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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (5702)	1/14/2004 1:07:23 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 20773

However, I am not sure that bombing a country based on blatant lies, bombing it to the stone age (which it was arguably not as far from as one may wish), invading and occupying the said country, and killing thousands of its civilians is the best way to go about endearing the US to the world. This is certainly not an accurate characterization of what happened. Yes, we probably killed a couple thousand civilians (near the fall of Baghdad, the Iraqis reported 1800 civilians dead). Certainly, as of now, we have saved more civilian lives than the war took. And the bombing was highly targeted; clearly, we will be leaving the infrastructure in far better condition than we found it, so your complaint here is not valid. My (uneasy) feeling is that in the medium-long term, this will breed even more anti-Americanism, Well, in the short-term, it definitely will. But already the Iraqi people are clearly in support of what we've done -- they're nervous about what our intentions are, as they would be. But I think everyone, including the administration, understood the short-term problem, but sometimes you have to endure that to get to the long-term. There is already a democracy in the Middle East, one with more than a 90% Muslim population. Turkey has been a democracy since its establishment in 1920s. Long time ago and a totally different scenario; I think it is difficult to extrapolate to the current situation. Tradition is a very powerful undercurrent in the behaviour of masses, and it is a dangerous error to assume that residents of the Middle East are just Americans with a darker skin color and a weird religion, who, if only they had a baseball bat behind the door, a sixpack next to the couch, and the remote control in the hand, they would be happier. I hear you. And I understand the difficulty. However, I think it is just as dangerous to assume that the people or Iraq cannot, given a chance, exercise self-determination without ending up back where they started. I believe the Iraqi (and Iranian) people simply want an opportunity, and given an opportunity, will make something of it. If you are under the thumb of a dictator and can't speak out against him, it is natural to turn your anger toward the entity that has what YOU want; we became a proxy for a target at which to direct their anger. Time will tell. It is complex operation. But if it works, it will have been a marvelous accomplishment. If it fails, I really don't know that we could be worse off. As it stands, the rampant anti-Americanism threatens our ways of life anyway.