In reviewing this, though, you make a good point. There are people that are motivated by nationalistic (or sub-national/tribal) anger towards the Coalition occupation (oh, yeah, it’s an occupation) who are not acting on the basis of the desire to put a theocracy in place. But it seems to me that most of the people doing the killing are aligned with either an Islamic group or an ex-Baathist group. I don’t think there’s too many folks out there that are something else. I think the tribal groups are starting to figure out that fighting on the same side as the more idealistic groups and the remnants of the old regime is a losing proposition.

As far as who’s a terrorist or not, I fall back to my definition. Anyone doing stuff like blowing a bomb up in the middle of a cafe or next to a bus is a terrorist. Their ultimate aim is immaterial, as is their party affiliation, their tribal membership or their national origin.

I’d say that there a definite faction of the Interior Ministry that is running these death squads. I think it’s something that the Iraqi Government is fighting against, and that it’s lessening. But I haven’t see a lot of hard and fast information either way about how many people are involved in these as either perpetrators or as victims. I agree they’re there, but it’s not something I’ve seen good data on.

Also, I implied that the Iraqi government runs death squads, and that if a different party had been elected, they would have been running death squads too. You replied that that was a pessimistic view you didn’t share. Apparently the part about running death squads wasn’t what you disagreed with. I suppose it was merely my rhetorical overstatement you disagreed with.

But then, as you say, you believe it is just a few bad apples who run death squads, and not a coherent policy of the interior ministry.

As I keep saying, I hope you’re right, but I see no evidence for it.

You minimize the signifigance of the insurgency and the civil war by reducing those opposed to the US & the current Iraqi government to those three groups.

I’ll respond to that if you can quote where I said that, or even implied it.

Certainly, the government is doing other things as well, and it is conceivable that the government might play a role in negotiating a peace with the various parties to the civil war (although, since at least one party to the civil war has been carrying out a fairly succesful campaign of murder against the families of everyone who participates in the government, it currently seems unlikely that they are ready to negotiate).

I will be very happy if I am proven wrong, but…

That’s a very pessimistic viewpoint of the value and functions of the Iraq government that I don’t share.

I figure we should stay. My reasoning is that there is right now the start of a representative government in Iraq, and without our continued support it will take it a much longer time to overcome internal and external resistance. In fact, it might even fail. Such a failure will probably make what’s going on now look like the Easter parade; if we leave, or stay and fail, there won’t be any further argument on whether or not a civil war is going on there. It really will be a civil war, with a greatly increased death toll on all sides. Iran will either invade, or else pour huge amounts of money and munitions into a radical Shiite faction that will be a lot worse than what’s in there now. Then Kurdistan will revolt, and Turkey will go on alert because they have a fractious Kurdish population and they don’t want to see an independent Kurdistan right next to their Kurdish population, etc., etc.

It might fail even with our continued presence, but it’s got a much better chance. I think we are morally obligated to finish what we’ve started.

Deaths have certainly trended up since the summer after the invasion (the point at which I cited the description of tribal leaders taking a wait and see attitude). There have been many peaks and troughs, and March 2006 was a trough for US soldiers (although Jan, Feb, and Apr were all pretty typical 2+ deaths per day months), the past 4 months have seen a steady spiraling upwards of Iraqi deaths, both military and civilian (although not surpassing the peak of last August), and have seen more extreme and concerted campaigns of ethnic cleansing through terror and intimidation than have been seen at any other point in the war.

A large part of the reason we aren’t seeing many of the 4+ US deaths a day months like we were last year is that the US ground forces are being pulled back to bases (air strikes and their massive casualties are up recently), which I suppose you can view as Iraqi government troops taking over their own part in the war (along with interior ministry death squads taking up their part in the war), but I have also seen it described as US troops staying out of what is rapidly turning from an anti-occupation insurgency to an inter-ethnic civil war, as US troop involvement would only enflame things further (as when they recently destroyed a religious center while pursuing Mahdi Army forces).

I vacilate between whether we should stay or withdraw. If I thought we could do any good at all (and maybe we can) then I would favor us staying. While the people responsible for this horrible mess will not be the one’s dieing for their mistakes, we are all culpable. To the extent I think that we are only going to make things worse, I think we should go.

What I definitely think is that we should never have been there in the first place. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was largely defanged, no threat to the outside world, and less of a threat to its own people than it had been earlier (the last big massacres were at the end of the Gulf War, and the major internal enemies (and subjects of brutal repression), the Kurds, were well protected by the no-fly-zone and the peshmerga). Sanctions had been made less brutal with the Oil for Food program (which is credited with a huge decrease in infant mortality in the late nineties/early oughts). Other than being able to vote for who will run the official death squads (and therefore who will be forced to have illegal death squads instead), I can’t think of any way in which conditions have improved since before the war, three years ago.

But are we really doing anything other than repeating cant? If you want my opinion on the war, you can find most of it (along with Juan Cole’s own creepy obsession with the Isreal lobby) over on http://www.juancole.com. My summary of violence levels comes from http://icasualties.org/oif/. Anyway, it seems both of us have merely been proved right in our own minds by the war, and if 3 years of reporting of facts on the ground haven’t gotten our positions within any reasonable range of ewach other, it is doubtful another exchange here will do so.

