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

To: TimF who wrote (105510)	7/15/2003 3:22:11 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<Most major changes of this type take longer then a few months or year.> Possibly, if the Iraqi people were willing, or sufficiently cowed, we would have years to see if that experiment would work. After all, sometimes it has worked, although it usually took decades. South Korea and the Phillippines eventually became democracies, for instance. But we don't have decades, or even years. The two most powerful ideologies in Iraq, and throughout the Muslim world, are: 1. nationalism (or tribalism, if the nation's borders are absurd) 2. Islam By occupying Iraq, and by backing Israel no matter what it does, and by banning elections, we have united those forces against us. Time is not on our side. Every time an American soldier searches an Iraqi home, every time a civilian is accidently killed, it creates resentment, resentment which expresses itself (in the absence of elections), in RPG attacks on our soldiers. And we can't hold elections, because we'd lose them. The Myth that we are liberators, the Myth that we are creating a democracy in Iraq, is becoming daily more surrealistic.