“Find a Dignified Way Out.”

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Monday, December 11. 2006

“Find a Dignified Way Out.”

The Dixie Chicks Entertainment Weekly
cover from May 2nd, 2003

Originally, this was to be devoted to the Dixie Chicks, the Texas-based country trio that gained record-breaking popularity in the late 1990’s when their fourth (Wide Open Spaces 1998) and fifth albums (Fly 2000) — CD’s, I guess, in contemporary-speak — sold 12 million and 10 million copies each.

They gained notoriety on March 10, 2003, when Natalie Maines, the lead singer made this statement at a concert in London: “Just so you know, we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” That was just 8 days before the president started his war in Iraq. Consequently, Maines and her two band-mates, Emily Robison and Marti Maguire have had concerts cancelled due to lack of ticket sales or concert support, their music banned on U.S. country stations, their CD’s crushed by bulldozers, and worst of all Toby Keith won the Entertainer of the Year award at the 2003 ACM awards show.

Brave souls, the Dixie Chicks, speaking their mind when nearly everyone else vehemently disagreed with them. There’s an excellent interview with the Chicks in the December (2006) issue of Playboy magazine that puts the focus on their controversial career and, not surprisingly, their family lives. They have seven children between the three and when on tour, three nannies accompany the band.

Yes, this was to be about the Dixie Chicks, the band named for the Little Feat standard, “Dixie Chicken,” but alas, reality has a way of getting in the way.

Last Thursday the long-awaited report from the Iraq Study Group was released to much fanfare, gnashing of teeth and outright hostility. The New York Post ran the headline “Surrender Monkeys,” with the faces of James Baker and Lee Hamilton, the two co-chairmen, Photoshopped onto the bodies of apes.

John McCain, the outspoken Arizona Republican senator who has been pushing for an increase in

Senator John McCain (R-AZ)

U.S. troop strength in Iraq, called the report a “a recipe … for defeat in Iraq.” For the complete quote, click here for a YouTube video.

There are some key elements of the 79 recommendations that are, at the very least, controversial. First, it calls for the U.S. to get into discussions with all of Iraq’s neighbors, including Syria and Iran. On the face of it, that’s a good idea but it’s based on the premise that Iran and Syria are willing to curtail their influence in Iraq. Not likely, especially for Iran which now is far more influential in the politics of Iraq than the United States. It would take monumental commitment from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey to mount any kind of opposition to, or at least balance for, Iran’s influence.

Turkey, of course, has its own concerns with the Kurds who have an autonomous region in the North of Iraq, bordering Turkey. The Turks have a Kurdish population that’s just itching for its own autonomy, or annexation to the Kurdish state in Iraq.

Then there’s the plan to remove U.S. troops by the first quarter of 2008, basically within the next 13 months. The president has flat out refused to any timetables, which pretty much nixes that idea.

What the report has also done, either by design or accident, has raised the level of debate on whether or not we can “win” in Iraq, as shown by Senator McCain’s remarks and the president’s continued insistence on staying his course.

President Bush — Mission Accomplished?

 “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” — President Bush, May 1, 2003, just 1,346 days ago.

Here’s the controversial part: the president’s war in Iraq was doomed to failure from the start for many reasons, not the least of which was Donald Rumsfeld’s decision to do it “on the cheap:” Too few troops who were poorly equipped and untrained for occupational duty in a country teeming with angry, unemployed young men resentful of occupiers in their land.

Then of course there was the lack of significant consensus from our traditional allies; Germany and France chief among them, no support from Saudi Arabia, and even Turkey objected to using U.S. bases in their country to stage the Northern invasion. Great Britain was the only power willing to commit a significant number of troops to the invasion. Let’s not make a big deal about the false alliance called the “Coalition of the Willing.” Most people could probably name two countries of that “coalition,” Spain and Italy, because of the news when both nations removed their troops from Iraq. But I would bet 99% of this nation would be hard-pressed to name five other partners in this “coalition” out of the 45 who sent troops not yet mentioned.
 South Korea, Poland, Australia, Ukraine, Netherlands, Romania, Denmark, Georgia, El Salvador, Czech Republic, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Mongolia, Albania, Slovakia, Japan, Bulgaria, Thailand, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Hungary, Nicaragua, Singapore, Norway, Portugal, Lithuania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Macedonia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Canada, New Zealand, Philippines, Tonga, Iceland and Costa Rica, which has since requested it not be included in any lists associating it with this coalition.
 Roughly a third of those countries have withdrawn their troops and of the roughly 162,000 troops remaining, 150,000 are U.S. troops. Great Britain has but 7,500 troops in Iraq as of today and they plan to have their troops out by the end of 2007.

William Kristol

The other factor, which doomed the president’s war in Iraq to failure was the imposed ignorance regarding the sectarian animosity between the Sunnis and Shia in particular. William Kristol, the neocon who helped shape the president’s war and actually drafted a letter to President Clinton in 1998, signed by a number of prominent neocons, urging Clinton to invade Iraq, claimed, so arrogantly before the war started, the people in Iraq wouldn’t devolve into sectarian fighting — a civil war — because they had been living in a secular state for many decades.

Senator Joe Biden (D-DE)

One of the points the ISG Report made was the cultural ignorance of the administration in regards to the religious and ethnic divisions among the Iraqis. But the ISG itself endorsed that ignorance when it rejected the three-state solution, a plan proposed by Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) in his plan for Iraq. And the reality on the ground in Iraq is that a vast majority of Iraqis want the three-state solution, based a on their constitution which calls for three autonomous regions. The people of Iraq voted for it.

“There’s only one thing worse than an over-stressed Army and Marine Corps, and that’s a defeated Army and Marine Corps.” John McCain’s words in that December 7th Senate hearing. As a person who had to watch the withdrawal of the U.S. presence in Vietnam while wearing the uniform of the United States Marine Corps, that point is all too fresh in my memory.

When, in 2002, the president started pressing for his war, the specter of another generation of U.S. military personnel bearing the social brunt of losing another war was the main concern on my mind. Thousands of lives would be lost and it would all be for nothing. Now, 31 years later, the president and Senator McCain sound like the Johnson Administration and congressional leaders who insisted, long after experts determined otherwise, the U.S. could win the Vietnam War.

Frederick Carlton Weyand
Painting by Bjorn Peter Egeli
Oil on canvas, 45" x 36", 1975

One of those experts was Army General Frederick Weyand, commander of the Army’s III Corps in Vietnam. He caused great controversy when, in October of 1967, he told two reporters, R. W. Apple Jr. of the New York Times and Murray Fromson of ABC News, “The war is unwinnable. We’ve reached a stalemate and we should find a dignified way out.”

As The Pentagon Papers later showed, many in the military held the same view. Weyand, for obvious reasons, was an anonymous source back then, and only recently revealed his identity, after nearly four decades of people accusing Apple and Fromson of fabricating that quote. Weyand is 90 years old and retired in Hawaii.

How long will Senator McCain insist the president’s war in Iraq is still winnable? Long enough to announce a secret peace plan just in time for the 2008 presidential elections?

Posted by Tim Forkes in NEWS and POLITICS at 09:13 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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