Regular readers of this blog know that I’ve struggled with the whole question of the Iraq war. I thought we went in for illegitimate reasons even at the time, and believed (correctly) that the Bush Administration was intentionally conflating the 9/11 attacks with the need to attack Iraq.

At the same time, now that we’ve gone in there, I feel we have a responsibility to the Iraqi people (or peoples, as Iraq is not really a complete nation but more of a conglomeration of tribal groups, ethnicities, and different religious sects) to try and do whatever makes the most sense for the area as a whole.

This means that if we could “win”, we should do what it takes to do so. The big problem is that nobody really seems to know what “winning” consists of.

Is it Iraq holding elections as an independent, sovereign nation? They’ve done that.

Is it killing every terrorist in Iraq? We’ll never win.

Is it defeating the people who attacked us on 9/11? If that’s “winning”, we’re really barking up the wrong tree, because exactly ZERO of the 9/11 attackers were from Iraq, and Iraq (including Saddam Hussein) had zip, zero, nada to do with the attacks that day.

Here’re a few quotes from a journalist that has covered Iraq for several years now:

But any true assessment of the happiness or misery of Iraqis must use a less crude index than the number of dead and injured. It must ask if people have been driven from their houses, and if they can return. It must say whether they have a job and, if they do not, whether they stand a chance of getting one. It has to explain why so few of the 3.2 million people who are refugees in Syria and Jordan, or inside Iraq, are coming back.

…

Life in the Iraq to which Bassim has returned is said by foreigners and Iraqis alike to be getting better. Perky pieces in the foreign media breathlessly describe how Sunni children are once again playing football in al-Zahra park near the Green Zone, where they would have been murdered a year ago. “The problem,” complained one American correspondent in Baghdad, “is that newsrooms back home have two mindsets – ‘War Rages’ and ‘Peace Dawns’ – and not a lot in between.”

Previous claims of an improvement in security by the US or the Iraqi government had been wholly false. I remembered Paul Bremer, the US viceroy during the first year of the occupation, claiming that the Sunni insurgents were a doomed remnant battling against “the new Iraq”. When Bremer left in 2004, he was shown on television clambering into one helicopter and then, when the cameras departed, scuttling on to a second aircraft in case those same insurgents might shoot him down.

…

Areas that were once mixed are not being reoccupied by whichever community was driven out. Bassim can no more reclaim, or even visit, his house in the Jihad district of Baghdad than he could a year ago. He can still work as a taxi driver only in Sunni areas. The US military and the Iraqi government are wary of even trying to reverse sectarian cleansing because this might break the present fragile truce.

…

Baghdad still feels and looks like a city at war. There are checkpoints everywhere. “You seldom see young girls walking in the streets, or in restaurants,” adds Zanab Jafar, “because their families are terrified they will be kidnapped, so they send private cars to pick them up directly from school.” New shops open, but they are always in the heart of districts controlled by a single community because nobody wants to venture far from their home to shop.

For all the talk of Baghdad being safer, it remains an extraordinarily dangerous place. One Western security company is still asking $3,000 to pick a man up at the airport and drive him six miles to his hotel in central Baghdad. The number of dead bodies being picked up by the police every morning in the capital is down to three or four when once it was 50 or 60.

“People are being killed in the back streets and alleyways but not in the main roads as they were 12 months ago,” says one Shia leader with a network of contacts throughout Baghdad. “About twice as many people are being killed as the government admits.” This figure is still well below what it was 18 months ago, and is unlikely to return to its previous level as long as al-Qa’ida does not resume its suicide bombing campaign, using trucks loaded with a ton of explosives detonated in the middle of Shia markets or religious processions, killing and wounding hundreds. If the attacks on the two bird markets in Shia areas on 1 February, killing 99 people, are repeated, then Shia death squads will start a fresh cycle of tit-for-tat killings of Sunni.

The new element in Iraq is the development of the Awakening Council, or al-Sahwa, movement. Suddenly there is a Sunni militia, paid by the US, that has 80,000 men under arms. This re-empowers the Sunni community far more than any legislation passed by the Iraqi parliament. But it also deepens the divisions in Iraq because the leaders of the Awakening do not bother to hide their hatred and contempt for the Iraqi government.

There’s a lot more, but the point of the article is that we’re not really “winning”. We just think we are because we aren’t seeing quite as many body bags being flow home to the United States. (Actually, thanks to the suppression of coverage by the Bush Administration, we don’t ever really see body bags being flown home, but you get the point.)

Instead, we’ve only appeared to be doing better not because of the surge as much as because the Sunnis, for the most part, quit bombing us and now are trying to be on our good side- so we’ll help them against their hated enemies, the Shia. Baghdad isn’t really “better”, it’s just quieter because the ethnic cleansing was more or less completed (there aren’t any mixed areas of Sunni and Shiites there anymore) and now we’ve kind of frozen the situation into place.

The Kurds are still doing their own thing in the north, even to the point where the Turks are attacking them. The Sunnis have formed up their own militia that’s separate from any kind of realistic control from the central government, and are right now sucking up to us as best they can so they can stockpile guns, explosives and ammunition from us to use either defending themselves against the Shiites or attacking them (the difference is virtually nil at times). And the Shiites are delighted to be mostly in control of things, because they took it in the shorts for so many years under the (Sunni) rule of Saddam and now they get to kick the crap out of the Sunnis for a while.

So are we winning? I’d say no for several reasons linked to the above. We’re not “winning” for the biggest reason- nobody knows exactly what the hell “winning” consists of. Even in the most basic goals- rebuild Iraq’s infrastructure, bring safety to the nation, stop the terrorist attacks- we’re failing to accomplish.

What’s more, I’m pretty sure we cannot win at any of those goals right now. What we call “terrorists” are a mixture of people. Some are truly Islamic radicals who just want to kill as many Americans as possible. But many see themselves as freedom fighters who are striking out at a foreign oppressor’s army that has illegally occupied their land- and we’re the oppressor.

I don’t think we’re winning. I don’t think we can “win” until we decide exactly what we’re there for, and even then I’m not so sure we can “win”.

It’s time for us to get the hell out and leave Iraq to the Iraqis, and when they’re exhausted of slaughtering and torturing each other and are ready to live in peace, maybe then we can help them. I don’t think they need much more of the “help” we’ve given them thus far.

Disagree? Here’s one last quote from that article for you to think about (hopefully you’re not reading this at lunch):

Iraq remains a great sump of human degradation and poverty, unaffected by the “surge”. It was not a government critic but the civilian spokesman for the Baghdad security plan, Tahseen Sheikhly, who pointed out this week that the city is drowning in sewage because of blocked and broken pipes and drains. In one part of the city, the sewage has formed a lake so large that it can be seen “as a big black spot on Google Earth”.

Saddam might have been bad, but we’ve created a situation where over 3 million Iraqis are refugees in other nations (that’s over 10% of their prewar population) and under Saddam, Baghdad didn’t have huge lakes of shit visible from outer space.