Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (153958)	12/14/2004 3:05:39 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Mike, you ask a tremendously intriguing question. I.e.: "I have a question and this goes to neocon ideology. If the force assembled to topple saddam was large enough to restart the country and secure borders before an insurgency broke out, would the war still be wrong. At that point there were a couple of thousand iraqi dead and under american dead. I may be dead wrong about this but i think that if rummy/cheney had followed powell/gulf war lessons rather than war on the cheap, the cost would have been a small price to pay for removal of saddam and creation of a free fledglinng somewhat democratic/islamic/federated iraq. I place the blame for this mess at the feet of cheney/rummy operations and not at the ideology itself. We will never know. I suspect you disagree." We don't have enough time to list all of the qualifiers needed to answer that question, but I can say that in my opinion the answer largely hinges on the question of whether in doing so we were offering limited "help" to a legitimate Iraqi movement, or whether we were trying to "create" a legitimate Iraqi movement that would follow our views of what they "needed." In this instance there was NO legitimate Iraqi movement to help unless it was the movement of the Islamics, and it's clear we were trying to suppress that movement rather than assist it. We were, therefor, attempting to use military force to alter a culture, a nation and a society for the purpose of imposing our views of the way their internal affairs should be conducted. We went so far as to TELL them how they would treat their women and their minorities, how their government would be structured, what their constitution MUST contain, and the role that their religion would have in government. We also initially told them that our involvement would necessarily be a "generations long" affair. No matter how many men we'd gone in with, that effort was doomed to create an intractable insurgency that would resist us ruthlessly. Any "neocon" ideology that assumes that military might can alter cultures, change ideologies and move little people to flow like sheep into pastures of "acceptable behaviors," is a fatally flawed ideology. The people who believe in that ideology have too little understanding of human nature and too little respect for the awesome cumulative power and nobility of the faceless people that toil live and die in anonymity. Those little people are the most powerful force on earth when their collective backs are up and their passions run high. They will make you pay a high price for your folly. But if we had intervened to "tip" the balance of power to enable a forming popular movement in Iraq that we favored and that we could then leave, (as the French did for us,) that would be a much more doable "change." As you can see, that wasn't the situation that existed in Iraq, and our young soldiers are paying the price for our initial arrogance and stupidity, and now our astounding inability to admit that, whatever the real motives for our adventurism, we must quickly cut our losses and leave. Ed