Blogversation with a Conservative Blogger 2

I recently exchanged views with a conservative blogger by the name of RebukeTheWorld. Our topic was Hillary Clinton and the likelihood of her getting the presidential nomination. It was spread over several days, so here it is put together. Either of us would be curious to get your comments.

I'm beginning an online conversation, "blogversation" as it was called by the blogger I did this with previously. A blogger handled as RebukeTheWorld and I started discussing Hillary Clinton and propitiously, she was on the news for her excoriation of Donald Rumsfeld at a Senate hearing. So which of them was right? That's our starting question. What follows is RebukeTheWorld's first post on the subject, and I need to get working on my response. Hopefully tomorrow, but keep checking back.

First, a bit of an introduction from RebukeTheWorld: "I started my News blog in 2005. My news blog has been promoted by AOL blog staff twice and my articles cited around the Internet. I'm a Christian, Republican, Environmentalist and a Humanitarian. I've a firm understanding about human nature and this is what I feel is my expertise."

RebukeTheWorld's first post:

Shall I say this respectfully, considering I believe Hillary will be our next president but her views on the Iraq war are borderline ignorant. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld isn't the reason for failed policy in Iraq. The problem is and will be for quite some time, the isolated culture in Iraq and its birth pangs. You can't push Democratic change with a nation that has only known dictatorship. You can't push the value of life when human bombs is their way of speaking out. Hillary says, "Under your leadership, there have been numerous errors in judgment that have led us to where we are. We have a full-fledged insurgency and full-blown sectarian conflict in Iraq." There is no magic wand in any leadership that will solve the problems in Iraq anytime soon. If Hillary Clinton spent some time studying history and society, her lack of insight might not continue to fail her.

I don't consider myself a genius but predicting civil war in Iraq was obvious from the onset. I said it, and others have too. The inner civil war isn't a symptom of America's failure or the Iraq war, it's the way of the Iraqi people. Did you know that the Iraqi people were killing each other under Hussein's leadership? If the answer to that question is so apparent, then why be surprised with inner civil war?

Removing Hussein's leadership freed up the political voice in Iraq, this is what happens when leadership changes, let alone a new government. You can't take a foreign culture and expect peace and stability within a few years. Its rarely been done in history and when it was successful it was for just a short season with these stipulations; dictatorship, terrorism from the government and the civilians ruled by fear and murder. A deadline date will give the minds of the Iraqi people closer but with a temporary stay. Why? The desire for power has been dormant to a much smaller degree under Hussein's leadership but now, a voice is allowed. This rallies the insurgents for their impending requests to the Iraqi people, "We want power. We want our leadership." The people of Iraq will continue this inner war into our children's children generation and who knows how much longer. America staying in Iraq will only slow the magnitude of their inner civil war but it will not stop it.

The Iraqi people have their first promise of Democracy. When freedom is given to those who have been under fear and control, reckless behavior is the equivalent to an immature society learning to grow up. Those who blame policy, should understand it like this. It's like locking someone up in prison and then upon their release expecting them to not desire to control their life. It's enough to say that man is doomed by his own need to control and leave it at that but then to turn it around with some inane logic, blaming policy when all along its been human nature, just conflicts with history. If you try and control a government as an outsider, you stir up those whose been held in prison. When you offer the key for freedom and leave, the stirring will still come. The answer for Iraq is not a pretty picture.

It will be hard for us draw back and watch the Iraqi people toss the baton but this is how it will be. The United States will fail with these illusions that our stay will bring stability to Iraq. A deadline date only offers marginal benefits because inner civil war is a given no matter your position is on this war. How we withdraw is what concerns me most. I've written on it but it must be done right, in order to keep the Iraqi people from blaming the United States for their future problems. I don't believe we should remove counsel, financial support and advice from the future Iraqi governments but our troops can't solve the long standing problems in the birth of a new government. If Hillary Clinton is elected, she will only be surprised at how little the United States can do and might consider hiring Rumsfeld with her soon to be enlightenment.

This is my response to the first post from RebukeTheWorld:

I agree with roughly half of what you said. I'm not normally likely to defend Hillary Clinton when it comes to Iraq. She showed poor judgement voting for it in the first place, though I grant most of Congress voted for it and most of the public supported it (to blow my own horn, I always saw through it). She got in trouble with many of her base for refusing to admit the mistake, and for throwing around this important sounding phrase "date certain" when refusing to support getting out. She was right at the hearing though. Rumsfeld deserved everything she threw at him.

