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

To: aladin who wrote (113283)	8/29/2003 5:21:21 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Respond to of 281500

I'm sure you are entirely correct, that the Sunni elite, in 1991, had priorities, and their own personal comfort was always given higher priority than that of the non-Sunni non-elite. But the boss of the Iraqi oil company who wrote this article Message 19255510 had 10,000 employees. He, and maybe his top managers, could be considered part of the elite. Everyone else was just a worker bee. Yet, he managed to motivate them (and, notice, he used carrots, not sticks, at least by his own account). He got the infrastructure up and running, in a few weeks, after it had been thoroughly bombed and looted. My point is, our occupation cannot succeed, unless the Iraqis do most of the rebuilding and guarding of the infrastructure. Right now, it looks like a small fraction of the population actively opposes us, just about everyone else is neutral, and almost nobody is actively, enthusiastically helping us. If this continues, we will never get the infrastructure running. There is no way that Halliburton, or U.S. soldiers, or Indians/Turks/French/Germans/Japanese can, either. The foreigners will be sniped at, and it will take only a few incidents of bullets to the back of civilian foreigner's heads, to make the rest go home. Our soldiers don't have the skills, or the numbers. So, the Iraqi people have veto power over the success of our occupation. All they have to do, is stay at home and do nothing (while a tiny percentage fires RPGs at us), and the occupation is made untenable.