Hi Sam; Before the war, our problem was that the nation was led by a guy without sufficient imagination to suppose that his gut feelings were wrong. But our problem now is far worse.
Among important figures in the US, as well as the population as a whole, there is very high support for staying in Iraq. I believe that no matter who gets elected next year, we will remain in Iraq until the price far exceeds our natural inclination to believe the logic: that, because we are a superpower, our military power must therefore be infinite, and so "fixing" Iraq with military power is within the capability of our military.
The one liberal (in the article you posted) who admitted, after the fact, that the Iraq war was a bad idea says: "One point we all seem to agree on is that America must stay and finish what it started." Also note that he still doesn't realize that even if he'd been in charge of invading Iraq he would still have ended up with a resistance to the occupation. Maybe they could have postponed the slide into resistance by another 6 months, but the friction between two peoples so different (American and Iraqi) was inevitable.
The quote carries all the logic of the rapist who decides that since he has ravished a virgin by force, he is now morally required to continue as her husband. There is also an unspoken subtext; that the husband will make the decisions, LOL.
They just don't get it. The Iraqis will continue to fight us, and those they think are allied with us, until we leave. Every decision we make will be second guessed by the Iraqis, no matter what that decision is. If we have full elections tomorrow the Iraqis will conclude that we had done it for our own benefit, and that the elected party (assuming that it cooperates with us) is our puppet. If we postpone elections, the Iraqis will conclude we are doing this for our own reasons.
You just can't win, when you try and marry the rape victim, except by constantly beating the Hell out of her, and we do not have the psychological make up to turn that kind of brutality into our national policy.
With WW2, we beat the Hell out of Japan and Germany before the occupation. If the neocon fantasy of an invasion of Germany in 1934 had happened, we'd be talking now about how the occupation of Germany had failed. If we'd invaded Germany, what would we have done? Our choice would have been to either fight against a resistance supported universally by the German people, or alternatively, to install Democracy in Germany and let them vote the Nazis back into power. The situation in Iraq is similar, except that in addition to the Baathists (or whatever political party would takeover their banner), we also have to worry about the religious fundamentalists.
If we were really planning to bring Democracy to Iraq, I'd think that we'd be seeing more articles about political parties in Iraq being organized. I've not seen any, have you?
-- Carl |