I do agree that Dr. Polya’s drive-by Teal Deer (”Too long- didn’t read” in fan-shprek) is using distinctly inflated methods to come up with US responsibility death counts, particularly for Afganistan.

local Islamic terrorists
Line.

foreign terrorists
Sinker.

I’ve got a lot more to say. Really. But it’s exhausting and I wonder if it’s really worth it.

(Not to say that RonF’s comment was worthless - it truly was not.)

For example, the first Gulf War could have been avoided if only Saddam had simply not invaded Kuwait … or if people had refrained from resisting the invasion. If we equate fault with foreseeable “but for” causation, then we could assign fault on either side or both. If we equate fault with a violation of norms of rights and autonomy, we tend to find fault with Saddam for failing to respect the autonomy of Kuwait, a sovereign nation.

Arguably the first Gulf War ended when Saddam agreed to certain conditions designed to limit future aggression. Arguably Saddam reneged on those conditions. This left the Coalition Forces with the choice of 1) resuming the Gulf War, 2) abandoning the conditions or 3) finding some middle path such as sanctions. Whatever the Coalition chose, it was foreseeable that Saddam might a) reduce spending on his military and use his resources to promote public health or b) reduce spending on public health and use his resources for his military or c) reduce spending on both to use his resources elsewhere or d) maintain or increase spending on either or both and reduce spending elsewhere.

Given these dynamics, if you wanted to design a policy to maximize public welfare you would need to compare the consequences of 1) renewing war, 2) letting the world know that cease-fire agreements have no teeth, or 3) imposing economic sanctions. And you would need to do this without knowing what Saddam would do to his own population. It is far from obvious to me what the optimal course of action would be. Absent such knowledge, I don’t know how to assign fault for failure to adopt an optimal course of action.

In contrast, I can find fault with people who elect a course of action that is foreseeable less desirable than an alternative. Even if I could not fault your choice to impose sanctions, I might fault you for failing to design an optimal sanctions scheme. Even if I could not fault your choice to abandon the anti-aggression conditions, I might fault you for failing to seize any opportunity to mitigate the lessons to be learned by other tyrants. Even if I could not fault your choice to resume the war, I might fault you for conducting the war ineptly. I may not be able to know whether a well-executed sanctions regime would produce better results than a well-executed war, but I pretty well guess whether a well-executed war would produce better results than a poorly-executed war.

Now, the victim lies on the ground, choked near the point of death, still trying to recover their breath and ability to defend themselves. Should we stand by while hoodlums from the neighborhood come by to steal his wallet, loot his house and kill him?

I disagree. It seems to me that he is in fact placing total blame for the “avoidable mortality” deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan squarely and solely on the Coalition. The only mention of Saddam Hussein he makes to to favorably compare the death rate of his subjects prior to the sanctions to that after the sanctions. Otherwise all he talks about is the Coalition and how they are responsible for what’s going on, and quotes the Geneva Conventions when talking about the Coalition (but not Saddam).

In the case of Iraq, the failure of the post-war reconstruction has been overwhelming, and is certainly significantly the fault of the occupiers.

People with guns are trying to kill anyone who cooperates with the reconstruction efforts of the Coalition and the Iraqi government. It is the responsibility of the Coalition and the Iraqi government to try to stop them. But it is not the Coalition and the Iraqi government’s fault that disaffected elements of the previous government, local Islamic terrorists, and foreign terrorists are trying to take over the country. The superior moral position here does not belong to the people busying themselves purposely killing civilians to spread terror and destroying infrastructure to try to destabilize a democratically elected government.

So Amp’s analogy to the deadly tug-of-war stands.

I didn’t address Amp’s analogy. I pointed out that Dr. Polyna seems to have argued against it. I haven’t seen that addressed.

It is hard to imagine a reconstruction effort that would transform Afganistan into a functioning state in 4 years.

Afghanistan hasn’t been a functioning state for a very long time. Hell, if you want to get strict about it, no one in Kabul has told the warlords in the highlands what to do since Alexander the Great. The central government in Kabul won’t have the same kind of control over the highlands that Washington D.C. has over Anchorage and L.A. for a very long time, if ever. But they might have control equivalent to what it has had in the recent past in the next few years.

On the other hand, it is obvious that what we are doing there isn’t anywhere close to the best we could be doing.

Every milblog posting from Afghanistan and Iraq that I’ve read that has addressed the subject has said that the U.S. could get a lot more stability and cooperation in these two countries if they got a lot more serious about pushing the reconstruction efforts and pumping more money in. Of course, this is no secret to Iran, Syria, etc.; that’s exactly the reason why they are doing whatever they can to force the Coalition to take resources out of reconstruction and into security. So you’ll have no argument from me that we need to do more. Given the security situation, it’s an open question whether or not we can do more. I’d like to think we’re doing what we can, but this is, after all, a government project. So I’m sure there are screwups and massive inefficiencies. And Pres. Bush and Sec. DOD Rumsfield and the rest have to wear the jacket for that.

