I am not an Iraqi, nor am I an Arabist, but commonsense tells me that it won't be prudent to visit Iraq for a foreseeable future, let alone join the US military to fight Iraqi guerrillas. If you had children, you wouldn't encourage them to go to Iraq to put down a raging insurgency, whatever the wish of Iraqis or collective wisdom of scholars of the Arab world.
In any event, notice that Juan Cole isn't having a debate with "radical leftists" in his blog entry that Kevin posted here: <http://www.juancole.com/2005/01/al-hakim-no-to-civil-war-yes-to.html>. He is debating Helena Cobban, who is a "veteran Middle East observer and journalist and a dear friend" of his. According to Cobban's own blog <http://justworldnews.org/>, she is also "probably the only Quaker who's also a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies."
Here is Cobban's blog entry to which Cole replied in the aforementioned entry: "An Announced Deadline for a US Withdrawal: Pro or Con?" (January 20, 2005, <http://justworldnews.org/archives/001088.html>). And her reply to Cole's reply: "Juan Cole's Defense" (January 23, 2005, <http://justworldnews.org/archives/001093.html>).
What's significant about the Cole-Cobban exchange? Not its content, but the fact that it is happening.
By now, it has got to the point where women like Cobban and men like Tom Hayden (cf. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050110/000811.html>) argue against men like Juan Cole and women like Lakshmi Chaudhry. In short, a sharp debate on withdrawal from Iraq has begun among the sort of individuals whom you regard as more "respectable" than "radical leftists" -- the sort of people who otherwise have a lot in common, socially, economically, and politically.
Christian Parenti said to you in your interview with him: "The main thing is that the US can win every single battle in this war and still lose the war. . . .[T]he war is greater than the sum total of all these battles. It's a social political equation. That has to do with economy, that has to do with the civilian management of Iraq. And all of that was so incredibly bungled and so incredibly corrupt that, in my opinion, the war is now over. It's done. The US has lost Iraq. And it will hang on as it did in Vietnam, for five or six more years, killing people, escalating, trying to escalate its way out of it" (November 11, 2004, <http://leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#041111>).
Why will Washington "hang on as it did in Vietnam, for five or six more years, killing people, escalating, trying to escalate its way out of it" even though "it's over"? In part because there are still enough people like you and Juan Cole in the United States -- as well as enough Iraqis who are sympatico with you in Iraq -- who believe that an immediate US withdrawal will be worse than the US occupation. Eventually, you and Cole will change your minds, but not before more Iraqi and American bodies pile up because of Washington's bad faith that "[w]e have to have a proper election in Iraq so we can have a proper civil war there" (Thomas L. Friedman, "Let Iraq Have the Right Kind of Civil War," The New York Times/International Herald Tribune, <http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/01/06/opinion/edfriedman.html>, January 7, 2005), which in reality means that "we have to have a semblance of an election in Iraq so we can pretend to be merely protecting an elected Iraqi government from guerrillas." -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>