Change For The better

[uwe]

People are dying in Iraq every day - Americans and Iraqis. If that is not a valid subject to have extreme disagreements on what is? eb2 has strong views on Iraq (and not just on Gibson bar bridges  ), he's allowed to have them, but I don't see his post as uncivil and he has argued his case, not just screamed insults and allegations at everyone. No reason to pounce upon him
for what is meanwhile a bravely unpopular opinion and let's not forget that both Ms Clinton and Herr McCain essentially share his view, neither of them a radical devoid of sensibilities.

I agree that Democrats are not automatically foreign policy saints (neither Kennedy nor Johnson were, Carte's reaction to Russia's Afghanistan invasion was naive - and in a cruel twist of fate a contributory factor to 9/11 - as was his treatment of Iran in the hostage crisis) and Republicans warmongers (neither Nixon nor Ford would have made Carter's mistakes when Russia invaded Afghanistan, they were too much "Realpolitik" for that and missed his evangelist zeal).

Iraq was a rogue state, yes. A vile dictatorship, yes. An enemy of the US, yes (but as long as it went against Iran you had little issue supporting and arming it). And Saddam many times over a murderer. But if that is supposed to automatically trigger a US intervention, the US still has quite of an agenda before it on the world map ... Do you really want to conquer them all?

What I missed in the descision of "invading" or "liberating" Iraq was any kind of weighing of the cons and the "what if ..." scenarios. No one seems to have given a thought about how Iraq held Iran in check and vice versa, no one seemed to realize that Iran is a product of arbitrary colonial borders with three large ethnicities and how a sepearate Kurdish state (with oil control) would have huge implications for close US ally and soon to be EU member Turkey with its huge kurdish territories and minorities. No one saw (or seemed to admit to seeing) that the evil in Iraq was inherently different to the evil of Osama, that Iraq was basically the military rule of a clan, but of a non-fundamentalist, even atheist clan. Iraq wanted to be a culturally largely westernized modern (police) state with enough military might to bully everyone in the region around, but they did not want to return to a muslim stone age nor was ever their support of the mujadin in Afghanistan reported - a civilized western democracy did that. Saddam and Osama couldn't have been farther apart, the only unifying aspect was fear and loathing of the US and Israel, a sentiment shared by many in the region but never quite enough to unify the Arab states as Nasser found out long ago.

But it is what it is now. Though it pains me to see the daily mounting US casualites and Iraqi terrorist bombing victims, a sudden withdrawal would be an even worse option - just look at what happened to Afghanistan after the Russians left as a stabilizing force and where it got us.

Uwe

PS: May I add a cynical thought? For all the money and resources spent in the Iraq war you could have easily bribed Saddam out of the country and gotten him a nice, well-guarded Swiss castle with golden bathrooms and a fleet of Ferraris for his two sons. You could have basically bought the country and bribed every inhabitant into voting to be the 51st State of the US. 

PPS: I didn't see until after my posting that this thread was locked (but that I could still actually add a post). Otherwise I would have stuck to that decision.