush family dynasty to the complacent, gullible public, all the while making America much less safe.

cwa: just so.

Ah, Kevin.

The surge is working, Kenvin. Iraqis already report a reduction of 80% in the past month, and Patreus estimates that by June we'll see the first real signs of progress.

Sorry to disapoint you girls.

Not sure what study you read, oh trembling one, but the article in todays Air Force Times was not so...upbeat.

And egbert - have you talked to the recruiters yet? I would think down there in the heart of Homeland Security country you would be atremble to join up?

Or are ya yella?

"Phoney and Wrong"? I disagree there, but it is worth rereading what Gore actually said:

http://newsbloggers.aol.com/2007/03/18/al-gore-phony-and-wrong/

"Last year Adelman told Vanity Fair that the Bush administration "turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era.' "

Let's see: Nixon, Reagan, G.H.W. Bush . . .

American "Fascism is my Bitch" Hawk, --now there's an image out of Terry Pratchett.

Iraq before was a fascist state that was a backwater of religious fundamentalism.

False. Saddam brutally repressed Islamic fundamentalism. You might note, for examples, numerous news items about how various sects are now able to hold religious festivals that Saddam refused to allow, etc. Also recall Bin Laden's reasons for calling Saddam an "infidel."

Bush has made it possible for radical Islamic fundamentalism to thrive in Iraq, in ways that were impossible under Saddam.

Nothing quite like the sight of a neo-con shill in full, peed-his-pants, yellow-streak retreat.

Adelman, who's now hoping against hope for a Baghdad-as-Damascus Iraqi outcome, has retreated considerably from the chest-beating triumphalism of his Washington Post April 10, '03 op-ed entitled "Cakewalk Revisited". Gloatingly he reminded everyone that 14 MONTHS EARLIER he'd predicted CORRECTLY the war would be a "cakewalk"!! And who was right?? He sneered contemptuously at how obviously wrong all the naysayers like Scowcroft had been. Bob Woodward reported: "Adelman wrote that his own confidence came from having worked for Rumsfield three times and from "knowing Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz for so many years."

Adelman now has the craven gall to feign shock - who knew??? - that the Bush administration who he knew so well turned out, in his words to be "among the most incompetent teams in the post war era." Given how utterly wrong he clearly was about the people he knew best in the world, why should ANYONE listen to anything he says, or thinks or predicts about things he knows far less well - like everything else in the world?

After reading Adelman's masterpiece of hubris, Cheney rang inviting him to dinner April 13th:
"Adelman realized it was Cheney's way of saying thankyou, and he and his wife came back from Paris a day early to attend the dinner. When Adelman walked into the vice-president's residence that Sunday night, he was so happy he broke into tears...The war has been awesome, Adelman said 'So I just want to make a toast without getting too cheesy. To the President of the United States'.They all raised their glasses. Hear! Hear! Adelman said he had worried to death as time went on and support seemed to wane that there would be no war." Woodward, Plan of Attack, Epilogue.

This is Ken Adelman. Bursting into tears, like Brittany at her 1st prom, over how "awesome" the war was & confessing how "scared to death" he'd been, that maybe, gosh darnit, there mightn't be any war, even though he'd like, TOTALLY asked & begged for one...

Remind me again. This is a man we should listen to...why?

Dan Froomkin is citing Bush's recent new reason for staying the course in Iraq and it's not WMD, and it's not democracy, now it's national security.

Mr. Froomkins says that Bush thinks: American security is at risk" and that that "has long been the key to understanding his refusal to leave Iraq -- regardless of how many troops die or how little good they appear to be doing.

And how bad things get in Iraq year and year out, can't leave Vietnam II because we have kill more people to honor the already dead. So Vietnam retro like thinking.

But like Kroomkin, I don't believe they'll follow us here and any rate it's the entire Mideast terrorism that we need to worry about AND not just the ones Bush created a haven for in Irag.

Not to mention that Bush is somewhat limited with all volunteer army.

And we could spend less money simply protecting our homeland.

The way you have to treat Bush everything is nasty administration throws BS in your face.

Henry later explained in a bit more detail: "I pressed Tony Snow and since he's calling flatly the Democratic plan a recipe for defeat, I asked him, 'Four years later, what is the recipe for success?'

Repug meme is "Dems want to lose" but really, What is Bush's plan for success, not more okay Kinsley lying. A little bitty surge ain't going to cut it.

It's pretty simple. All the PNACnuts aligned themselves with a plan they, in all their accumulated wisdom, believed to be true. In his own words, a self-congratulatory "cakewalk".

They were all wrong. WRONG! On every count.

No reason to listen to them now.

For all their self-proclaimed intelligence they were not. They have nothing to say that we should listen to. Period.

And I forgot to say:

For the sake of your theory, there's nothing like putting other peoples' lives on the line when there is absolutely no cost to you and your own. War, no less, and not a second thought about how right it and he was.

What a pissing, ugly, yellow, weaselly scum bag. May he rot. He never grew up.

