Posted by
Reeson on Monday, January 15, 2007 7:26:56 PM
Mr. Ferguson misses a key point with his article: the United Nations doesn't want any part of Iraq. Does he really believe that they would take it if we gave it to them? Excerpts from an article in the
Los Angeles Times:
Niall Ferguson
TO: The President
FROM: Secretary of Defense
SUBJECT: Iraq
I am deeply concerned about Iraq. The task you have given me is becoming really impossible….
There is scarcely a single newspaper … which is not consistently hostile to our remaining in this country…. Any alternative government that might be formed here … would gain popularity by ordering instant evacuation.
…. At present we are paying … millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.
*
ACTUALLY, NO. That wasn't a leaked memorandum from Robert M. Gates to George W. Bush. It was, in fact, a memorandum from Winston Churchill to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, dated Sept. 1, 1922, when Churchill was colonial secretary and Lloyd George's government was on its last legs. The point is, of course, that we — by which I mean we British — have been here before. Despite having defeated an Iraqi insurgency two years previously, Churchill dreaded "living on an ungrateful volcano" for an indefinite period. To judge by the latest polls, a substantial majority of Americans feel much the same way about Iraq today.
For all his faults, Bush is right about one thing: "To step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear the country apart and result in mass killings."
The flaws in Bush's new plan are real enough. But they are not the flaws the Democrats want to name. The most obvious one, articulated (bravely, in view of his presidential hopes) by Sen. John McCain, is that 21,500 extra troops will not be enough. In 1920, when they crushed an insurgency, the British had about one soldier for every 23 Iraqis. Even with the projected "surge," the ratio of Iraqis to Americans will be 174 to 1.
Bush's medium-term goal of handing over responsibility for law and order to the Iraqi security forces is also fatally flawed. Left to their own devices, those forces will become at best ineffective and at worst active participants in the civil war.
For these reasons, I see only one credible alternative to Bush's strategy: U.S. forces should hand over responsibility for Iraq's security not to the Iraqis but to a new force provided by the United Nations.
The challenge would certainly be a daunting one for the U.N.'s new secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon.
But what's the alternative? After all the disappointments of the 1990s, I never thought I would see myself write these words, but here goes: It's time to send in the blue helmets.
nferguson@latimescolumnists.com