Comments Posted By Tom Holsinger
Displaying 1 To 5 Of 5 Comments
Rick,
Tell us again how there are only two sides in this fight - America's and the enemy's. And that the Iraqi people aren't involved.
You are carefully avoiding the bloody obvious fact that it is THEIR COUNTRY, not ours, and they decide what happens to recalcitrant minorities who persist in murdering their children to obtain power. And the Iraqi people have decided to get rid of the SOB's.
Not all of them - there are about 250,000 Sunni Arabs living among about ten million Shiites in the Shiite dominated south, and those Sunnis have been very well behaved for the past four years because they know what the alternative is.
But ALL the terrorism directed against Shiites and Kurds has been done by Iraq's Sunni Arabs, or with their knowing help. And none of that happens in areas where there are few, if any, Sunni Arabs.
So the formerly 78% majority of Iraqis, now about 91% after a year of ethnic cleansing, have decided that the fastest and most effective means of protecting their families is to get rid of the Sunni Arabs.
The Sunnis could have changed sides earlier. They didn't. Now it is too late. Tough for them. The Middle East is a hard place for ethnic minorities which persist in violence against ethnic majorities.
But you say IT'S OUR FAULT THAT IRAQ'S SUNNI ARABS KEEP FIGHTING? IT'S OUR FAULT THAT THEIR VICTIMS ARE FIGHTING BACK? Gimme a ****ing break!
It's not our job to save the world, and particularly not to save truly nasty ethnic groups from their own nastiness.
We can't stop Iraq's Sunni Arabs from getting what's coming to 'em, and we shouldn't try. We gave them a chance to change sides. They rejected it. Let 'em die!
Our principal objective in conquering Iraq was to elminate it as a threat to our homeland, and keep it from emerging as one again afterwards. We don't need Sunni Arabs in Iraq to achieve either objective.
My exact comments on this 42 months ago were, and pay particular attention to my last sentence:
http://www.danieldrezner.com/mt/KeYaHaMlAs.cgi?entry_id=849
"The one absolutely crucial objective in reconstructing Iraq seems to have already been achieved - securing a firm alliance with the Shiite Arab majority (we had one with Iraq's Kurds prior to the invasion). The media/press are clueless about this. They have no idea what the important stories are. Our relations with the various Shiite Arab tribes are the most important story in the occupation. I've paid close attention to the details emerging here. It looks like we've won. They're slowly dealing with their own crazies and the Iranian trouble-makers. Sometimes they need some backup from American forces, but we haven't had to actually take any action ourselves.
The differences between us pacifying Iraq's Sunni Arab tribes, and not doing so, will chiefly be these:
(1) how many Sunni Arabs remain in Iraq once we leave. Note that the Iraqi armed forces are being rebuilt with an all-new, i.e., non-Sunni, cadre. Unreconciled Sunni Arabs in Iraq will have the following choices once our occupation ends - (a) becoming reconciled, (b) becoming gone or (c) becoming dead.
(2) whether there is a significant prosperous and peaceful Sunni minority in Iraq to serve as a model for reconstructing the Sunni majorities in other Arab countries. It will be much more difficult for us to succeed with the latter if we don't.
Keep in mind that we will win the war on terror. The major question is how many Arabs survive the experience.
Posted by Tom Holsinger at October 28, 2003 08:48 PM"
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000976.html#007417
"Victory in the Iraq occupation campaign (conquering the place was a different campaign) depends on our relationship with Iraq's Shiite majority, not its Sunni minority. The Shiites are the strategic center of gravity.
It would be nice if we succeed in turning all of Iraq's factions into ones we can live peacefully with. That's not the only way to win.
A horrible example of the price of not kissing up to the Americans would be useful too. The Sunnis have some influence on which way we win.
Iraq won't be the last campaign in our war with terror.
We're doing this for us, not for them.
posted by: Tom Holsinger on 12.26.03 at 10:51 AM"
Comment Posted By Tom Holsinger On 13.05.2007 @ 17:26
Rick,
Calling ethnic cleansing of the Sunnis a "disaster" lets the enemy define victory. All the Sunnis have to do, by your definition, is insist on total victory by them, fight to their expulsion and death at Shiite hands, and then their group suicide proves that we were defeated in Iraq.
So, since the expulsion of almost all Sunni Arabs from Iraq has been a given since the beginning (I called it, Jim Dunnigan called it, Austin Bay called it, Trent Telenko called it, etc. - this has been obvious to anyone with knowledge of ethnic affairs in Iraq), it has never been possible for us to win in Iraq by your definition, and our defeat has always been inevitable.
You suffer from rectal-cranial inversion syndrome.
Comment Posted By Tom Holsinger On 13.05.2007 @ 14:13
I take you too believe in the lefties' No. 1 Article of Faith - nothing bad happens in the world unless the United States makes it happen.
