Kidnapped

Idiots and those who think we can impose our will on other countries if we just believe we can do it (coined as The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics) think that the time to double down in Iraq and win decisively is now. This is echoed by people like John McCain's call for more troops, a sentiment echoed by... well, by John McCain. But they aren't seeing that somebody's already won decisively in Iraq, geniuses. Chaos has won:

Gunmen dressed as police commandos kidnapped up to 150 staff and visitors in a lightning raid on an education ministry office Tuesday, the largest mass abduction since the start of the U.S. occupation. Five senior police officers — including the neighborhood police chief — were later arrested, the government said.

At least 82 people were killed or found dead in murders, bombings and clashes nationwide.

Alaa Makki, head of parliament's education committee, interrupted the body's session Tuesday morning to say that between 100 and 150 people, both Shiites and Sunnis, had been abducted in the 9:30 a.m. raid at the ministry offices, calling the kidnapping a "national catastrophe."

In any campaign of ethnic cleansing, you get rid of the smart people first. That and the means of communication (and that's happening too). The brain drain in Iraq is enormous. It's what's thrown what was once the leading health care system in the Middle East on the verge of collapse. The universities have been completely shut down in response to this kidnapping.

There is absolutely no difference between Iraq right now and Yugoslavia in the darkest days of their breakup. The solution there was a political and diplomatic one, culminating in the Dayton Accords. A military action was never ruled out, and was in fact implemented later when NATO bombed Serbia to stop the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo (and accomplished their goals without a single NATO casualty, I might add, under the direction of Gen. Wesley Clark). What we did not do was try to "double down" and win a war in a scene of sectarian strife and chaos. We tried to stop the killing. The truth is that there's no war left to be won or lost. Obviously a pullout of the kind Carl Levin supports is not a call to abandon the region; in fact, the pressure is on the White House to engage FURTHER instead of less. But the idea that now's the time to "get the terrorists" (who by and large aren't even close to being the problem in Iraq right now) is simply ridiculous and has no hope of advancing the situation. I'd allow that these magical thinkers ought to go over and look at what's being proposed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in a strategy that's eerily familiar:

During the 2004 election, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) likened the war against terrorist networks to fighting crime, suggesting that both could never be fully defeated but their impact on our lives could be drastically reduced:

“We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” Kerry said. “As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

In an interview with MSNBC, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Peter Pace, explained that the Bush administration is currently pursuing the same strategy that Kerry advocated in 2004. Watch it:

"PACE: Winning to me is simply having each of the nations that we’re trying to help have a secure environment inside of which their government and their people can function. Example: Here in Washington, D.C., there’s crime, but there’s a police force. And the police force keeps the level of crime below the level at which the government can function. That’s really what winning in the war on terrorism is."

Obviously the White House has dialed down victory so much that it's essentially irrelevant. We lost in Iraq because we pursued a silly strategy of democracy through a gun barrel to begin with, where elections=democracy rather than the actual work that goes into building democratic institutions. We allowed a separatist group of fundamentalist Shiites rise to power and enact revenge. We took a fragile, loosely affiliated nation and allowed its citizens to set upon one another. We never restored order from day one. Now we're just trying to get the government to function.

And now, NOW is the time to double down? Wrong. Now is the time to reach a political and regional settlement, and end this nonsense.

UPDATE: The other part of this is that there are simply no troops to do the "double down" thing right now, but I suppose the magical-thinking war hawks will just conjure some up for us.