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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (2840)	2/26/2004 12:27:53 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

Yes, and you don't think that it was a religious war? Saddam was secular but you don't think he favored the Sunnis over the Shia? The reasons for the war were secular so the war was primarily a secular war. Religion gets involved like it does with a lot of things in the ME but the Iran/Iraq war was mostly secular. It was not a war to conquer land for the Sunni or to convert Shias to Sunnis. It was not a jihad. It was about Saddam's desire for more power and wealth and prestige. The Sunni Arabs supported Saddam because they wanted him to do their dirty work and put down the Iranian Shia. I think that's called a religious war. The other Sunni countries sent aid to Iraq but they didn't take part in the war. I wouldn't consider their motivations particularly relevant to labeling the war as religious or secular. Also for the other Arab countries their aid was as much about Arab vs. Persian as it was Sunni vs. Shia. The main reason they supported Iraq was they didn't want Iran to dominate the region. Even if Iran was Sunni they still would have helped Iraq to avoid being dominated, esp. to avoid being dominated. Yes, so you were all for sending aid to Saddam......is that right? At the time I didn't really have much of an opinion. In 1980 I was only 12. I can say now that I don't think sending him aid was stupid or evil. I mostly think it changed nothing, it had little real impact. I think if we didn't send any aid things would not have worked out differently. But if things did work out differently one possibility would have been Iran dominating the Gulf, another is the US getting in to a war with Iran. I don't see either of these possibilities as being better then what actually happened. If I was making the decision then and I knew that the aid wouldn't change the outcome and I knew that the war would basically stalemate with or without the aid then I wouldn't send the aid. Why get involved with someone like Saddam without good reason? But if I felt that Iraq would collapse without the aid then I would have sent it. Tim