Tell me; what would you recommend should be done to solve this?

They had just come out of a Occupation run meeting to discuss the reconstruction that had gone badly, and they all agreed that they were giving the occupation a few more months to get its shit together and start a real reconstruction, and that if we didn’t they were joining the insurgency. We all know how things went from there.

Yeah. In fact, we do. They’ve had 3 elections with increasing participation from previously disaffected elements in each one. The government has formed and after some predictable delays (”Hey, we’re the biggest faction, we get to pick the PM. What? What do you mean ‘They get to have some say, too.’?”) the leadership is starting to get sorted out. Deaths due to combat and terrorism if anything decreasing; they’re certainly not trending up. More and more Iraqi Army units are getting equipped and trained. The most influential cleric in Iraq, Al-Sistani, has told everyone that private militias must be folded into the army, and that the central government must be in complete control of all men under arms, and you might notice that when he speaks, the Shiites tend to listen.

All is not well. People are still getting killed by terrorists. Oil sales are not what they should be, or need to be. Infrastructure projects are going more slowly than they should be. But overall, the trends are good. This is not going be something that’s over in 12 months, but I’m optimistic that the end result will not be a dictatorship or oligarchy that will slaughter it’s subjects with bullets, poison gas and environmental disasters, reward the families of dead foreign terrorists with tens of thousands of dollars for killing civilians, and watch its subjects die of disease and starvation while building 70+ palaces and military bases with gold-plated faucets and heroic statues of “The Leader”.

BTW, I have a problem with the usage by the mainstream media of the word “insurgent”. They apply it to anyone not under arms under the authority of the Coalition or the Iraqi government. I think that the word is being generally misapplied by the mainstream media and it masks who is acting in Iraq and what their moral standing is. In my opinion, someone who kills civilians as their primary target is a terrorist, not an insurgent; their object is to terrorize and destabilize civic order so that they can take over. On the other hand, if someone attacks armed men, then they are fairly described as insurgents. Some one who sets off a roadside bomb to try to kill Coalition troops in a humvee is an insurgent. Someone who sets off a car bomb near a market or somewhere else a lot of people gather, or who kidnaps or kills people trying to rebuild the country is a terrorist.

Dr. Polya’s piece (why, without having seen it appear anywhere else, do I feel that this is comment spam, posted unchanged in numerous blog comment sections? At least it was posted on a relevant -if very old- thread.) is not primarily concerned with violent deaths, it is concerned with avoidable deaths. The overwhelming majority of these are non-violent. Dr. Polya is faulting the occupiers for not restoring (in Iraq) or creating (in Afganistan) the necessary infrastructure to provide basic functional third world (say, Syrian) living conditions. In the case of Afganistan, this seems questionable (has Afganistan ever had the infant mortality rate of post-1950’s Syria? Certainly not in the past 2 decades). It is hard to imagine a reconstruction effort that would transform Afganistan into a functioning state in 4 years. On the other hand, it is obvious that what we are doing there isn’t anywhere close to the best we could be doing. In the case of Iraq, the failure of the post-war reconstruction has been overwhelming, and is certainly significantly the fault of the occupiers.

Indeed, it is this falure to carry out effective reconstruction that has been a major impetus for the insurgancy (which has, itself, also been responsible for the failure of the reconstruction). I remember hearing an interview (on This American Life, can’t find the specific program right now) with a group of tribal leaders in Iraq (this was in the summer immediately after the war, when the insurgancy was still in its very early stages). They had just come out of a Occupation run meeting to discuss the reconstruction that had gone badly, and they all agreed that they were giving the occupation a few more months to get its shit together and start a real reconstruction, and that if we didn’t they were joining the insurgency. We all know how things went from there.

Dr. Polya didn’t deny Saddam Hussein’s responsibility for deaths under sactions, he merely implicated all of us. It is you who are trying to argue that it was all Saddam Hussein’s fault. So Amp’s analogy to the deadly tug-of-war stands. It was certainly Saddam Hussein’s fault. It was also certainly your fault and mine.

The reasons were as Amprsand said in post 24 and as Nik said all along - they didn’t count in the heavily populated areas where most of the fighting took, or had taken, place.

As for the Iraqi Sanctions policy, you seem to be saying that if Person A and Person B have a tug-of-war in which the rope is wrapped around the neck of Person C, strangling person C to death, person “A” should be able to get out of all responsibility for the consequences by saying “it was B’s fault! B could have acted better!”

That does seem to be Dr. Polya’s position. He supports his positions by saying “the Ruler is responsible for the Ruled, notably in war-time as set out in the Geneva Conventions.” Saddam Hussein certainly ruled Iraq during the time of sanctions, and between the money he made in compliance with the sanctions and the money he made under the table in defiance of the sanctions, he could have taken care of his subjects. So it seems to me that Dr. Polya’s argument that the Coalition is solely responsible for deaths after Saddam was gone means that Saddam was responsible for them while he was in office. I’m curious to hear Dr. Polya’s comment on this. I wonder if he’ll be back?