One thing Clinton can't be faulted for is doing her work, even when we don't agree with her votes. When Rumsfeld added a doozy to the long list of dumb things he has said, "You'd have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I've been excessively optimistic," it took Clinton and her staff just a few hours to find a slough of examples where he had done just that. The quote I thought of immediately was "It could last, you know, six days, six weeks, I doubt six months." There are more in the Countdown transcript I linked to above.

She wasn't chastising him just for being overoptimistic. Her exact question was, "We hear a lot of happy talk and rosy scenarios, but because of the administration's strategic blunders, and, frankly, the record of incompetence in executing, you are presiding over a failed policy. Given your track record, Secretary Rumsfeld, why should we believe your assurances now?" I disagree with you when you said she showed a lack of historical understanding. She was right about the litany of mistakes by Rumsfeld, by people he appointed and oversaw, or by those taking his advice. Just off the top of my head: they withdrew resources from Afghanistan to prepare for Iraq and so left that war still raging five years on; got the intelligence 100% wrong on WMDs and Al Qaida connections; disbanded the Iraqi army and police leaving no security in place; let the army keep their weapons; didn't secure munitions depots; allowed looting except for the Ministry of Oil; gave reconstruction contracts to US firms instead of Iraqis and brought in foreign workers; appointed leaders who had no legitimacy with Iraqis; refused to hold elections in a timely way; reused Saddam's prisons and routinely detained suspects without charge and used torture. I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but the point is she was completely right about his track record.

You might be right that a civil war was inevitable, but I hesitate to agree. The only prediction I made was that the war wouldn't go as Bush and the neocons predicted. History has few examples of those who start wars correctly predicting how they would go, so when they said a few weeks to invade followed by a blossoming of democracy, I knew that wouldn't happen. What makes me hesitant to agree with you is I don't at all share your understanding of Iraqi history.

You said, "The inner civil war isn't a symptom of Americas failure or the Iraq war, its the way of the Iraqi people." That's where I disagree. There wasn't a civil war going before our invasion. They had a murderous dictator, but so do lots of countries (ever notice how war proponents avoid answering the question "Why Iraq but not the other dictatorships out there?"). Many overthrows of dictators are followed by civil wars, but hardly all, so we can't assume a war would have happened without the US invasion. So a question I have for you is when was a prior Iraqi civil war? Saddam killed in order to maintain power, but government oppression isn't he same as civil war, and there was nothing particularly violent about Iraq before Saddam seized power. That takes us back only 1978.

I think there's sense in your analogy of a man let out of prison and being expected to smoothy fit into society. That certainly explains the anarchy after Saddam's fall with nothing to replace him. However, that also contradicts the idea that they would have been at each other without our intervention. A coup or popular uprising wouldn't have left the vacuum. It might not have been sweetness and light right afterward, but there would have been some order.

Where I have my strongest disagreement is seeing Iraq as a young country that knows only violence. This is the oldest civilization on Earth, literally. They get that title for being the first to have written records and probably the first to invent agriculture, thus the title "cradle of civilization". They managed before Saddam to not kill each other. There has been separatism on the part of the Kurds which has sometimes been violent, but no more so than separatist movements all over the world, including our own violence to break free of Britain. I doubt they see this as birth pangs in any way, not with a view of history that long. At the hazard of making a prediction, the one aspect of the aforementioned looting to be remembered, besides Rumsfeld blowing it off, will be US soldiers standing by while 6,000 years of history in the Baghdad Museum was looted. That will go down with Julius Caesar letting the library at Alexandria burn.

Besides, before we call anyone else violent, let's remember most of the ordinance used in Iraq was dropped by US planes and fired from US guns. The Sunni insurgents don't have planes. The Shiite death squads don't have tanks. Roughly 100,000 Iraqis are dead who wouldn't be without the invasion.

I do agree with you that the key thing for us to decide is how to get out, that the government was delusional when it went in, and we're making stability less likely. I just don't agree that Clinton was wrong in this instance, that Rumsfeld has any enlightenment to shed except as a bad example, or that the Iraqis have a history that shows they're more violent than anyone else.

