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You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / War / Talabani’s Proposal

Talabani’s Proposal

by Tim F|  September 26, 200610:49 am| 20 Comments

This post is in: War

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Miclael Stickings’s Joe Gandelman’s coblogger Michael Van der Gallen points to comments by Iraqi president Jalal Talabani supporting a prolonged US presence in Iraq.

“I think we will be in need of American forces for a long time — even two military bases to prevent foreign interference,” Talabani told The Washington Post.

“I don’t ask to have 100,000 American soldiers — 10,000 soldiers and two air bases would be enough.”

[…] “In some places Sunnis want the Americans to stay,” he argued. “Sunnis think the main danger is coming from Iran now.”

Michael links to a somewhat perturbed blogger (note the shortened adjective ‘Democrat,’ a reliable indicator of hackdom) who has a hard time resisting a bit of triumphalism:

This is clearly a refudiation of every democrat talking point on Iraq over the last year. Iraqis are not asking America to leave or redeploy. They are asking for our help to keep their fledgling democracy afloat. The cut-and-run crowd has just been handed a huge foreign policy blow. We need Arab-Muslim support in our war against Al Qaeda and terrorism, and now we have a formal, public request from a country that used to be a sworn enemy of America to be an ally and help them out. Now when a liberal democrat cries “runaway” (in an echo of Monty Python’s Holy Grail) the country can respond “what about what the Iraqis want from us?”.

No doubt many Sunni recognize that a US departure will give the Shi’a even more freedom to exercise harsh, Iran-aligned majoritarian rule and will probably open the doors to a bloody partition that, owing to the geographical quirks that leave Sunni areas largely oil-free, will not do them any strategic favors. However, the US more or less pulled out of Anbar province for a reason. The idea that the red-hot insurgency will welcome the US back into their home territory is beyond ludicrous. Pacifying Iraq’s Sunni heartland would take a force that we simply do not have.

Iraq’s Kurdish president knows full well that an American pullout will lead to a war of partition. First to go will be the effectively independent Kurdish state in the north. Unfortunately the Kurdish dream of independence will last about as long as it takes Turkey and Iran to mobilize their armies massed on the Iraqi border. Both Turkey and Iran deal with constant harassment from Kurdish terrorists who filter back and forth through the porous border with Iraq, and have made no bones about what they will do if a separate Kurdish state appears. Talabani undoubtedly knows that as well as anybody.

Think about the details of Talabani’s plan. Nearly two hundred thousand troops cannot pacify Iraq. Does anybody seriously think that we can head off civil war with 10,000 based over-the-horizon in Kurdistan? No. The plan laid out here clearly shows that Talabani wants the best of both worlds: partition and the bloody war that it entails, and a South Korea-style trigger force of US troops to discourage “interference,” also known as “invasion,” by Iran and Turkey.

Talabani’s proposal does nothing whatsoever to support the stay-the-course right. Quite the contrary, it reflects the more sensible pullout plans in which we allow Iraq to follow its internal inertia while keeping a quick-reaction force in Kurdistan to strike the inevitable al Qaeda training centers as they appear. Conveniently for Talabani our bases will also forestall the negative consequences of independence, notwithstanding the chutzpah that it will take for us to stand in the way of Turkey responding to naked acts of terrorism. Talabani’s throwaway line about the Sunnis tolerating long-term US bases in their territory simply fails the laugh test.

***

In a related note, Gregory Djerejian recently asked whether we should classify Iraq as a failure or an impossibility. That is to say, could reasonable leaders with a grounding in counterinsurgeny have succeeded where arrogant incompetence has plainly failed?

My simple answer is that reasonable leaders recognized that winning an insurgency war would take more troops than America could possibly send. You cannot just invent magic pony scenarios where the Pentagon waves a wand and makes needed divisions appear out of the aether, so I would answer that reasonable people with relevant experience would not invade Iraq. At least, they would not do so without a multinational force several times the size of what we had (see, magic pony). The act of invasion was a strategically irresponsible act that would not have been repeated by people who knew what they were doing.

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20Comments

  1. 1.

    Mr Furious

    September 26, 2006 at 11:07 am

    I thought we eliminated the Talibani?

  2. 2.

    Mr Furious

    September 26, 2006 at 11:16 am

    Seriously, it sounds like what Talibani is asking for here is essentially Kurdish secession with a U.S. protection force for Kurdistan.

    That’s great for the Kurds, but what about everybody else?

