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

To: neolib who wrote (161935)	5/13/2005 5:03:26 PM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

The Iraqi people need to step up to the plate here and finger the bad guys with more regularity.....if they do not, the situation will become untenable....

To: neolib who wrote (161935)	5/14/2005 12:23:36 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Much safer than the compliant ones are under the US occupation. If under Saddam, the level of random violence was what we are seeing now, he would not have lasted either. Surely you can grasp this little difference? Not really, because the difference is less than you make out. It takes a large amount of killing to keep up a proper climate of fear, and compliance is no safety when the dictator is paranoid and crazy and the mukhabarat & its informers (which probably includes your neighbor and your brother-in-law) have a quota to fill and a pressing need to prove themselves loyal before someone else can accuse them of being complicit in anti-Saddam behavior. The best description of such a system is in the opening pages of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, where he compares the whole system to a sewer, designed to keep a steady supply of prisoners flowing out to Siberia. The effect of the current situation, paradoxically, is that people are in more danger when walking on the public street (though even there the effect of the reporting exaggerates the degree of danger) but much safer indoors, with family and friends and acquaintances, because they can speak their mind without worrying if that guy over there is secret police and will somebody come to take them away in the night.