Iraq Study Group/New Defense Chief
It looks like the shrub needs his daddy to bail him out again. James A. Baker is supposed to be making suggestions to W about what to do about the mess in Iraq. I also see that he got Robert Gates, his dad's old CIA chief to try to fix the problems caused by outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The problem with Iraq is that no matter what we do or how competent the people W hires, Iraq is lost. The civil war is only going to get worse and there is not going to be a democracy no matter what we do. When the Iraqi people went to the polls and voted strictly along religious/ethnic lines it was the last nail in the coffin. They chose to persecute each other and squabble over the oil riches rather than working together. In a true representative democracy, factions are created along political ideology not religious affiliation or ethnic identity. This idea has been lost on the GOP, a party that has been hijacked by the religious right becoming a party that Barry Goldwater would not recognize. Their view of government is overly simplistic as is their black-and-white view of every issue.
What to do about Iraq? I don't think partitioning the country will work since the central region is so mixed. A unity government among people who want to kill each other won't work either. Letting the civil war play itself out is another poor alternated - it would leave hundreds of thousands of people dead and destabilize the rest of the Middle East. It seems like all we can do is hope and pray that the Iraqi leaders come to their senses and decide that working together is better than dying together - though I doubt that this is possible at this point.
I hate to say that Iraq was better off with Saddam in power but it looks so. We would not have 2,900 American dead and several hundred thousand Iraqi dead and we could have focused more on Afghanistan but we let that slip too. I hope things begin to turn around soon but I doubt it. If anything is to be learned from this tragedy it is that preemptive wars are a very bad idea and that the US should not try to export democracy at the barrel of a gun.
The problem with Iraq is that no matter what we do or how competent the people W hires, Iraq is lost. The civil war is only going to get worse and there is not going to be a democracy no matter what we do. When the Iraqi people went to the polls and voted strictly along religious/ethnic lines it was the last nail in the coffin. They chose to persecute each other and squabble over the oil riches rather than working together. In a true representative democracy, factions are created along political ideology not religious affiliation or ethnic identity. This idea has been lost on the GOP, a party that has been hijacked by the religious right becoming a party that Barry Goldwater would not recognize. Their view of government is overly simplistic as is their black-and-white view of every issue.
What to do about Iraq? I don't think partitioning the country will work since the central region is so mixed. A unity government among people who want to kill each other won't work either. Letting the civil war play itself out is another poor alternated - it would leave hundreds of thousands of people dead and destabilize the rest of the Middle East. It seems like all we can do is hope and pray that the Iraqi leaders come to their senses and decide that working together is better than dying together - though I doubt that this is possible at this point.
I hate to say that Iraq was better off with Saddam in power but it looks so. We would not have 2,900 American dead and several hundred thousand Iraqi dead and we could have focused more on Afghanistan but we let that slip too. I hope things begin to turn around soon but I doubt it. If anything is to be learned from this tragedy it is that preemptive wars are a very bad idea and that the US should not try to export democracy at the barrel of a gun.
posted by tcsned at 1:29 PM
2 Comments:
Well written. At least W seems to be getting some sense of reality into his cranium, it's just amazing it took an electoral humiliation like that for it to happen. I am hopeful with Baker involved--history will not be kind to the neocons...it already seems like a bad nightmare.
www.minor-ripper.blogspot.com
I hear ya - as much as I don't like W I don't want to see Iraq totally fall apart. History will view the neo-con era as a low point in US history and a mistake that others will not repeat.
Post a Comment
<< Home