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

To: Bilow who wrote (118488)	11/4/2003 7:59:05 AM
From: Sam	Respond to of 281500

The situation in Iraq is ugly. What Bush did was to trade a situation where we could bomb the locals into a pretty good version of submission from 50,000 feet while remaining immune to their attacks, for a situation where they can bomb our soldiers with IEDs, mortars, and SAMs while remaining relatively immune to our counterattacks.... The country whose citizens were responsible for destroying the WTC was Saudi Arabia, a country with which our relations are the best.... Probably the worst thing that could happen to us, as far as the war on terror goes, is to convert Iraq into an "ally" like Saudi Arabia, where the government is nominally an ally, but the people hate us and are, in fact, our true enemy. Well said. Bears repeating. So I did.

To: Bilow who wrote (118488)	11/4/2003 8:44:23 AM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Bilow--stream of consciousness below looking for common ground and new ideas. These are just out of the box ideas to save american lives without having to go to unilateral withdrawl which i still feel is the bigger disaster. Turkey and Iran both help if it is in their interest to. We need to get them to see it that way if possible. Turkey-Kurdish relations can improve too if there appears to be common interest. Northern oil, pipelines and autonomy for the Kurds may create this. An Iranian protectorate in shiite south must take into account that iraqi version of shiism is different than that of the mullahs but perhaps not much different than more liberal version of irans population. Perhaps iraqi shiism falls in the middle. In the NYT today you can read about virtually 100% anti american attitude in falujah and tikrit because of tribal stuff and patronage from the formal regime. Bagdad however is a mixed bag with more support for the US than opposition. (My inference) So if US can control north and south by proxy with cooperation of turkey and iran respectively, US can control the west and the city of badgdad. Tikrit and Falujah can be cordoned off. Perhaps more troops are needed for what i would call a benign blockade, forcing chieftans to weigh support for baathists and terrorist against joining in a new iraq, much like warlords did, albeit with difficulty in afganistan. Since we have polar opposite views, i am curious whether you feel that my alternate plan to current admin plan and your pullout view, which may rest on an impossibility of getting iran and turkey onboard, has any merit. Iran, Turkey and Israel were the pillars of US policy during the cold war. Perhaps again today. Of course we all hope that iran will become a democratic state on its own. mike Re: Iran and terrorism. I have the view that iran terrorism is less global and more specific to mideast than sunni/saudi/wahabi version. I dont think iran is looking to convert the west to islam by terror so in that sense its not global terrorism. An acceptable peace between israel and palestine will go a long way to reducing iran terror. In order for that to happen, iran needs to become a player in the process and not just a rejectionist state. Also the Wahabis have to be anathema to iran as were taliban offshoot so we(the west) should be on the same page there. All cooperation between iran and al quaeda is tactical. Bin Laden is a bigger threat to shia than he is to us.