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Politics : Stop the War! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (615)	3/20/2003 3:50:47 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Respond to of 21614

Right--job creation and education and training, coupled with a huge economic recovery plan could easily show people, even those with only a fundamentalist Muslim education, a better way. I would be very surprised if such an outcome would occur for two reasons: 1. Bush has a record of moving from one issue to another without harnessing the necessary political support to stay in one place till the job is done. He won't risk the cost of redeveloping Iraq when there is so much to be done on health and education issues at home. 2. Despite all the rhetoric about building a democratic society, this is not going to happen for a long time, if ever. It goes back to the difficulty of separating religion from secular politics in a Muslim culture whose tradition is that the religious and secular heads of government are one and the same. The only places where this monolithic structure is beginning to break down are Turkey, because of Ataturk, and Iran (oddly enough), where the religious leaders at least acknowledge a secular component to government. As for Iraq, the present government, while somewhat secular in its orientation, is still a dictatorship. There is no tradition of participative government or pluralism in decisionmaking. It could happen in about a generation, but Bush isn't interested in waiting that long, and neither are most of his supporters. Art