  3. 3.

    srv

    September 26, 2006 at 11:22 am

    The Turks will have no choice then but to start quietly funding Sunni insurgents to make life for the Kurds (and us) harder. So we’ll have Saudi, Jordan, Syria and Turkey all on the Sunni side, and Iran on the Shia side.

    Talabani and Barzani may want us in the short term, but keeping us around too long is going not going to help them. I suspect Talabani and Barzani will start fighting each other again within 3 years.

  4. 4.

    chopper

    September 26, 2006 at 11:23 am

    This is clearly a refudiation of every democrat talking point on Iraq over the last year. Iraqis are not asking America to leave or redeploy.

    classic internet whacko rhetoric. if you can find a handful of iraqis who want the US to stay, then it’s utter proof that “iraqis [on the whole]are not asking america to leave.”

    brilliant.

  5. 5.

    Andrew

    September 26, 2006 at 11:26 am

    I was going to add Strata to my list of idiots, but he’s already on there.

    Yeah, chopper, I too am shocked (and awed) that the guy who runs the puppet government propped up by the U.S. military wants the U.S. military to stay.

  6. 6.

    Andrew

    September 26, 2006 at 11:35 am

    More to the point, and less sarcastically, we should absolutely give Talibani and the Kurds protection and put strategic military bases in Kurdistan.

    And get the hell out of Iraqideathistan.

  7. 7.

    matt

    September 26, 2006 at 11:41 am

    I don’t knoooow, I’m kind of going back and forth between what Tim said, and it clearly being a refudiation of every democrat talking point on Iraq over the last year.

  8. 8.

    The Other Steve

    September 26, 2006 at 11:57 am

    Not being a bleeding heart myself.

    I don’t really have a problem with the Sunni facing Shiite opposition. Ought to teach them a lesson, frankly. If all the stories are true of what the Sunni did to the Shiite under Hussein, then payback’s a bitch.

    And surely, if you want to knock over the middle east… a full out Sunni on Shiite war would do the trick.

    Regardless, Iraq is Iraq and it belongs to the people who live in Iraq. They need to learn how to work out their own issues without patronistic do gooders telling them we know better.

  9. 9.

    RSA

    September 26, 2006 at 11:59 am

    This is clearly a refudiation of every democrat talking point on Iraq over the last year. Iraqis are not asking America to leave or redeploy.

    This is my kind of refudiation! “Iraqis are not asking America to leave or redeploy,” but rather only to move 93% of current U.S. forces out of Iraq. That’s what I call “staying the course.”

  10. 10.

    The Other Steve

    September 26, 2006 at 12:00 pm

    More to the point, and less sarcastically, we should absolutely give Talibani and the Kurds protection and put strategic military bases in Kurdistan.

    I always thought Iraq ought to be split into multiple countries.

    Holding Iraq together is like holding Yugoslavia together. What’s the fucking point?

  11. 11.

    chopper

    September 26, 2006 at 12:32 pm

    we should split iraq into “the united states of kurdistan, soon to be the smoking crater formerly known as the united states of kurdistan” and “iran II: electric boogaloo”

  12. 12.

    jg

    September 26, 2006 at 12:46 pm

    Creating Iraq worked out so well why wouldn’t splitting up Iraq go just as swimmingly?

  13. 13.

    Tsulagi

    September 26, 2006 at 1:13 pm

    The “perturbed blogger?” Now there is a true case of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

    You gotta love those Kurds. The scraggly underdogs nobody loves coming out fat. I picture Talabani biting his lip trying to keep a straight face making that proposal.

    What he’s saying is you guys (Republicans) have a bigger election coming up in two years and if you think this stinkhole is giving you problems now, what about then? Here’s an out. Don’t look over there where you see this would be gold for the Kurds, read my lips, it’s good for you. And really, who counts?

  14. 14.

    Tony J

    September 26, 2006 at 1:31 pm

    Well, from the point of view of anyone planning to invade Iraq and turn it into a secure base for threatening its neighbours, the “fucking point” of keeping Iraq together would be simply to avoid a much larger and more dangerous version of what happened to Yugoslavia. Don’t you think?

    An independent Kurdistan would probably lead to war with an Iranian/Turkish alliance that’ll be able to play the terrorism joker loud and proud in justification. An independent Shia south would put most of Iraq’s population and much of its oil into Iran’s camp. And an independent Sunni rump state in the middle would be breeding revanchist fanatics on a scale that guarantees another war or two every generation. Plus Baghdad goes up in flames as the different communities fight for sheer survival.

    What astonishes me about this screaming shitstorm is that the DC Regime seem not only to have deliberately fostered this kind of factionalism with their pseudo-Democratisation policy towards Iraq, but they seem to think that the worse they screw up the better their chances are of winning elections, or at least making them close enough to steal after the fact.

