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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 29-Apr-07
Senator Joe Biden wants to move troops from Iraq to Darfur civil war

Web Log - April, 2007

Senator Joe Biden wants to move troops from Iraq to Darfur civil war

Saying on Meet the Press that we should remove troops from Iraqi "civil war," the Delaware Democrat strongly criticized President Bush for continuing to be involved in Iraq, but for not getting involved Darfur. Biden is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is running for President.

Joe Biden on <i>Meet the Press</i> <font size=-2>(Source: NBC)</font>

Joe Biden on Meet the Press (Source: NBC)

Biden repeatedly told Tim Russert on Meet the Press that the Iraq war was a civil war. Here's how he put it, at first describing the bill that just passed in the Senate:

"[The bill says] Mr. President, you've got to start moving combat troops out of harm's way now. The whole function of this is to try to get this president to change his strategy here. He operates on the premise that if we put enough troops in the middle of a civil war, we can give breathing room to a group of people in Baghdad to get together and form a strong central government that's a democracy. That will not happen in your lifetime and mine. I said that four years ago, I say it now.

The only rational purpose for troops in Iraq now - train Iraqis prevent al-Qaeda from occupying large chunks of territory, and we should begin to decentralize the government. That's the underlying essence of what the language in this bill is about. It says though start now to redeploy and have as a target to get out by April 1 the bulk of your combat troops. I strongly subscribe to that view. ...

We're trying to fundamentally change what this President is using our forces for. He's in the midst of a civil war, with the flawed objective of establishing a strong central government. That will not happen. And we have an obligation to push back as much and as often and as thoroughly as we can.

[Russert said that Biden had repeatedly changed his mind.]

The problem here is this is also a moving target. I also called for more troops in Iraq. I called for more troops on this program a couple of years ago. That was in order to stop a civil war. Once the civil war began, I was on the program after that, saying, all the troops in the world cannot settle a civil war."

OK, that's what he said at the beginning of the interview. Here's what he said later in the interview:

"The conduct of this war has so badly damaged our readiness; the conduct of this war and the blood and resources we've had to expend has limited our credibility around the world, and limited our flexibility in terms of the use of force. Here we are - we could end the carnage in Darfur tomorrow."

This is hardly the first time that Joe Biden has called for an invasion of Sudan's Darfur region. Here are excerpts from a news story from April 11:

"Biden calls for military force in Darfur

'I think it's time to put force on the table and use it'

WASHINGTON - Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democratic presidential candidate, called Wednesday for the use of military force to end the suffering in Darfur.

"I would use American force now," Biden said at a hearing before his committee. "I think it's not only time not to take force off the table. I think it's time to put force on the table and use it."

In advocating use of military force, Biden said senior U.S. military officials in Europe told him that 2,500 U.S. troops could "radically change the situation on the ground now."

"Let's stop the bleeding," Biden said. "I think it's a moral imperative."

Under U.N.-backed agreements approved last fall, a hybrid force of 22,000 African Union and U.N. peacekeepers are to be deployed in Darfur to protect and provide relief for 2.5 million Darfurians who have been forced from their homes and are now confined to camps.

"We must set a hard deadline for Khartoum to accept a hybrid U.N.-AU force," Biden said."

Now, let's see. Biden calls Bush "incompetent" because he sent too few troops into Iraq in 2003, but now he wants to send just 2,500 US troops into Darfur to stop a civil war against 2.5 million Darfurians, even though the United Nations had called for at least 22,000 troops.

He says over and over and over things like, "All the troops in the world cannot settle a civil war," and now he's criticizing Bush for not trying to settle the Darfur civil war with 2500 troops.

You know, dear reader, I realize that I get criticized for calling these people "idiots," but I just can't help but express my sheer contempt for people like this. Is he just lying, and knows that what' he's saying is crap? That's quite possible - after all, he IS a politician. But let's suppose that he actually believes what he's saying.

Biden certainly doesn't know what's going on in Iraq. We know from articles in the Congressional Quarterly that Washington journalists, analysts and politicians have no idea what's going on in Iraq. They don't know the differences between Sunni and Shi'ite, they don't know that al-Qaeda is operating in Iraq, and they don't know that al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization. So Biden is just one of the mob in that regard.

