Originally posted by Seagoon
Perhaps a reality check might be in order?
Sadaam, whom we are now told it would have been better to keep in power, prevented civil war by brutally enforcing the hegemony of the Sunni minority via genocide, torture, summary executions, chemical weapons and generally making the life of the Kurds and S h i' i tes a living hell. ............... So yes, a civil war was "prevented" but at an appalling cost.
So another dictator. I'll never buy the removal of a brutal dictator as a legitimate reason. Western and world powers have allowed, and continue to allow brutal governments and geonocide to continue around the world. The little attrocity in the Sudan, and now spreading to Chad, has accounted for 200,000 to 300,000 deaths and probably several million refugees to date, Actually, the Department of Defence and very little is being done to stop it. The African Peacekeeping Forces are not up to the task, and it is taking months, if not years, to assemble a UN peacekeeping force for the region, which probably will also be ineffectual. The world has always had these kinds of governments somewhere..... not a good thing, but I don't see the world's leading governnments actually doing anything constructive about it any time soon.
After Saddam was removed from power, the Sunni terrorist groups in the country immediately began directing their attacks on the Shi'ites knowing that this would destabilize the nation and make consensus impossible. Their hope of course is to make Iraq ungovernable and force the coalition to withdraw..................... ....
The region is not *ready* for democracy. The culture, the traditons, the competing interests, the religious hatreds, and old feuds and scores to settle..... The tradition is for the strong to seek power by force and hold it by force. The S h ii te s will listen to their religious leaders before they follow their political leaders. Everyone there will follow their clan or tribal leaders before their governments. It's how they prioritize their loyalties. All through the formation of the government, religeous leaders like Al Sadr have been consolidating thier power and organizing their militias. When the Iraqi or U.S. Governments wanted to get the people's attention, they would ask al-Sistani to call on the people (which seems to have weakened Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's position among the young firebrands as being too close to the western occupier, his influence has suffered....U.S. went back to that well too many times....). During the current violence, the story was the Muslim clerics calling for peace and the protection of the shrines from their followers.... the government is weak compared to them. The last round of elections was wrought with fraud. Iran is actively seeking to influence the formation of the Iraqi government, and is becoming more successful than the western efforts.
They were not ready as a people, a culture, by tradition, or a nation for democracy. Only western arrogance can believe all the world is prepared to immediately and naturally become a democratic people. It is a fine ideal, and one that America with its voter turnout history and quality of its politians has yet to achieve fully itself, but not all cultures are quite ready for it.
All we've managed to do is cause the killing of 30,000 to 40,000 Iraqis, actually lower the standard of living and feeling of security for many (Saddam's terror aside, during his rein the people weren't afraid to walk the streets or let their children play outside.....now they are because of the violence, bombings, and kidnappings), and severly destabilize the country.
Now, we are told that "we shouldn't even be in Iraq" because the problem was in Afghanistan. But most sane people realize that as soon as we leave Afghanistan, the current government will quickly collapse and the nation will once again descend into chaos and endless violence. The unlimited supply of new Taliban and Arab Jihadis who stream over the border from Pakistan, and the almost unlimited funding they receive from Petrodollars, will make that inevitable. Even if we had nabbed Bin Laden or made him a martyr, countless other Bin Ladens are awaiting their turn to be the next contenders.
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Taliban and Al Qadea fled Afghanistan to primarily Pakistan and Indonesia, and we pursued them to.... Iraq...... Generally there are about 40 countires identified as harboring, supporting, training, and being active centers for various terrorists cells and movements around the world. Iraq really was not one of them ---- one training camp in the Iraqi north-east used to train people to harrass the Iranians is all that I'm aware of. Surely we didn't go in to protect Iranians from Iraqis?
The "War of Terror" was used as a pretext to attack Iraq. Plain and simple. They saw a region with big oil reserves, access to the Persian Gulf, strategic location for a military presence in the area, and a way to settle an old score. Totally misread the cultural and societal realities that exist on the ground and what it would all cost. Now, it has proven to be a drain of resources and manpower, and terrorists cells have adapted around the world and have been given time to evolve and expand while the west has been distracted.
It will come back to haunt us.
Our stated way of dealing with the problem of Jihad, is to attempt to kill or imprison (and then eventually release) all the active Jihadis, we've been following that approach for decades now, while simultaneously playing Mr. Nice Guy with the forces that produce them. So we kill the members of the terror cell, but we tolerate or encourage the Mosque that encouraged them, the Madrassa that trained them, the Imams that spurred them on, the literature they read, and the countries giving them the money they spent.
Aside from the fact that that approach will never work, it commits us to a "forever war" of attrition. And do we really think we are willing to spend lives for as long as the Jihadis?
But if stamping on them one by one is the best we can come up with, then we'd better stay in Iraq for as long as possible if only to provide a convenient sand-box to which we might attract the newest crops of Jihadis and then kill or capture them. Once we leave, we are back to trying to do that on our own territory, not theirs. And lets face it, once we leave the Dar-El-Islam, and they are able to concentrate on attacking us at home, sooner or later they will pull off an attrocity in the USA of such scale that nothing but massive retaliation will satisfy the public, and which nation are we going to retaliate against?
The muslim faith is growing fast among the poorest people in the world. In a way its the new communism. For a guy living in a mud hut, being told that all he has to do is kill himself in service to God to recieve great rewards in heaven must sound like a good deal. The oil that the west craves comes from these poor countries..... all they see is images of rich societies plundering their own country's resources, and they get nothing from it. Hating the west is an easy sell.
The Department of Defense has taking to calling this "The Long War" actually. As long as western nations need oil from the Middle East, this violence will continue to be with us. And there is no real effort to get away from fossil fuels..... too many entrenched interests in the way things are now. Something on the order of the Manhatten Project or Apollo Program could break the west free of oil dependance..... but it won't happen. Even if it did, what would increased poverty among the Middle East result in? Probably they'd start killing each other as much as trying to kill those in the west.
By no means have we seen the worst of it yet.
