Month: September 2004

Over at the The Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr asked three questions for bloggers who support the war and ask them to post their answers and send him links. His questions are in italics below followed by my answers. This is a big subject and I have tried to be brief so the usual caveats about generalizations apply. I may also tweak and update this as the day goes on.

First, assuming that you were in favor of the invasion of Iraq at the time of the invasion, do you believe today that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea? Why/why not?

I still believe it was a good idea. The case for invading Iraq can be divided into two sections: A narrow case based on the direct threat posed by Saddam himself and the wider case based on the regional effects of destroying his regime.

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Update: (One of those a-ha moments of recognizing the mote in other’s eyes and not my own). Here are the links I should have begun with: Allawi’s speech. And here. And here. To download video and audio go to C-SPAN .
He concludes it with

As generous as you have been, we will stand with you, too. As stalwart as you have been, we will stand with you, too. Neither tyranny nor terrorism has a place in our region or our world. And that is why we Iraqis will stand by you, America, in a war larger than either of our nations, the global battle to live in freedom. God bless you and thank you.

We should have learned one lesson from Vietnam – the battle is about Iraq, not us. So Mark Steyn describes the press conference with Allawi and Bush:

They’re six feet from Iraq’s head of government and they’ve got not a question for him. They’ve got no interest in Iraq except insofar as they can use the issue to depress sufficient numbers of swing voters in Florida and Ohio.

If the press (and Kerry) must obsess, why don’t they obsess about what is really going on in Iraq, why do bloggers have to point out where the deaths are and ask more whys – as Shannon does? The stories in this newspaper from Iraq could have provided a score of questions that we would like (in a real sense need) to see answered. How are things in Basra? What do we need to know about the destruction of the oil pipe lines? How important is the new electricity to the economy? Why, how and by whom were the eighteen professors assassinated? What is the effect of the attacks on police stations? How long before the Italians can get the marshes back to their original state? It could be that the American press would dismiss these as slanted, but, these are hardly pr projects – they are the heart of whether this whole “occupation” is going to work or not.

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To hear the media tell it, Iraq is disintegrating. Violence is widespread and progress made since the fall of Saddam has stagnated or even reversed. Others, like Iraqi bloggers or returning US military tell a different story. I decided to try to map the violence in the country to try to get an visual idea how widespread the violence was. I wanted to see how much of the country of Iraq was shooting at the Coalition.

First here is a map of Iraqi population distribution. Notice that most of Iraq’s population lives east and north of the Euphrates river which nearly bisects the country. The greyish areas in the east between the Tigres and the Iranian border are analgous to the American mid-west, with lot of contiguous habitation, small farms and towns and no major dead zones. The areas east of the Tigres turn rapidally to desert. Population hugs the rivers. Most of the area south and west of the Euphrates is functionally uninhabited. The Al-Anbar province in particular is nearly completely deserted except for the river valley.

I mapped all 58 U.S. combat fatalities for the month of September to date using data made available at GlobalSecurity.org. The map color codes the number of U.S. fatalities resulting from enemy action in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces. Only four of the provinces had any U.S. fatalities. 14 of the provinces had zero fatalities. (The British down in Basra had zero fatalities from combat in September).

Here’s the map.

See all the green?

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It argues the European Union have been gravely damaged by three core problems – economically it is falling far behind the U.S. and Asia, politically it is deeply divided on issues like Iraq, the new EU constitution and the euro and its legitimacy has been shattered by a crippling ‘lack of popular understanding and enthusiasm’.

‘Europe’s share of the world economy is shrinking as the United States constantly outstrips European growth and the Asian economies surge ahead,’ it warned.

Idiots… when are the Eurocrats going to realize that you can’t tax and grow at the same time.

I’ll be happy to see the EU go.

They probably won’t set off a nuke in Manhattan, or “lose” one of their nukes to their terrorist subsidiaries, at least unless they’ve got a really surefire way to get away with it.

But observe that they are already backing at least part of the “insurgency” bedeviling Iraq. If they go hog-wild, we can always muster support for an invasion – for now – so there’s limits to what they can do there.

But with a nuke, they’ve suddenly invasion-proofed themselves. Like the Pakistanis, the Chinese, and the Russians, they’ll either get nuked or scolded and/or embargoed, but almost certainly nothing in between.

All of a sudden, the limits to their insurgency-backing activities in Iraq are gone. We’re going to enter a nuclear exchange because they’re vigorously backing insurgents? Not bloody likely.

So what we end up with is a proxy war against another nuclear armed power. We don’t have the option to take the fight to the backers no matter how much they escalate the situation, because they’ve got nukes. So we’re stuck blasting away at their agents (who quickly get replaced by the backer) and taking significant numbers of casualties in return for years on end, making life awfully rough for the locals in the meantime, until one side finally runs out of patience and throws in the towel. If it’s us that throws in the towel, then life gets really rough for the locals and our reputation goes in the toilet.

That sounds awfully familiar. Didn’t John Kerry make a passing reference to the time he was in that situation a few decades back? As I recall, it didn’t turn out too well last time around…