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

To: geode00 who wrote (217351)	2/9/2007 9:06:33 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

How do you know any of this? Have you done a poll? Observe, listen, think, and conclude. Try it. It works better if you set ideological bias aside. It's simply logical that people are people the world over and that they will act in the same manner, given the same incentives and disincentives, as people the world over. And people all over the world have acted the same way, given similar incentives and disincentives. That's why it was so predictable. You can't tell a Hutu from a Tutsi, and you can't figure out why they want to kill each other, but you can recognize the reality that they do want to kill each other, and anticipate the results. The incentives for sectarian violence in Iraq were in place, developing over decades, long before the US came on the scene, which the Bush administration might have recognized if they had cared to look. So many of the accounts I've read said that there was a window of opportunity, before chaos took hold, to have a socio-political solution. It wouldn't have been perfect or necessarily peaceful but it would have an end game. I absolutely agree that the early stages of the occupation were disastrously inept. I'm not entirely convinced, though, that the final outcome would have been markedly different if that incompetence had been reduced (obviously we can't know what would have happened if...). The incentives toward violence were too strong and had been in place for too long, and the US simply lacked the credibility to act convincingly to create a whole new set of incentives. Ironically, perhaps the most effective way for the US to have stabilized Iraq would have been the most cynical and corrupt device: leave the Iraqi Army intact and appoint a new dictator. It's not likely that such a government would have lasted, but it would have forced the opposition to unite, organize, and act coherently, and that might ave avoided the wholesale anarchy that we're seeing now. does anyone know what in the world the end game is today? Civil war, festering until the Americans get frustrated and leave, then exploding. Epic bloodshed, ending in either partition or dictatorship. I don't "know" that this will happen, but it seems by far the most probable outcome. Civil war was arguably a likely outcome in any post-Saddam scenario, of course, but that's another very hypothetical questions.