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

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (172927)	10/20/2005 3:05:13 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Mary, you never did explain what a "fixed" Iraq would be. Would it be an enlightened society that valued human rights and protected the rights of minorities and women? Would it be a friend of the western nations? would it be an enemy of those radical ideologies that advocate using violence against those viewed as infidels? Would it be a secular democracy, a theocracy or something else? Would the culture of intolerance and oppression that pervades much of that society somehow change? Or would a fixed Iraq be a nation whose culture, world views and internal treatment of minority sects, cultures and women would make us shudder? Would it be a nation that used brutal measures to maintain stability? These are important questions because, depending on what you see as the ultimate goal, the time and effort to get there changes dramatically and some "fixes" may be humanly impossible within a generational time frame. Assuming you can articulate a "fixed Iraq" that you'd consider acceptable, however, will spending a trillion dollars to train Iraqis and to fix the infrastructure and sending 2-300,000 American troops to Iraq likely accomplish that fix? I can't see how. When you examine the reasons Iraq needs "fixing" it's apparent that there are strong ideas driving some very determined, passionate and committed enemies who are dying, and will die, before "being fixed." Some of those ideas are grounded in religion, some are grounded in the culture, some are grounded in nationalistic resistance to being fixed by an armed force of foreigners, some are grounded in a struggle for political power and others are grounded in generations of sectarian animosity and distrust. As with all enduring insurgencies, they have significant popular support or they couldn't create the havoc they're wreaking. If you believe we can "fix" Iraq by spending a trillion dollars without first winning the war of ideas that drive them, then you underestimate the cumulative power of multitudes of men with strong beliefs they're willing to kill and die for. We've underestimated that power before and we shouldn't continue to rush stupidly off that cliff. Remember previous conflicts where small, militarily weak insurgencies wore down and defeated the goals of powerful, foreign-occupying nations? And it's not a matter of more force. At this point we could send in 2 million soldiers and things in Iraq would likely get worse, not better. At the best more troops might drive the insurgents further underground and change the way they operate but it would not reduce their antipathy and determination and there'd be a lot more targets and a lot more civilian deaths. It's the same old story. We've seen the faces of foreigners we tried to "help and fix." For some reason they pay more attention to their dead women and children and the guns we're carrying than they do to our ideas of how they should be governed, treat their women, thank America and view the world. The longer we stay the stronger the hatred grows between them and the soldiers we send to "help" them and the more allies the insurgents secure. That's the lesson of history and that's the clear direction things have taken in Iraq. We're facing a rapidly deteriorating situation there and unless we can find a way to separate "us" from "them" it will get worse. The truth is that we have to have much less interaction with them, not more. And throwing more money at that problem isn't the answer either. We can spend billions for things like infrastructure but all we'll get is more money wasted on security and graft and new, easy targets that we can't protect. And what exactly are are we accomplishing with our increasingly bloody "help." The fact is that we're the sword of the Shiites and the Kurds. We're in the middle of a bitter civil war that will smolder and burst into flames someday and if the Shiites win that war, with or without our help, we may someday question why we didn't support the more secular and less dogmatic Sunnis. Regardless of how you view the internal politics of Iraq, therefor, anyone who predicts that a friendly, peaceful and non-radical Iraq will arise as a result of American ideas, blood and money should take a long, hard look at the limits of American power. And anyone who believes that we shouldn't have gone into Iraq in the first place should remember the reasons it was a mistake then because, when you look closely, you'll find that it's wrong to stay for the same reasons it was wrong to go. In the final analysis it matters little that we broke it. If Iraq must find its own bloody path to stability, division, theocracy or whatever, and history says it must, then we should stop playing God and get the hell out of the way. As heartless as it may seem, we should allow them do what people have done throughout history; let them build their own path and their own future on the bodies of their own dead. They will anyway, the only question is how long we'll stand in the way and how many mother and fathers will lay awake at nights wondering, "Why?" Ed