We! The People Webzine: Mommy, He's Looking at Me by Norla Antinoro

by Norla Antinoro
January 16, 2007

Sending them to their room won't stop the battle.

What the various military plans for Iraq have failed to address will be the downfall of all of them. What is the actual goal of the American presence in Iraq, concretely, boldly stated? In order to win or achieve success at any venture one must first decide how that success is to be measured. In order to measure success we must have a clear goal in mind.

Peace in Iraq has a nice sound to it but is not something we can produce nor enforce. Peace cannot be handed down by a superior force and then passed off to lesser trained troops who may side with one or the other faction to enforce. Peace at gun point is difficult to maintain at best. Like any punishment based approach it is doomed to failure the minute the enforcer/parent is out of the room. The only way to have peace in any place, whether it is the children's bedroom or a country, is for the people who live there to have a hand in developing that peace and an investment in its success.

Right now the largest investment in a stable Iraq is held by the American based oil companies. Of course it would be lovely for the people who live in Iraq if some sort of peace could be developed that had a chance to last but that is not a gift that can be given by outsiders. Peace in any nation must come from within its own people. And it does not come form force of arms. It comes from negotiation and statesmanship.

The Sunni and Shiite forces neither one have any investment in an American led peace. Each wants to own Iraq. So nothing we do in the way of forcing a peace is going to mean anything at all to them. They will simply wait us out and when we leave the room they will attack each other again until they resolve their own difficulties or destroy each other in the attempt.

They will not either one accept a divided Iraq, part given to the Sunni, part to the Shiite. They each want the whole thing. We can beat the drums forever and we will never find a cadence that will get them marching together.

I maintain that bringing peace to Iraq is not what we are or should be doing there. Whatever our original motivation for the war in Iraq, we are now faced with an unwinnable conflict. To play in this arena is to lose, for all sides. No one will win this one and the people of Iraq will pay the ultimate price for the lose-lose situation that exists.

No matter who put us there, no matter why, we are there and need to leave. If the corporations want access to the oil fields to develop those resources, they need to negotiate with the people of Iraq for that privilege. Taking that access by force of arms is wrong and, as has been shown more than once, not feasible. IT does not work and we have demonstrated that. This government is neurotic if it believes that by doing what has failed again and harder we will be able to gain the goals that have so far eluded us.

If they insist on staying in Iraq, then they should pull back to the oil fields and the bases already established and let the Iraqis handle the situation in their country. Yes, we stirred the ant hill and caused untold damage. But we cannot fix it by doing the same thing over and over again. Poking the same big stick into the already chaotic ant hill bigger and faster than before will not bring order, it will merely perpetuate the chaos.

Iraq is not our country. Peace in Iraq is not ours to give. It is up to the people of Iraq to make peace with their neighbors and cousins. We cannot impose such a peace from outside. If imposed, it will not hold. It will fall apart the minute we relax our vigilance, even if we do establish a temporary slow down of hostilities.

This truth has been proven by history, it has been demonstrated in the laboratory, it is true for every species that learns. Punishment based learning will disappear when the source of the punishment is gone. Peace brought from without by force of arms will disappear as soon as those arms are gone.

To have so many of the minds of America working at this straw problem is a waste of resources. We cannot bring peace to Iraq. We cannot establish stability in that country. The Bush League does not even want us to do that. They have no interest in the welfare of Iraq or Iraqis. They only want enough stability to get the oil out and into their hands.

So we are faced with a situation where many good people are striving with all their energy to make a plan work that has no chance of working. They are thrashing around in the quicksand, which only brings about a faster sinking into the quagmire. These minds that are trying to establish a way to implement Bush's 'plan for Iraq' in such a way that it has a chance of accomplishing something could actually be doing important work that might improve the welfare of Iraqis and Americans alike if they were to recognize that the plan they are trying to fix is unfixable, the war has been lost by all sides and the field needs to be abandoned.

Bring American troops home. Provide support to the Iraqi governments own attempts to rebuild. Negotiate oil development. Negotiate bases for our military. Accept once and for all that military might can no longer hold the world in check. It has grown too large and complex for that. Warlords can no longer rule the earth. Small plots were all they could ever subdue effectively even in simpler times.

Humanity must move beyond the bullyboy tactics and embrace rational discourse and mutual respect.