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| Ledeen: The Surge and its Critics |
| 2007-01-11 |
| Getting Syrious By Michael Ledeen We’ve renewed the great debate on Iraq, and as usual the central issue — the regional nature of the war — is not addressed. Still, one is grateful to Eliot Cohen and Bing West for some long-needed suggestions in their excellent article in the Wall Street Journal. Above all, they raise the question of “Iraqi justice,” one of the central requirements if the Iraqi people are going to have any confidence in the future. West and Cohen say that 80 percent of all arrested people are released without a sentence, and they point out that many of those people were originally arrested by American forces. If you want to understand the frustration of our troops, this is probably the best place to start. Americans are killed, we investigate, find the people we believe are guilty, and arrest them. We then turn them over to local authorities for processing. But the “justice system” is totally centralized in Baghdad; there are no local judges to pronounce sentences, and all cases go to Baghdad. Baghdadi courts are not a model of efficiency, thus alleged killers walk. Not just once, but many times. They kill again, are arrested again, and walk again. That’s the sort of thing that sometimes drives some soldiers to go on vigilante rampages when they see men walking around who are believed to have killed GIs or Marines. There must be local courts, otherwise the increase in the prison population for which West and Cohen call will be politicized, ethnicized, or tribalized, depending on what’s happening in Baghdad. |
| Posted by:Brett |
| #4 Ooopppps, I mean look at, Cindy viz Jane Kennedy viz Kennedy Bobby Seale viz Al Sharpton |
| Posted by: Shipman 2007-01-11 11:56 |
| #3 Damn you got it AC. Maybe this time as farce tho? |
| Posted by: Shipman 2007-01-11 11:54 |
| #2 The problem here is one of terms and of public relations. What Bush proposes sounds like (and in fact is) a military offensive. Surge sounds an awful lot like hurl to me with all the charms attributed thereto. The surge terms gives Bush's snooty political enemies ( AKA The American Left ) a chance to trivialize this critical moment in the Iraq War, and thus to ignore it in favor of agenda. These folks live for verbal slip ups from their enemies jsut so they can trivialize it and advance their own barbaric ideas. For me on a very, very personal level, I do not believe we have properly instructed the masses that in a war the only acceptable casualties are the enemy's and that when your representative supports a war it must be until victory is achieved, or that representative must vote against the war; that turning against the war for humanitarian reasons just makes your representative sound like a huckster, unworthy to participate in a republic. Another thing Bush has failed to do is to simplify the requirement of the Iraq war. Allow me: Our presense in Iraq is a strategic block against the ambitions of a hostile armed foreign power, if nothing else, and that by leaving we are conceding the field to that enemy, and that those who insist we do so value agenda rather than our nation's interests and those people who value agenda over all must be removed from power. |
| Posted by: badanov 2007-01-11 09:44 |
| #1 The pop-left's script for this will be based on the leftist response to the 1970 invasion of Cambodia. In what passes for their minds, this is an analogous situation---- the defeated imperialists lashing out in a last desperate attempt to retrieve the situation. Actual campus riots, as opposed to choreographed hate-festivals, are less likely now that the ex-hippies run the campuses but the urge to follow a counterculture meme is very powerful among the conformist masses, roughly equivalent to a rodent mating impulse. If acted upon faithfully enough, this script might even lead to a twenty-first century version of Kent State, hundreds of them with any luck. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2007-01-11 07:29 |