The mob in Washington, including Biden, are also unaware that the Darfur genocide is a civil war, that began in the 1970s between farmers and camel herders, escalated slowly during the 1980s and 1990s, and became a genocidal crisis civil war in the early 2000s. The Washington politicians and journalists know even less about Darfur than they know about Iraq, and we know from the Congressional Quarterly articles that they know nothing about Iraq.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, putting American troops into the middle of the Darfur civil war would be a total disaster for America. This is a real crisis civil war, in fact the only generational crisis war going on in the world today (though the Sri Lanka civil war will be there soon ). In 2004, when the Darfur situation first gained international focus, I wrote that the U.N. is completely irrelevant to the Darfur genocide, and that it would not be stopped until it's run its course. That has continued true to this day. The genocide has gotten worse, and has even spread into neighboring countries Chad and Central African Republic.

On the other hand, the Iraq war is NOT a civil war, as I've written many times, and described in a lengthy analysis of the current situation in Iraq. Those car and truck bombs that lead the news every day are the work of al-Qaeda, and the suicide bombers themselves are all foreigners (Saudi and Jordanian), almost without exception.

So Senator Biden wants to remove all our troops from Iraq, which is NOT having a civil war, and allow the invading al-Qaeda force to take complete control of the country, or at least of Anbar province in the West. And he wants to move the troops into Darfur, where there IS a genocidal civil war going on, with millions of people on both sides.

You know, Tim Russert could have asked Biden why he wants to move the troops out of Iraq into the civil war in Darfur. That's certainly the question I would have asked, if I had been interviewing Senator Biden. But he didn't, and that's because Russert doesn't know what's going on in the world either.

In the Sunday interview on Meet the Press, Biden kept babbling about a "strong centralized government," which he said was impossible in Iraq. Thus his proposal is to partition Iraq into three autonomous regions, the west for the Sunnis (Anbar province for al-Qaeda), the south for the Shia, and the north for the Kurds, a proposal of monumental stupidity, as I wrote about last week in my article about Biden's soulmate, NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

It is worth mentioning again that Biden's proposal is COMPLETELY anti-historical. Biden talks about "going back in history," but by that he means three or four years. If you go back a little further to Iraq's crisis wars, then you find something quite different. In the 1920s-30s, in the aftermath of the Great Iraqi Revolution of 1920, you find that Iraqis put their Iraqi identity ahead of the sectarian religious identities. Next, in the Iran/Iraq war of the 1980s, all Iraqis, including the Shi'ites, fought on the side of Iraq, and did not join with Iran.

But here's what Biden said on Sunday about getting to a partition of Iraq:

"What this is about is we have lost 3300 dead, we have 24000 wounded, and we still have an opportunity to deal with the possiblity of not trading the dictator for chaos, but it will not happen unless we have a serious change in our operating strategic premise. And that is we have to decentralize, not centralize this government. We've got to get the world community in on owning part of this, by calling an international conference to put pressure on the regional powers. If we don't do those two things, I don't see a happy ending to this whole undertaking. We may be forced into a position where there's no option, at some point, to withdraw and try to contain the chaos."

Now all of this is total guesswork by Biden, who is completely clueless about what's going on today, let alone what might happen in the future. But this remark shows that his ignorance is truly cavernous, because the "international conference" he's talking about is already scheduled.

There is an international security conference on Iraq on May 3-4, to be held in Egypt. The big news on Saturday is that Iran is going to attend this conference, where previously they had refused. While Joe Biden was talking on Meet the Press, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was on the other Sunday talk shows answering questions about this very conference.

Now, how stupid is Joe Biden, when he calls for an international conference when Condoleezza Rice and Iraqi authorities had already set one up for next week? You see what I mean when I say Biden is a moron?

And, of course, Tim Russert might have challenged Biden at that point. "Why, Senator Biden, are you not mentioning the international conference that's already scheduled in Egypt next week?" But probably Russert doesn't know about it either.

One more point: If an international conference is such a great idea, why didn't he propose one for Darfur, instead of wanting to have the U.S. invade Sudan? Well actually, there have been international conferences in Darfur -- in the United Nations Security Council -- and they've been a total waste of time. If international conferences don't work in Darfur, why on earth does Biden's tortured logic propose one for Iraq? Really, this guy makes "stupid" a compliment.

I'm sorry, I'm just so contemptous of people like Joe Biden and Tim Russert. These are supposed to be our nation's leaders, and every time I see them, it sickens me how pathetically ignorant they are of even the simplest facts about the world.

Here's another of Biden's concepts, as he explained it to Tim Russert:

"[President Bush] is in the midst of a civil war, with the flawed objective of establishing a strong central government. That will not happen. ...

There's never been a time in history that I can think of where there's been a self-sustaining cycle of sectarian violence, that has ended even remotely reasonably without a federated system. Never."

