Hi h0db; Re: " Saddam is never coming back, ..."
Well if we executed him this would be true, but note that the death penalty has just been outlawed in Iraq. It is traditional to exile or kill ex dictators for a reason. Keeping them alive in their home country is dangerous.
Re: "... and the Sunni resistance will likely decline."
Not a chance. The majority of the Sunni resistance was not fighting for Saddam. In a heartbeat, they change their chant from "hearts and souls to you, Saddam", to "hearts and souls to you, Iraq", or whatever.
It was the fond hope of the Germans that the death of Roosevelt would end the US participation in WW2. The problem was that the war was wildly popular in the US. Similarly, in Iraq, the resistance is wildly popular, far more popular than Saddam ever was.
If anything, convincing the Iraqi people that Saddam is no longer a threat reduces the attraction of coalition forces to them. As long as Saddam was a realistic threat, there were plenty of Iraqis who wanted the coalition forces to remain in Iraq. With Saddam retired, those Iraqis will look at the current situation and wonder whether they can run their own affairs better (for them) than the US does. Since US efforts have been famously poor, their answers to this question will mostly be that they want a chance to run their own country. As Bush refuses to hand power over to the Iraqis, more and more of them will not just passively assist the resistance (by not turning in the guerillas), but turn to actively assisting the resistance.
The whole hoopla is based on the assumption that the Iraqi people are forced to choose between Bush or Saddam. To some extent, this is true, but the absence of Saddam only makes Bush look that much worse. What they will want now (and have repeatedly stated in polling) will be some third alternative, neither Bush (in the form of US teenagers with guns) nor Saddam.
-- Carl |