Get a grip. Ethnic cleansing of Iraq's Sunni Arabs by its Shiite Arabs, with help from the Kurds, is not something we can control. I predicted this would happen back in October 2003 on Drezner's board. The only surprising thing is that the Sunnis have lasted so long. The Shiites and Sunnis have had it in for each other for more than a thousand years longer than the U.S. has existed.
The most American forces can do, as Jim Dunnigan at Strategy Page put it, is make for a "kinder, gentler ethnic cleansing."
But I do encourage you to try harder about this. Go to Iraq yourself and tell the Shiites that they ABSOLUTELY MUST STOP protecting their families from murder by Sunni terrorists by the only means which has proven effective - getting rid of the Sunni Arabs who shelter and aid the terrorists.
Stamp your foot real hard and scream at the Shiites about this. Be a population control volunteer.
Comment Posted By Tom Holsinger On 13.05.2007 @ 12:48
IT'S TIME: MEDALS OF HONOR FOR THE PASSENGERS OF FLIGHT #93
I believe one of the Flight 93 passengers was a private pilot with a multi-engine license, but in props rather than jets, and that the passengers intended that he fly the aircraft in the remote possibilty that they secured it without crashing.
I agree with Andrew Said that the MOH is not appropriate here. A Medal of Freedom is, however cheapened that has been for political reasons, and Rick Rescorla, chief of security for Morgan Stanley in the WTC, should get one of those too.
Comment Posted By Tom Holsinger On 4.04.2006 @ 21:42
Vonsider that you may have only looked at the surface consequences of Iran's mullahs openly having nukes. It's not just them. Everyone else will want nukes, and get them. May will need their own nukes at that point.
Consider the consequences of widespread nuclear proliferation. My editorial on the subject at Winds of Change today says of those:
"If the United States does not forcibly prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons, every country in the area will know to a moral certainty that they cannot rely on the United States for protection against Iranian nuclear attack, or Iranian nuclear blackmail in support of domestic opposition to the generally shaky regimes of the Middle East. American prestige and influence there will collapse. If we won’t protect ourselves by pre-emption, we can’t be relied on to protect anyone else.
So every country within reach of Iranian nuclear weapons will have enormous strategic pressure to develop their own nuclear weapons to deter Iranian nuclear threats. As a recent strategic survey noted, Syria has many times the per capita and absolute GDP of North Korea, and Egypt several times the per capita and absolute GDP of Pakistan. If North Korea and Pakistan can develop nuclear weapons, so can Syria and Egypt, and also Saudi Arabia, all three of whose regimes are shaky. And they won’t be the only countries to develop nuclear weapons after Iran does - many more will join the nuclear “club†within a few years, some within months.
All of those countries having nuclear weapons will create a security nightmare – at some point terrorists will be able to buy or steal some (assuming that Iran doesn’t first give a few to favored terrorist groups). It is likely that at least some will use their nuclear weapons on each other, or in a domestic coup or factional fight. The latter might first happen in Iran.
Few have any idea of the degree to which international trade and prosperity relies on free movement of goods between countries. Container cargo is an ideal means of covertly transporting terrorist nuclear weapons. Once the first terrorist nuke is used, international trade will be enormously curtailed for at least several months for security reasons, and the entire world will suffer a simultaneous recession.
It won’t stop there, though. These same security precautions, once implemented, will significantly impede future economic growth – a ballpark estimate of reducing worldwide growth by 20-30% is reasonable. Consider the worldwide and domestic effects over a twenty-year period of a one-quarter across the board reduction in economic growth.
This will be just from security precautions against terrorist nukes –not physical destruction from such use nor, more importantly, the consequences of nuclear wars between or within third world states. Physical destruction from these will be bad enough, but that pales compared with the social and consequent economic effects – enormous tides of refugees, economic collapse and outright anarchy over wide areas.
We cannot avoid that washing over us from abroad even if we manage to avoid terrorist nuclear attack at home, and we are unlikely to be so lucky. Scores if not hundreds of thousands of Americans will likely be killed, and many more injured, from terrorist nuclear devices used in America when so many politically unstable countries possess hundreds of the things.
We better than most can economically afford the thoroughly intrusive security measures required to protect against terrorist nukes when the threat can come from anywhere, as opposed to Islamic extremists alone.
But the price of domestic security, when foreign security fails due to a failure of leadership and will by President Bush, will be something much more precious – our freedom.
Freedom everywhere will suffer due to those same security precautions. The greatest loss of freedom will come in those countries which are freest, i.e., especially America. Especially us.
THIS is what is really at stake – the freedom which makes us Americans."
Comment Posted By Tom Holsinger On 19.01.2006 @ 13:19