Actually, Cheryl, a "little bitty surge" is cutting it. That's because Iraq wasn't nearly as bad off as the defeatocrats have been saying all along. You've been mistaking the terrorist ability to explode "slaughter bombs" in the street with the ability of Sunni diehards to take control of everything and restore their former dominance.

That ain't going to happen. The slaughter bombs in the streets kill innocent people but they no more win the war than did the "Big Bertha" artillery shells falling on Paris in 1916-17 and killing dozens of people at a whack, or the V-1 bombs falling on London 1944-45 killing similar numbers and mattering not one whit to the outcome of the war.

Sunni supremacy in Iraq is over. Nor is Iran going to set up a Shia puppet to govern from Baghdad. What defeatocrats have been missing while hyperventilating, turning blue, and shrieking "Hate Bush/Cheney!" to each other, is that a lot of good people have been working hard in Iraq the last four years. Soon the elected Iraqi government will be putting out some big contracts for infrastructure repairs. Probably Halliburton will get some of those, because a job like trying to give Sadr City its first working modern sewers takes real professionals guiding the local workers.

If Defeatocrats in their paralyzing bitterness forbid Halliburton from managing the work, Korean firms will just step in and do it. But it will get done. When the U.S. forces leave next year terrorism is not going to stop a single project. Look at the Kurdish portions of Iraq today. That's all of Iraq tomorrow.

In a way Bush tricked all the Defeatocrats and other raving leftists by simply playing rope-a-dope. You've been chanting failure, failure, failure, it's all a hopeless mess. He politely tried to point out reality to you but you would have none of it, so he just plunged ahead and absorbed all the extraordinarily vitrolic abuse.

So, in 2009 we will have a funny situation. The Democrats might even sweep into the White House by virtue of an orgasmic frenzy of negativity, but modern, democratic Iraq is stubbornly not going to go away, dissolve, disintegrate, or do anything else even while leftist scholars try to bury it.

I am predicting that the Bush administration already figures it can pull enough force from Iraq by mid-2008 to go ahead with something which has been put off too long already--invading the Pashtun region of Pakistan or maybe all of Pakistan if they try using their nukes on us.

Iran can wait. Their bombs aren't ready and once Pakistan to the east and Iraq to the west are sorted out and set on the road to democratic progress and social modernity, the present regime in Iran will get the boot by the Iranian people. That will happen probably before 2010 and the Saudi monarchy won't be long behind in getting trash-canned by history, with a little American help.

...invading the Pashtun region of Pakistan or maybe all of Pakistan if they try using their nukes on us.

Iran can wait. Their bombs aren't ready and once Pakistan to the east and Iraq to the west are sorted out and set on the road to democratic progress and social modernity, the present regime in Iran will get the boot by the Iranian people....

Posted by: mike cook on March 20, 2007 at 12:20 AM | PERMALINK

You sort of make a passable if flawed argument until you get towards the end. Then you go way over the top and show your true not-based-in-reality colors. And I thought Pakistan was our ally! Perfidious USA. And Iran will throw out their government once they are surrounded and under threat rather than the last 25 years when they are not? Dream world; the reverse is generally true.

Sure you're not on the AEI/PNAC dream team of world political thought and reformation? Interestingly those guys would have been well suited to bolshevik Russia and Maoist China: politically constrained and doctrinairely narrow thought not based or tested in reality but promulgated for self-promotion and the primacy of the party.

Well done, Mr. Cook. You have made yourself a card-carrying member of the league of blinkered thinkers.

Give it up.

The Bush Administration will never agree to pull out of Iraq until Dick Cheney and his friends have the oil contracts in hand.

Pakistan is not our ally. Only President Musharraf and a few realistic, secular generals are kind of our allies mainly because they don't want Islamist radicals trying to shut down a rapidly modernizing society in Islamabad.

But our "allies" in Pakistan are hanging on by their fingernails and they are slipping. At this point, we do not want to do a "regime change" type of intervention to democratize Pakistan. That would only put wild, anti-Western radicals in power. We need to do a more subtle social change, by crushing the Pashtun tribal areas that harbor bin Laden and the Taliban. Then we need to replace all the teachers in the religious schools with genuinely humble, religious men. Then we need to make the Pashtun areas a carefully-watched playground for several decades.

As to the comment that we will never get out of Iraq until Cheney and friends have their oil contracts, that remark is hyped, fraudulent, and nasty in a Bush derangement syndrome kind of way.

We will be getting out of Iraq by early next year for the same reason the British have started to get out--we will no longer be needed and the real war zone is going to be elsewhere. Halliburton has moved its corporate headquarters to Dubai because quite clearly there will be some very large contracts coming soon to do things like give Sadr City a modern sewage system.

If Democrats stay really mad and try to bar Halliburton from getting these contracts, then Korean firms will do the work. In either case, the international firms will supply professional project guidance while locals do almost all the work.

American "Fascism is my Bitch" Hawk, --now there's an image out of Terry Pratchett.
Posted by: cld

He'd fit right in. 'Jingo' maybe.