Hi Hawkmoon; Re: "So do you wish to be responsible for turning Iraq into 1980's Lebanon??"
It's outside my power to do that to Iraq. You and yours already did it.
I suppose the next thing you're going to do is to blame Ronald Reagan for the crap in Lebanon. After all, he CUT AND RUN, unlike what you, a hero of the Second World War, would have done.
Re: "Tribe against tribe, clan against clan.. religious faction against religious faction, ethnicity against ethnicity??"
Apparently you want to keep US soldiers in Iraq because you feel that the Iraqis need to have targets available that will keep their minds off their hatred for each other. But your noble sentiments are contrary to your also spouted desire to turn Iraq in to a Democratic utopia.
Re: "Iraq will easily devolve into such civil strife, Kurds and Shiites killing Sunnis, and vice versa."
Let the Arabs take care of the problem that we created, if they can stomach it. We can't fix it, no matter how much you moan about it.
Re: "But you don't care. Let them kill one another."
No, I do care. But the US can't calm the situation down. Every month that goes by the situation becomes worse. Nor is the rapist always the best guy to choose for attending to the victim, LOL. The Bush administration turned Iraq into Lebanon, how the hell can they possibly be the ones that repair it? They were so clueless about the country that they thought they'd be welcomed by liberated Iraqis.
Re: "Good thing most of us have a conscience and hopefully will not permit such a scenario to play out."
You mean just like you didn't permit the electricity to be sabotaged in Baghdad? Like you didn't permit the water mains to be broken? Like you kept the Iraqi people employed? Like you kept the streets safe for women in the country? Like you prevented looting from taking place? Like you stopped terrorism from blowing up buildings? Like you saved the lives of all those hundreds of civilians that have been accidentally shot dead by trigger happy US soldiers?
If you had been able to take care of Iraq in the past your claim to be the ones to take care of it in the future would make a hell of a lot more sense.
The truth is that you have ZERO control over what does and does not happen in Iraq. Not you, not Bush, and not the rest of the American people. The Iraqis are still in control of that country, and will remain so. The targets driving around in armored vehicles are just temporary interlopers that will be gone soon enough and the Iraqis know it.
Ronald Reagan saw Lebanon as a hopeless situation and extracted US soldiers from it after making a few noises to the effect that US resolve would remain undimmed (just like the UN is now making). This was the correct policy at that time. If he'd kept us involved we'd have been attacked by terrorists that much more, and the impotence of US military force in the support of pacification operations against hostile civilians would have become obvious that much earlier.
-- Carl |
