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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (9771)	3/23/2004 10:22:00 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Brumar, you're a reasonable man but I think some of your facts are slightly off the mark. First, the reason that the efforts of the first Bush to encourage a rebellion did not work was because THE FIRST BUSH decided that he didn't want the rebellion he'd asked the Iraqis to stage. As you may recall he encouraged them and then left them under the Iraqi gunships with no air support after he was informed that the Iraqis were chanting "Ayotolla Al Hakim." The prospect of another Islamic state was, in his view, a greater danger to American interests than a Saddam Hussein led government. Interestingly enough, he later wrote in his book that he did not "complete" the job and take Saddam out because in his view we would be left trying to create order out of chaos. His description of the dangers, cost and problems we would have faced is prophetic when you look at the dangers, cost and insurgency we are facing. Of course those problems will become TOTALLY unmanageable if we try to stand between the Shiite clerics and their view of what the ultimate "Islamic State of Iraq" will be. By the way, did you note that in Afghanistan those that drafted their constitution named their nation the "Islamic nation of Afghanistan." On a second point, I'm not basing my view of the Democrat's attempt to leverage Bush into going to the United Nations and exercising patience on some "new" spin; it was stated at the time by many of the Democrats that they had made a deal to give Bush the authority in return for his promise to work through the U.N. That doesn't mean that Kerry isn't a political pansy. He'd help his cause immensely if he'd take a clearly unpopular position and stick with it. How can you trust someone that ALWAYS tells you what you want to hear? With respect to your point about the middle east and democracy, that's a pipe dream in this decade. You need look only as far as Jordan to find an enlightened leader who is TRYING to lead his country into democracy and cannot do it. There is too much history, too much religion and too many non-democratic values. Each culture moves at it's own pace and "missionary work" always fails. It makes me wince to hear Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice and Bush go on and on about how the Iraqis now have all these new rights under the new "constitution." That temporary document has no weight and confers no more rights than can be enforced through cultural mores or legal institutions. Take women's rights for instance; what cultural mores will support equal rights for women, what legal institutions will protect them. It's a man's world over there and every woman knows it. It's just like the early 1900s in the south. Blacks had all kinds of paper rights but it sometimes meant death to try to exercise them. It's too silly to try to sell "progress" when it's only on paper and written in disappearing ink as well. As far as whether the Bush people intentionally destroyed, or allowed the destruction, of Iraqi institutions, military and police forces, ask yourself exactly what they did to plan for the preservation of those facets of Iraqi society and what they actually did. With the Bush administration actions and words are often at odds. Trust the actions. For me it's simply a matter of keeping a pragmatic view of the world. We can all WANT Iraqis to have a western leaning, human rights sensitive and prosperous society. We can all WANT them to become tolerant of other religions and cultures. We can all want that to spread to other nations in the region. The problem is that the Iraqis don't seem to have our view of the world. When we get finished there we may wish we'd left things to evolve on their own over time, instead of adopting 25 million people that see life far differently than we do. I thought we'd learned that lesson in Vietnam, or from watching what happened to the Russians in Afghanistan, or from watching what happened to the French in the Sudan or Vietnam. Unfortunately this Bush doesn't seem to read much and he never got to see firsthand in Vietnam that when you try to "help" another nation it's like trying to help in a domestic dispute; both the husband and the wife end up piling on.