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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (17664)	11/26/2003 10:05:55 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 793717

The Guantanamo solution A bit harder to manage in Iraq than in Cuba. The key difficulty lies here: Should things get worse in Iraq or the Baath Party leaders come back into power, the United States could easily intervene. Otherwise, let the Iraqis decide their own fate. The most likely scenario for things getting worse would not involve a dramatic resurgence of the Baathers, but rather a gradual decline, with a Shiite dominated government violently suppressing Sunni resistance and the Kurds moving toward separation. This sort of scenario would be ready made for exploitation by Islamists with terrorist sympathies. Intervention would be far from easy. What would be the objective? To remove a lousy government? That would put us right back where we are now, and force us to come up with something better. If an elected Shiite-dominated government turns out to be sympathetic to terrorists in practice while denouncing them in public, how do we manage an intervention? While Americans are patient with George Bush, even with the incessant drip of deaths, they will not be willing to put up with many more months of combat casualties. To ask them to do so would be to strain our resolve and sap our strength. It would squander the determination Sept. 11 left in our national soul to see the war on terror to its conclusion. If we continue the occupation, we will have many more months of casualties. If we end the occupation, we will probably get a Shiite-dominated Islamic state aligned with Iran, which would hardly be a victory in the war on terror. Wonderful options we’ve fixed for ourselves. I wish there were an easy way out, or a single strategy that would provide a good chance at a solution. Unfortunately, there isn’t. That’s nothing we can complain about, though. We walked into the kitchen with fair warning, now we have to take the heat.