Here's her response:

Hello Eric, I too agreed with much in what you said but with a few thoughts to suggest for rebuttal. One thing is for certain, Secretary Rumsfeld underestimated the culture of Iraq. I'm sure his optimism laid in the hopes that freedom would execute "A great Iraqi people support system" to fight against any insurgent agenda but that will not become evident by a people who've been ruled by fear.

Hillary Clinton's views on staying in the war are just as ignorant as Rumsfeld's six month prediction to win this war. It's by her lack of historical understanding that she draws an opinion on our stay in Iraq. I agree with you that Afghanistan was put on the back burner with our engagement in the Iraq War. Good points! The critical views I mentioned in my article about Rumsfeld's tactics is what I wanted to challenge, since it's the common ground for much of the criticism.

You wrote- So a question I have for you is when was a prior Iraqi civil war?

I think that depends on one's definition. Today, some experts are saying there still isn't an civil war in Iraq. Some are saying that there is. I'm saying that there has been inner civil war in Iraq for a very long time. Do we define inner civil war by united sides against one another? Do we define inner civil war by one powerful united force against those fighting, one by one? Inner civil war is the "the people against the people" with brutal force but can come in different forms. We still don't have a full on civil war in Iraq by its grandest definition because the combined effort of the people aren't fighting back as of yet. What is also true is the Iraqi culture and religious bias accepts that killing their own people is fair game. This existed through out Saddam's reign and before. We can't negate the Kurds and their continual uprisings against the Iraq government either. Whether it's the Kurds who were slaughtered by them in the 1980's for their support in the Iran war or the Sunnis, even today their voices seek its own justice with cultural problematic distinctions.

In March of 1991, the Iraqi people marched in a united form as a protest against Saddam and he retaliated by killing thousands of those unarmed citizens. There were only a few collected campaigns against Saddam but there were 100,000's of solo campaigns that saw death by Saddam's orders. Over 200,000 innocent Iraqis were imprisoned and tortured, including children as a consequence for their fighting back. If civil war is defined only by its grandest terms than those who fought one by one and were brutally killed one by one, were only uprisings in solo land only. The truth is, the culture is what is it and the people did fight back but not unified. They fought with voices and died as individuals throughout Saddam's rule.

Iraq's religious biases support brutality against their own and it's by this too, that I knew day one that the Iraq war would mean the longest war in the United States' history. The insurgents are the culture of Iraq and there are millions that support their views but not all want to participate in a war. And, then there are the silent voices slaughtered by Hussein, whose living relatives today fear to speak. BBC correspondent John Sweeney said, "I have been to Baghdad a number of times. Being in Iraq is like creeping around inside someone else's migraine. The fear is so omnipresent you could almost eat it. No one talks."

You wrote- A coup or popular uprising wouldn't have left the vacuum. It might not have been sweetness and light right afterward, but there would have been some order.

My thoughts is you can suppress the people with fear and create an illusion of peace and order but if the culture remains unchanged; it only takes a day of freedom to see the explosion from those who once did nothing. The vacuum of Saddam's control created less uprisings in the last twenty years but the uprisings still occurred, one by one. The hidden war against its own people with innocent women, men and children in prisons can't even be accurately accounted for. Its estimated to be in the millions but no one knows for sure.

You wrote- They managed before Saddam to not kill each other. There has been separatism on the part of the Kurds which has sometimes been violent.

I agree that this appears to be true but the graves reveal the one by ones that were killed under Saddam's rule.

You wrote- The Iraqis have a history that shows they're more violent than anyone else.

I disagree. Millions died in the Iraq/Iran war. 100,000's with the Kurds, the Sunnis, the Shiites, The Shia, etc...and inner civil war within the Iraqi people makes Iraq significant. It doesn't set Iraq apart from Iran, Africa and a few other nations where war has existed far more than not but globally, they've significantly violent.

The Iraq civil war between the Shia and Sunni will be what I suspect ,a future genocide of the Sunni People. The Shia government and its people over 60% population, the Sunnis don't stand a chance. Rumsfeld's tactics for this war isn't the reason for the uprisings and the lack of stability in Iraq. The uprisings have always been but in different forms and the explosion to com,e is when we pull out. And, we cant afford to stay for a 100 years to subside the inevitable. Like I said, Iraq has to make its own history. The birth pangs of Iraq isn't a new country but a new government. I should have made that clearer in my article. I don't believe that democracy will win for some time there but I pray it will. The Bush administration or any other presidential administration has no ability to control the powers that will sway in Iraq and that is why I negate policy in spite of the errors made.

