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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (203874)	9/24/2004 9:16:46 AM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576615

re: Imagine if we left and somehow he <Zarqawi> managed to wrest control of the country from Allawi. That is entirely possible and it would be... Anything is possible, but Zarqawi seizing power is very, very unlikely. You can't base policy on the least likely, worst case scenario. Paranoid imagination does not lead to logical conclusions. John

To: RetiredNow who wrote (203874)	9/24/2004 3:19:49 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1576615

I just heard Allawi speak. He said Iraq is divided into 18 provinces. Of the 18, only 3 are experiencing any insurgency. Within those 3 provinces only a few cities are experiencing insurgency. Sounds good on the surface but when you closer, his words are fairly empty. Most provinces in Iraq are lightly populated and mostly desert. Baghdad has roughly 5 million people out of a population of 22 million. Consequently, the capital has a major impact on Iraqi life. And Baghdad is in constant turmoil. The major city centers outside of Baghdad are Fallujah [Sunni], Najah[Shia] and Mosul[Kurd]. The Sunni territory is under insurgent control. Najah was under Sadr control until the Ayatollah, and not the gov't, brokered an uneasy peace. Mosul suffers from car bombs and the occasional attack but is still under Kurdish control. A new wrinkle is the kidnapping and beheading of Kurds who work with the Americans and/or the new gov't. Neither the Sunnis nor the Shia like the Kurds. So the Iraqi PM saying that insurgent control is small and the country relatively peaceful is like saying that Chicago is under the control of insurgents and there are daily bombings in NYC and LA but MT, ID, NM, Wyoming, ND and SD are seeing little insurgency activity and are doing well. So he said that things are actually not as bad around Iraq as the press claims. Now, I don't know whether to believe him or the press. However, one thing I do know is that Zarqawi is not already in power in Iraq. Right now, he is clearly a destabilizing source, but he does not control the resources of Iraq and can't tap into oil revenues to fund his terrorism. The gov't certainly doesn't have much control over the oil and its revenues either. Oil production has yet to return to the low pre war levels. The pipelines are bombed every other week. ted