Re: Why do you think we were a target on 9/11?"
We were attacked due to our moral superiority to the rest of the world. Our foreign policy in the Middle East and Islamic fundamentalism played no role whatsoever.
As to the other questions, even though Saddam is a basically secular nationalist more in the Napoleon vein that the Ayatollah Komeini vein, and even though Saddam has never been a state sponsor of terrorism (unlike Iran, Syria, Libya), we must destroy him. Iraq's 1B barrels of proven oil reserves that are only being drilled at 1/4 or so of the pre-Gulf-War rate and a desire to finish Bush Sr.'s war play no role whatsoever in the decision making process, nor does a desire to weaken/destroy any strong regimes in the Middle East that can be viewed as potential threats to Israel.
Instead, we will topple Saddam and instill a modern Western democracy into a state that, were state repression by Saddam eliminated and a democratic election actually held, would probably vote 80% for an Islamic fundamentalist government. Moreover, even though the Kurds make up their own ethnic community in the North, we will somehow keep them from founding their own state and starting a secessionist movement in whatever state Iraq becomes. They will certainly not incite the Kurds in Turkey to start their own state. And, even if they did, there is certainly no way that the Kurds in Turkey would start an uprising in Turkey, leading to substantial instability and likely civil war in that country.
Moreover, the Arabs will not become even more pissed off by our increasing interventionism in the area and become even more excited about destroying the United States.
The Iraq project is dumb-- if we take a war footing, we have to go in and neutralize the governments and mindsets of the entire Arab and Persian worlds (a new imperialist undertaking that I seriously doubt the citizenry of this country, let alone the rest of the world, would tolerate), which would cow them into not being terrorists anymore. I think these actions should be left to the nineteenth century, and a half-ass little butt-kicking of one already emasculated despot and a slaughter of 200,000 or so more people is simply not going to do it.
-Eric |