Here's my response:

You may have missed the thrust of my question about Iraq's prior civil wars, because you wrote extensively about Saddam's time while my question is about before that. I raise the question, and ask again what civil wars there were before Saddam, because you still come from the assumption Iraq is an inherently violent society which hasn't known another way to solve its problems. This is both wrong and dangerous. Wrong for reasons I'll elaborate on in a moment, and dangerous because Americans tend to look at foreign conflicts and consistently dismiss them on the grounds they've been fighting for centuries, and thereby misunderstand the causes of conflict and the possible resolutions, leading to such foreign policy mistakes as invading Iraq. We do that with Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, we did it with the Balkans, and that was a reason we stayed out of World War II until we were attacked.

Saddam was a murderous dictator, but his rule was one period in a very long history. He will go down as Iraq's Ivan the Terrible, Iraq's Pinochet, Iraq's Ceaucescu, yet l doubt you would suggest Russia, Chile, or Romania are inherently violent societies. May I suggest Saddam's period is merely recent, not typical. That's why I was asking not about how violent Iraq has been since 1978, but how violent it was before. I take issue with the first part of your sentence, "The insurgents are the culture of Iraq and there are millions that support their views but not all want to participate in a war." If that were so, shouldn't Iraq have been plagued with such violence going back at least through the 20th century? But what are the pre-Saddam examples?

To give an illustration of what I mean, I presume you and our readers know something about the Bosnian civil war, at least to the extent of knowing it happened and killed a lot of people relative to the country's small size. The country has been at peace for ten years. Suppose you knew nothing of the US or Bosnia except for the last ten years, and you were asked the question which country is more violent. You would notice that for the time you were familiar with, Bosnia had no wars, while the US had the Kosovo War, the Afghan War, Iraq War II, and was making threats to more countries. Which would you conclude was the more violent country? And wouldn't an American the defend his country's reputation by asking to look at more than just ten years? Thus do I suggest that before saying insurgents are the culture of Iraq, you look at pre-Saddam Iraq.

I call this notion that some cultures are inherently violent "dangerous" because it becomes tempting to blame the victims of mass killing, and to absolve ourselves of any fault or obligation. The sad fact is there would not be civil war or large scale sectarian killing, I'll leave the terminology question for later, without our invasion. Whatever conclusion that leads to about what we should do from here, that fact is both unavoidable and pregnant with meaning.

If I can steer back onto Hillary Clinton for a moment since she was the starting point, she the subject of my post on the 15th for being the subject of a Swift Boat level attack ad.

This is her response:

Hello Eric, pre-Saddam in my opinion, is the inner Iraq conflicts between the Kurds, Sunni and Shiite people.

You had asked me what civil wars existed before Saddam. This is a great article with an outline of the Iraqis' inner conflicts.

Typical definition- A civil war is a war in which parties within the same country or empire struggle for national control of state power.

This article disagreed with my thoughts on civil war but I thought I would still share it. In my opinion, civil war is more broad than the narrow dictionary defines. I don't see the individual camps, Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis, as armies trying to fight for power. I see them as groups of people with different political, religious and cultural agendas and yet; both Arab, both believe in the same God and both live in the same country.

The insurgents mentality is to kill each other to speak up politically. Insurgents are the Shiites, Sunnis, religious fanatics, secular Saddam loyalists and just fighters with their own agendas. I thought this was a great article.

Their inner civil war has been slight these last fifteen years and will be ugly all over again as it was when Saddam first took rule.

The Sunni religious and political power under Saddam, created a great war leading to millions dying throughout the 80's. Yes, I agree with you that Saddam did create a more seemingly harmonious country but that was because the Shiites were suppressed and persecuted by Saddam. These two tribal camps have had conflicts since 650 AD. I do agree that their conflicts are measured differently relative to the numbers who died but vast numbers of people still died. That is pre-Saddam and with a long history. They have the same religion, believe in the same God but definitely have a different culture but still can't make peace amongst each other.

