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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (49433)	10/4/2002 10:56:52 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "Weird conclusion. If they fight our invasion, then they're fighting for Saddam, and he's said they won't do that. I mean, who wants to die for Saddam? So the natural conclusion is, they will passively support the invasion, but look for ways to give trouble later if we don't pull out or put an acceptable government in place." As soon as we attack Iraq, the Iraqis will rally around Saddam just like the Palestinians rally around Arafat, the Americans rallied around Bush, etc. This is a fact of human nature and (home brew as opposed to foreign installed) authoritarian regimes. Iraq's army shouldn't be too much trouble, though we will have to kill a lot of people to get them out of Baghdad. And that's the rub. Killing more people in Iraq is going to make the locals like us even less. So, like Israel, we end up with a "difficult" occupation, but in a nation with much more people, much longer borders, much better armed, and probably less afraid of us than the Palestinians are of the Israelis. It's not like the Islamic Fundamentalists don't have operations in Iraq already. It's fairly obvious that the Iraqi people would flock to those groups to organize guerilla operations against us. Body bags. Re: "I dunno, Kristof's columns always seem to have these strange conclusions. I can't figure out where he's coming from." At least for this article he's writing from Iraq, where he's probably got a better view of things than you do. I seem to recall that he believed that the war in Afghanistan was serving humanitarian goals, as the Taliban was so destructive. I agreed with that. SI search is pretty much busted right now, apparently, so I can't search for his stuff. -- Carl