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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (228335)	4/24/2007 7:50:48 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Look, Hawk, Management 101--the first step to solving a problem is to define it correctly. The real problem in Iraq isn't that al Qaeda is there. The real problem (now) is that the Sunni-Shia rift has been inflamed and threatens to get completely out of control. Until you and Bush get that firmly ensconced in your brain, then talk is silly, and the problem won't even get addressed. sorry, no time today.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (228335)	4/24/2007 3:10:40 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Oh.. so it's going to be some kind of act of "brilliance" to unilaterally withdraw from Iraq? Somehow a functioning government is going to arise after we leave? I'm afraid it's too late for that. We won't be able to impose a stable government in Iraq. We ought to have thought about the likely consequences of deposing Saddam before going into Iraq. That was the "stroke of brilliance," to use the phrase in the same spirit in which you use it above. Now you're blaming the messenger who is telling you that there are no good solutions. You want to keep searching for one, lol, and make things worse by the day. But the truth is we aren't getting anything from being there. Yeah, it will likely be even messier than it is now. And I have little doubt that there will be people who will blame that "messiness" (and, yes, I am understating here, as Rumsfeld did back in 2003-05, and even '06) on people who opposed the war--after all, they are still blame "peaceniks" for the carnage in Vietnam following our pullout there, lol. As if our actions and arming of the 20% of the people who supported us there had nothing to do with making that civil war exponentially worse than it would have been if we hadn't taken over from the French in the mid 50s in the first place. I think it was George Packer who suggested convening a regional conference to discuss ways of avoiding or at least trying to mitigate the worst possible cases--at any rate, whoever it was, I would be in favor of that before completely leaving. Oh.. another stroke of brilliant deduction. We abandon the Shi'a once and they don't like us. We abandon them twice and sudddenly they won't hate us EVEN MORE? And you somehow believe that our staying there is endearing us to them? I'm not at all sure that they will consider our leaving as "abandoning" them at this point. I suspect that the ones who hate us the most just want us out of the way so that they go back to Sunni Shooting. The "inevitable" is never inevitable until you decide to permit it be inevitable. And defeat is not inevitable in Iraq unless we CHOOSE to let the other side win. No. There is, at this point, no "other side". No single other side, that is. There are many other sides. And many of those other sides are fighting each other as much as or even more than they are fighting ourselves. And we can't stop them. It would be extremely difficult to stop them even if we had more than half a million troops over there. But we definitely can't stop them with the manpower we have. You want to talk about "inevitable".. What will be inevitable should the Jihadists win in Iraq is that the students there will find themselves relegated to Jihad, instead of educating themselves how to bring progress and peace to their country: As I said in my last post to you, you have tunnel vision, you haven't defined the problem problem. If only this were a war of "the Jihadists" vs. the US, the problem of Iraq would be infinitely simpler. Then it might actually be winnable. Unhappily, that isn't the problem. In other moods, at other times, you yourself have acknowledged this. For some reason known only to yourself, though, you keep falling back on the Bush propaganda line that the battle there is reducable to the US vs. Al Qaeda in Iraq. If only it was true. But then, this administration and its supporters seem far more enamoured of their fantasies than truth.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (228335)	4/25/2007 4:14:13 AM
From: Don Hurst	Respond to of 281500

>>" Oh.. another stroke of brilliant deduction. We abandon the Shi'a once and they don't like us. We abandon them twice and sudddenly they won't hate us EVEN MORE? "<< Gee, I wonder what the Shi'a of Lebanon think of us since we rush shipped laser guided missiles to Israel so they could kill as many Shi'a as possible and let them use our WMD (cluster bombs) on the Shi'a. I wonder how many Iraqi Shi'a are naming their sons "Nasrallah"? Probably a bunch since that name is the most popular right now in Shi'adom.