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

To: stockman_scott who wrote (62340)	12/19/2002 5:01:02 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Part of this is false: Iraq's current leaders, largely Saddam Hussein's loyal retainers from Tikrit, will almost certainly be killed in the war or its aftermath, in revenge for his brutal policies. Certainly they will lose power. No functioning government will be left in the wake of this bloodbath. There is a very large civil service in Iraq. Much of it is not useful since it's part of Hussein's terror force but a great deal of the rest of it is the usual sort of folk involved in running public works, telephones, bookkeeping etc. Most of these folk would remain after a US invasion. The army is a professional organization much tyrannized by Hussein and his Baathists. There is no apparent reason it might lose its coherence after a defeat by the US. With the removal of the secret police from it's ranks it might turn out to be a more coherent organization than it is now. That depends on US policy.... The author is correct in that a parallel with Japan after WW2 is illegitimate but Iraq is not exactly an unindustrialized country, either: Japan was already a highly industrialized country before the occupation and could realistically set out upon an ambitious course of high-tech development as early as 1946, even in the face of very different American plans to keep Japan a fourth-rate country. Iraq is not an industrialized country with a technologically sophisticated workforce. I suppose the folk who built the WMDs are not technically unsophisticated? The engineers who have built the considerable public works in the country have suddenly lost their professional skills? Does he think all the technically and professionally trained folk who have fled the country leaving families behind aren't interested in doing something there after Hussein? This is really outrageous: Most important, it was U.S. policy during the Cold War to reconstruct Japan as a bulwark against communism. Iraqi reconstruction is not in America's interest, for Iraqi reconstruction would drain oil out of the total supply. Where has this guy been the last 15 months? Of course the US doesn't see Iraq as a "bulwark against communism" but as a bulwark against islamofascism. It's very much in the US interest to rebuild Iraq. His parallel with Afghanistan is also poorly drawn. Iraq does have ethnic conflicts but the various factions, at least the largest of them, are talking to each other about the shape of things after Hussein. The country does not now have well established warlords as seen in Afghanistan and it's not a sure thing at all that such a situation would arise if the US takes the country in an all out occupation. Iraq has indeed suffered under Hussein and sanctions but is the most endowed of mideast countries. It can feed itself, (that it has not been able to - apparently - has everything to do with Husein's mis-management) it does have a middle class, much weakened but still existing, it does have the oil, which is as much a curse as a blessing, it's secular. It's been mis-managed by stalinists and has similar problems as Russia but not as bad on the economic front. Like all the anti-war folk the writer is mesmerized by the oil. In fact, Iraq would be well off if a good bit of the oil revenue never came into the country as it would only make other local products uncompetitive. There's lots of promise in Iraq which the writer doesn't want to admit.