Comments on y-intercept blog: WMDs on the Path to Power

I agree, so what defines failure in Iraq - or more...

2007-09-03T11:30:00.000-06:00

I agree, so what defines failure in Iraq - or more to the point, how would one define success? While we're at it, let's admit the semantic gamesmanship here. Labeling the forces opposed to the US occupation of Iraq as "terrorists" or "Al Qaeda" or for that matter "freedom fighters" obscures the complexity of the chaos that is Iraq today.

IMHO, success in Iraq is a term to be defined by the Iraqis themselves not by Americans. I doubt many Iraqis view the horrors of the last 17 years and particularly the last 4 1/2 years as a success. I am sure that most Iraqis, like most people everywhere, would just like to live their lives free of violence and go about their normal business. The United States government has deprived them of those simple basics of life for 17 years and it hardly seems plausible to look to the United States for success.

Failure? It is simply not possible in any honest and realistic sense to succeed in a criminal undertaking. From the Iraqi point of view, it is difficult to imagine how the death and destruction caused by the United States since 1990 could be described as anything but a failure.

Please refrain from trotting out the old "would you prefer Saddam" canard. At least Saddam was an Iraqi failure, not an American one. He was an evil dictator and there was no political freedom in Iraq, but neither was there constant violence. The horrors visited on Iraq since March 2003 would never have happened under Saddam's strongarm rule and there is only one place to blame for those deaths and the destruction of that nation - 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC USA.

Sorry, but no matter how you look at it, the death...

2007-09-03T10:47:00.000-06:00

Sorry, but no matter how you look at it, the death quota is not a good metric for judging the success or failure of any policy.

The problem, of course, is that the terrorists are aware of the metric. This is the one number that they can control.

Anyone familiar with statistics or with human nature know that can and will manipulate things under their control. The Terrorist know that September is the month in which we will debate the surge and they have to make the surge a failure. The death toll has to be an increase over July.

It is not surprising that, when the month is near complete and they are short of their quota that they set off a bomb designed to wipe out a village.

A bomb designed to wipe out a village is a WMD, especially when said bomb is used to wipe out a village.

This was one of the biggest concern I had about the troop surge is that it compelled the terrorist to kill people simply to have a high death count. Terrorists are, by definition, people willing to commit atrocities to get into power. Even just 50 terrorists committed to killing 2k people in a month could hit the goal.

The death quota is a bad and meaningless statistic that should be ignored. A large number of people know this. Anyone on the left who pushes the death toll as proof of the failure of the troop surge is simply going to magnify division at home.

There may be other reasons to argue the troop surge is a failure. This is just a very bad metric.

You could look at that same article a different wa...

2007-09-02T16:42:00.000-06:00

You could look at that same article a different way. If after the "surge" has been given "time to work", we still have a constant rise in civilian deaths, we can conclude that the surge is failing - at least it's failing the Iraqi people and they are the only important constituency.

Al Qaeda is barely mentioned in that article so it is hardly reasonable to conclude that they "hit their target". Reliable sources (the US military) put Al Qaeda at less than 5% of the forces fighting against the US occupation.

WMD were not mentioned in this report, so your assertion that Al Qaeda detonated WMD's is simply wrong.

No honest look at the death toll in Iraq can fail to acknowledge that had the US not invaded without provocation and in violation of international law, these people would still be alive. The best way to insure that fewer people die is to remove the provocation of alien military occupation forces.