He delivered the last sentence with special emphasis and sternness. I don't know what he's talking about -- and neither does he -- but the American Civil War was finally settled with a strong central government. The Cambodian civil war in the 1970s and the Rwanda civil war in 1994 were also settled with a strong central government. I think Biden was just babbling random words.

Let's address one more of Joe Biden's topics, because it raises some interesting theoretical issues:

"You know what happened in the Balkans. Once there was a political agreement reached as to the separation of the parties, from Brcko [pronounced Birchko] to Sarajevo to Srebrenica, there was an incredible diminution in the internecine warfare. Why? Because in the context of an overall political settlement. What this is all about is manoeuvering -- each of these groups -- to determine who is going to call the shots."

Now, Biden's words are total nonsense, and he has no idea what he's talking about, but even Donald Duck occasionally quacks something out that raises some interesting theoretical issues.

The comparison of the Iraq war to the Vietnam war has been troublesome to the Democrats, because after the Americans evacuated Saigon, there was a massive genocidal civil war in "the killing fields of Cambodia" that killed millions of people. The Democrats seem to realize that a similar outcome in the Mideast would be disastrous, so Biden is presenting a different comparison: He saying that we should set up an international conference, like the one we set up in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, at the end of the Bosnian war. After that, as he points out, things settled down.

Let's discuss the theoretical factors affecting his proposal in the Vietnam War, the Bosnian War, the Darfur war and the Iraq war:

The Bosnian War. The Dayton conference was set up at the end of the war, after four years of genocidal crisis warfare, including the Srebrenica massacre, and after the intervention of the Nato forces. At this point, the genocidal war had run its course, and would have settled down even without any international crisis.
From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, I sometimes compare a crisis war to a ball rolling down a hill. A war may begin with years or even decades of low level violence -- occasional terrorist acts or police actions, but general restraint on both sides. In the analogy, the ball might start out very slowly, going back and forth, perhaps getting stuck in the tall grass. Soon it starts to pick up speed, going faster and faster, gathering momentum. Once it has enough momentum, it can't be stopped by any human force. Finally it reaches the bottom in a massive explosion. In the case of a crisis war, it starts out slowly, and becomes increasingly violent as time goes on, ending in a massive genocidal explosion.
In generational theory, the point where the ball has too much momentum to be stopped is called the "regeneracy." In the case of a war, this is the point where the society turns away from political bickering and unites against the enemy. The society has literally been "regenerated" as a unified society, and at that point cannot be stopped.
But once the explosive climax has been reached and passed, a new phase begins, and the society enters a "recovery" phase. The survivors of the war vow that they'll never let anything so horrible ever happen again, and they set up institutions and define austere rules to guarantee it. In the case of the Bosnian war, the Dayton conference was part of the Recovery phase. This succeeds as long as the survivors are still alive; after the survivors have all been replaced by younger generations born after the war, a new crisis war can begin.

The Darfur War. The Darfur war is still raging in full genocidal fury. The ball is still rolling down the hill, and increasing in speed. No human force can stop that ball, or the Darfur war, today. The Darfur war is headed for some explosive conclusion that cannot yet be predicted. No international conference, or any sort of negotiation or mediation, will have any effect until that explosive conclusion is reached.

The Vietnam War. At the time that America evacuated Saigon, the crisis civil war in Vietnam had not yet ended, and the crisis war in Cambodia had just barely begun. One explosive conclusion occurred in Vietnam, as the North Vietnamese poured into Saigon and purged the South Vietnamese; and a separate explosive conclusion occurred in Cambodia, as millions of people were slaughtered. The American armed forced could never have prevented those conclusions, and no international conference would have had any effect.

The Iraq War. The Iraq war is NOT a crisis war, so the above considerations do not apply. The Iraqi people are in a generational Awakening era, and have no desire for war. An international conference could very well work.
However, Iraq is being invaded by foreign forces -- al-Qaeda -- a force that is coming from countries, especially Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Jordan -- that are in full generational Crisis mode. So some regional neighbors might be willing to help stabilize the region, but al-Qaeda will never do so. Any international conference will be considered a sign of weakness by al-Qaeda, and in any event they will continue their program to destabilize Iraq, and bring war to the entire Mideast.

I've been saying for years that, despite the nonsense going on in the clown circus Congress today by Biden and others, my expectation is that American forces will be in Iraq until the Clash of Civilizations world war begins, at which time they may be forced to leave because they'll be needed elsewhere. Once that happens, Darfur-type genocides will be the norm, rather than the exception. (29-Apr-07) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 29-Apr-07 Senator Joe Biden wants to move troops from Iraq to Darfur civil war

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 29-Apr-07
Senator Joe Biden wants to move troops from Iraq to Darfur civil war