I realize the conflicts subsided after the war and under Saddam's rule but I have other conclusions for that. After a great war, conflicts do subside. If we observe history and even go back to the Roman Empire, the ending of war does silence the conflicting parties often but for a short moment. Those historical brief peaceful moments are usually because time is needed to reorganize or time is needed to fuel the anger from those who are suppressed. If we hadn't started the Iraq war, I think it's a fair guess when considering human history, that the Shiites would have eventually fought again against the Sunni control but now we will never know that.

When we pull out of Iraq, we will be blamed for their inflamed civil war to come. And, America will be partly to blame. We negated to understand the political control Saddam had. It took Saddam victories in war, millions died and then it took years for him to obtain a sustaining rulership. A new leader, just can't walk in and not expect barriers to gain the peoples respect or to gain their fear. Eric, I think its fair to say that you agree with the basic definition of civil war and yours is the accepted version. I guess I go against the grain on the popular vote; thus leading to my conclusions that the insurgents are the way of the Iraqi people. I will post our conversations about this on my article because I feel I wasn't sensitive enough when I wrote that. It does imply an "ALL" statement and I don't believe anything is ALL. The Iraqi people don't all possess insurgent mentality. I should have worded that differently to have made my opinions clearer to the reader.

Here's my response:

Since you're willing to concede that you went too far saying all Iraqis have an insurgent mentality, I'll meet you part way and say that it might be a fair description of the Kurds, though that's using "insurgent" in the sense of the use of guerilla tactics, not terrorists. The Kurds I expect would rightly resent being thought of like the Sunni insurgents. I looked at the outline of Iraqi history you linked to, and I found it a bit tricky to follow. It got mixed in with an outline of Iranian history, which I caught only when I noticed the name "Mossadeq".

There was one place where you seem to have misunderstood my point. When you said, "Yes, I agree with you that Saddam did create a more seemingly harmonious country but that was because the Shiites were suppressed and persecuted by Saddam." My point was actually that Saddam made things less harmonious, not more, and his period of Iraqi history will be remembered as exceptionally violent, not as typical or even better, the current dissolution of Iraqi society notwithstanding. Sunni dominance started with Iraq's existence as a state like we know now, when Britain set up a Sunni king. Interestingly, the other day Nick Hayes was talking about Iraq being Winston Churchill's biggest screw up. He was correcting a caller who said Churchill was ridiculed for pointing out the Nazi threat, when he was actually ridiculed for an at best mixed record in military matters.

At the risk of getting off on a tangent, I'm glad you disagreed with the article at The Fourth Rail you linked to. It and the lengthier article it linked to at The Belmont Club were saying that talk of civil war was a way of shifting attention from the failure of the insurgency. What patent nonsense. You'd have to ignore the simpler explanation that civil war speculation may be caused by the obvious possibility there might be a civil war. You'd have to believe their assertion the insurgency has been mostly defeated. In fact, insurgent attacks on US forces are increasing, not decreasing. They've increased their capabilities so they can attack US troops, Iraqi security forces, and Shiite civilians at the same time. So attacks on US troops aren't down, just less salient amidst growing attacks elsewhere. It seems like conservatives judge the accuracy of their opinions by how well they question the motives of liberals rather than how well they fit the facts.

I think it overstates things to say Shiites and Sunnis have been in conflict all this time since they split. They've usually gotten along, which is why current sectarian conflicts in Iraq and elsewhere can be taken as a sign of a disturbance, even a crisis, within Islam. I take the violent flare up as a symptom, not as a permanent condition any more than the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant branches are in permanent conflict. That's another big topic by itself, the crisis in modern Islam and how it manifests itself in sectarian strife, terrorism, fundamentalism, and difficulties assimilating in non-Muslim nations.

Veering way back towards our starting point with Hillary Clinton, there's speculation she may skip the presidential race in exchange for becoming leader of the Senate Democrats. It's unexpected developments like that which cause me to shy from making predictions. I prefer to stick to what I want to happen, like the hypothetical Pres. Russ Feingold. To get back to our starting point, who was right, Clinton or Rumsfeld, clearly she was right. Rumsfeld's record is screamingly awful, a record of nearly nonstop failure. He didn't plan, his strategy was wrong, his tolerance of torture has undermined our efforts and reputation, and he has shown no understanding of the situation before him. However unfortunate may be Clinton's own record on the war, and even if her rebuke of Rumsfeld was just to get liberal diehards like me to like her better, her remarks were spot on, a classic case of a flawed messenger delivering a valid message.