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

To: Bilow who wrote (60022)	12/5/2002 9:51:36 PM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Why should the Iraqis trust the US to replace Saddam with something better? From the Iraqi point of view, the Americans supported the brutal Shah, now supports the nasty Saudis, and the Zionist Israelis. Hell, the US used to support Saddam himself. The basic question is good. The answer is that many don't but not because of the reasons you give. They don't trust the US because of what happened after the Gulf War. The Kurds, Shiites, and exiles as well, who are all talking to the US, all say publicly they don't want a military replacement for Saddam or a Saddam clone and that they won't move on their own unless the US commits itself to action as well. Pre 1990 is water under the bridge. But what I was thinking of was the kind of partly conscious, partly subconcious calculation we all make at time of crunchy decisions. There was an assumption I didn't add to the proposal but I think a reasonable one: in places like Iraq most folk don't believe anything the government says and are vastly suspicious of the motives behind anything it does. I did say in the proposal, which was really just some of the propositions we put into the calculation, that it was proposed by someone I don't like. That's why I put the death possibility so high (dislke has distrust component). What it boils down to is that humans are comfortable being killed by their cars, their friends, and by the usual things, but they go ape nuts when the possibility arises of their being killed by foreign humans. And most importantly, humans get used to dying a particular way, and they don't mind it so much. But they put up a lot of resistance to any new ways of dying, even if it would result in fewer deaths overall. But there's already lots of unacceptable ways (to Iraqis) of dying in Iraq now. That's why I mentioned the family friend being whisked away. There already is a terrible peril. If there's to be a really big change, even if not to a very much better situation, at least that particular account gets cancelled - it's start over time (sort of like all the debts being cancelled when the old king died). (I found the last few lines of Raed's post quite interesting. Does it read like he's going to join the resistance to the US invasion? I don't think so. He doesn't like the US from certain points of view, but if it rolls across the border set on doing down the regime, I don't think he's going to get in the way. And, if he's really an Iraqi person in Iraq, I think he's going to hope the US is successful because he's got an account that needs cancelling before it's opened, doesn't he?)