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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: Hawkmoon who wrote (200020)8/29/2006 8:11:52 AM
From: GST   of 281500
 
You cannot have democracy without the rule of law. There is no rule of law in Iraq. The US destroyed the civic order of Iraq and then completely failed to establish a new civic order. Worse still, by engaging in its own lawless behavior, the US lost any credibility as a source of law and order, except that which might be attained by force. This is exactly what Saddam had done and done well. If all we went there to do was to create a civic order based on force, then we would have accomplished nothing. To promote democracy we needed to do something far better than what Saddam had done by force.

To establish a new civic order required acts of leadership and diplomacy -- but we did not have that leadership or diplomatic capacity. Had we the ability to abide by the laws and standards we theoretically espouse, and had we the intelligence not to engage in an illegal invasion but rather chose instead to use legal means, and had we entered Iraq with full knowledge of what it would mean to establish a new civic order, then we would have had a chance to do something useful. But the ideological hotheads in Washington would not go down that road. There is an old saying: What starts out screwed up will end up screwed up. The invasion of Iraq was screwed up even before it began. And it has been screwed up ever since. It did not have to be that way. We had choices. We made bad ones and we made them for bad reasons. The invasion of Iraq does not promote democracy -- if anything, it destroys the prospects for democracy in the middle east for many decades to come.
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