Page 34 - Flathead Beacon // 7.9.14

34 | JULY 9, 2014
OPINION
LETTERS
A NEW FOREIGN POLICY CONSENSUS?
The outlook for Iraq seemed very different 11 years ago when I rolled from Bashir airfield, which my brigade had taken by airborne insertion, through Erbil amid cheering crowds. Moving into Kirkuk, we faced little resistance but were close enough to Iraqi soldiers that cigarettes were still warm in their ashtrays. The opposition had melted away, and we began working to transition Iraq to a post-Saddam future.
We all soon realized during that terrible summer of 2003 that there was no post-war plan. The L. Paul Bremer III administration in Baghdad was making disastrous decisions that would have consequences that remain today, including the dismissal of the largely Baathist Iraqi army officer corps. These Baathists, along with Sunni tribal leaders excluded in the post-Saddam Iraq, formed an insurgency that took the life of good friends of mine and nearly destroyed the country.
Only years later did Gen. David Petraeus use political and financial concessions and more effective counterinsurgency techniques to bring Iraq back onto a more hopeful path. Even then, though, the war was known to be a strategic failure. We lost thousands of American lives, saw tens of thousands of soldiers wounded, and spent trillions of dollars. And we had removed a fierce and unpredictable adversary from Iran’s borders without achieving any concessions in return.
The violence we see today in Iraq is heartbreaking, but perhaps we as a nation can take something good from the tragedy. I think we may have finally reached a new foreign policy consensus: the U.S. military shouldn’t be used for nation building.
During my deployment to Iraq it was clear that when it came down to our mission – taking an airfield, destroying a bunker, etc. – we were clearly the best in the world. Nation building, however, felt like building a castle on sand. We faced countless obstacles, including frequent troop rotations undermining our relationships with key Iraqi leaders and insufficient and ineffective project funding.
Fundamentally, the nation-building mission we were handed was mission impossible. The dream of a democratic, secular government of a nation where citizens respected various religious and ethnic viewpoints and placed the rule of law above all else was our dream – not theirs. They had other dreams for their country.
The peshmerga fighters I’d smoke cigarettes with dreamed of a Kurdish
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homeland. Others felt secular government must come second to Islam. And in the south, Shiites saw their first opportunity to become the governing ethnic group of the nation. Some feared a darker future; when we raided a Turkmen’s home and found RPGs, he said he simply needed them to protect himself in the coming civil war. Our dream for Iraq failed because it wasn’t the Iraqi peoples’ shared dream.
We must move past the blame game that has dominated the national conversation about Iraq for the past decade and find a bipartisan consensus against launching such a war ever again. I have been spending a lot of time over the past few months talking with voters in my state legislative district, and I haven’t met a Republican or a Democrat who thinks we should put U.S. forces in the war raging across the Middle East.
We now know that even the best military can’t import a dream of a nation foreign and irrelevant to a vastly different culture where there are deep fractures among the people themselves. This is a lesson we should have learned after Vietnam, but now we have two generations of Americans who have lost lives and limbs due to ill informed decisions made by what should be a discredited foreign policy elite in Washington DC.
I pray that the people of Iraq find a way out of this civil war soon, but I expect that they will have do to so largely on their own. If you think we should keep out of Iraq’s civil war, I suggest you let your Senators and Congressman know you expect them to speak up and make our voices heard.
Rep. Andrew Person Democrat, Missoula
OBAMA VIOLATES BALANCE OF POWER
When the Constitution of the United States was designed, there was serious debate about the need for and the danger of an executive branch of the government. It was finally decided that the inherent balance of powers put into the Constitution would prevent the executive branch from exceeding its authority. Woodrow Wilson, FDR and now Barack Obama have figured a way around these constraints and the balance of power between the legislative, executive and a judicial branch is weak if it exists at all. When Obama announced he “had a pen andphone”hewaschallengingtheideaof whether judicial and legislative branches of government are even necessary. By selectively choosing which laws to enforce or ignore and by imposing executive orders, Obama is essentially running the government by fiat. With the power given the president by the Patriot Act, Obama can declare martial law any time he chooses and run the government without Constitutional restraint. I will argue he is doing this pretty much already without evoking the Patriot Act.
Bill Payne Libby
IT’S NOT IF, BUT WHEN
As the meetings proliferate between BNSF Railroad and Glacier National Park, Flathead National Forest, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, Flathead Basin Commission, City of Whitefish, Flathead County, et al, it is clear that the expectation is not if a railroad car derailment will take place someday but when it will occur. Plans are underway for various contingencies of where a catastrophic accident might happen and how to alleviate its damage.
My concern is twofold: (1) How can better safety measures be followed to ensure the railroad tracks are well- monitored for wear and tampering to avoid a track derailment (an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure); and (2) How can evacuation procedures for humans in the blast zone be adopted and then implemented during the crisis? The inevitability of such possibilities mandates that much more be done than has been to date.
Since I last wrote about potential coal car derailments, the much more dangerous, volatile, and explosive light crude oil and tar sands oil cars have come rolling through from East Glacier to West Glacier, through The Canyon (Coram, Martin City, Hungry Horse), and on through Columbia Falls and Whitefish. Added to the severe toxic problems to our waterways that coal car derailments threaten to aquatic life and human recreation in the Flathead River, and to humans drinking polluted well water with its hydrological connection deep underground to the river water, is the possible loss of human life from oil car derailment massive explosions and toxic, choking smoke from the resultant fires.
The problem gets magnified many times as the number of oil trains keeps increasing at alarming rates. BNSF maintains they must transport this cargo, and along this route, due to federal regulations.
My fear is that the general public will leave the planning to lifetime-tenured bureaucrats in the government public sector who do not feel the same sense of urgency as the local private sector citizenry aught to by contributing their own ideas for their own personal safety. Where are you all? Hiding in apathy?
This includes those of you living along the Flathead River corridor all the way south to Flathead Lake. You will get toxic pollutants from accidental derailments along the Flathead River corridors from East Glacier to Columbia Falls. Why aren’t you participating in the disaster contingency planning against that ecological degradation? Again, hiding in apathy?
Bill Baum Bad Rock Canyon
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