There is no way to prove this, but I have always felt that because the United States did exactly what it said it was going to do in Iraq, and because it was perfectly clear that we did not wish to occupy the area, the paranoia about the United States that had helped keep the Soviet Union together vanished. We went in, made military history, and got out (mostly).
As I need not say, it's a lot more complex than that. The Soviet Union simply could not digest one more Moslem country, namely Afghanistan, and abandoned a pattern of encroachment and conquest that had been going on for centuries.
Also, leaving Saddam in control meant leaving a threatening Moslem presence in the area and helped assure that the other oil-producing countries would keep supplying us. An effort to totally defeat and dominate Iraq, and reconstitute its government, might have roused the kind of feelings among other Islamic countries that we now see.
The United States has every right to go after bin Laden, even if it should turn out that it was some other organization that actually supported the WTC attack, and I hope we can get him and get out of that part of the world as quickly as possible (except for continuing humanitarian aid, of course).
I guess I have to hope that Powell and Cheney and Rumsfeld and others are getting enough intelligence to handle this with the right mix of force and diplomacy. I think Bush was good for one good speech, and that's about it. |