    “Oh look, we’ve destroyed a country and made the whole region a free-fire zone for US troops. Vote for us so that we can keep up the good work!”

    It’s probably just me, but I can’t help finding that an unlikely election-winning soundbite. It sounds more like something you’d say if all you held the whole democratic process in contempt and all you really cared about was kickstarting Armageddon.

    At least, I hope it’s just me.

  15. 15.

    Tony J

    September 26, 2006 at 1:36 pm

    But I’ll spare everyone a diatribe on ‘Using the Preview feature before posting’ for a time when my house is a little less glassy in its construction.

  16. 16.

    ThymeZone

    September 26, 2006 at 1:44 pm

    What’s the fucking point?

    Do we have a map of where the oilfields are?

  17. 17.

    The Other Steve

    September 26, 2006 at 2:32 pm

    An independent Kurdistan would probably lead to war with an Iranian/Turkish alliance that’ll be able to play the terrorism joker loud and proud in justification. An independent Shia south would put most of Iraq’s population and much of its oil into Iran’s camp. And an independent Sunni rump state in the middle would be breeding revanchist fanatics on a scale that guarantees another war or two every generation. Plus Baghdad goes up in flames as the different communities fight for sheer survival.

    Ohwell. Life goes on. As I said, I’m no bleeding heart liberal. If the Iraqis want to duke it out then be my guest. It’s not our fight, and we don’t have to sit in the middle between them as target practice.

    And it seems to me that in these “The sky is falling” theories that people keep putitng forth, they ignore the reality that people rather like to save their own rear ends. So faced with the possibility of killing each other, you don’t think that they might just think for a moment… “Hey, maybe we can work something out?”

    I hate to use ST:TOS analogies, but I shall. This whole bloody thing reminds me of “A Taste of Armageddon”, where the two nations are fighting a very neat and proper war with a computer. Every once in a while a bell rings and so and so many people go to execution chambers to be killed. The war has gone on for 500 years, because it’s neat and tidy, nobody get’s bloody, no buildings are destroyed. Life just goes on.

    WAR SUCKS! That’s why God invented Peace.

  18. 18.

    Tsulagi

    September 26, 2006 at 2:34 pm

    Iraq’s Kurdish president knows full well that an American pullout will lead to a war of partition.

    Already happening.

    The plan laid out here clearly shows that Talabani wants the best of both worlds: partition and the bloody war that it entails, and a South Korea-style trigger force of US troops to discourage “interference,”

    Yep.

    Unfortunately the Kurdish dream of independence will last about as long as it takes Turkey and Iran to mobilize their armies massed on the Iraqi border.

    Nope.

    In addition to it not looking good for us to impotently sit on our hands if something like that happened, the Kurds have effectively resisted Turkey and Iran for decades even with Saddam chewing on them from the south. Their Pershmerga are an effective fighting force. Those that have been in the ING largely have been the only troops that would stand and fight insurgents. Kurdish ING units were used in the joint Fallujah 04 operation. Some payback by the Kurds?

    But now most have returned to Kurd territory. Might be a fair part of why our military in quarterly progress reports starting just before our 04 election put the number of ING battalions capable of fighting insurgents without coalition support at three, then in subsequent quarters it went to one, then none. Great trendline. For the Kurds, why get in the way of the Shia and Sunni killing each other?

    Now that the Kurds have something to lose, land and oil, they might be a little more refined in their exchanges with the Turks and Iranians. Still, it would be nice to have that tripwire.

    Talabani might see the greatest threat down the road to the Kurds not coming from outside Iraq, but within. After the eventual partition and dust settles, if Iran gets too bugged about the Kurds, they might use the Iraqi Shia as their proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon. Then it would much harder for us to step in if the locals are beating on each other. See Iraq now.

    Georgie, you’ve done a heckuva job. FUBAR takes on a whole new level when you’re involved.

Comments are closed.

Trackbacks

  1. Dean's World says:
    September 26, 2006 at 11:44 am

    reality vs spin

    John Cole, remarking on the thesis (advocated by Glenn, Austin Bay, and others) that teh media is actively supporting the terrorists’ goals, pretty much sums up my view.

  2. Balloon Juice says:
    September 27, 2006 at 2:31 pm

    […] Jalal Talabani doesn’t completely agree with the Iraq people on this. Rather than a complete pullout, he merely wants greater than 90% of Americans to leave, with just enough staying behind in Kurdistan to discourage the Turks and Iranians. […]

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