Reply #76: I am a funny guy. [View All]

[Fovea]

So let me crack a few jokes for you.

Donald Rumsfeld, shaking hands with Saddam after supplying him with chemical weapons and precursors.

Who is doing this polling? I might trust Pew, but history is replete with photos of smiling, cooperative victims.

Iraqis are not better off today than they were a year ago. That much is obvious. Those Iraqis who support the 'coalition' do so because they hope that they will get rid of or control those 'other' Iraqis.

Iraq is not a country, it is a layer cake of sects, tribes, and cultures. Iraq's future was, and is civil war. First the ottomans held these peoples in empire, then the Brits, then the Baathists, now us.
It is no more viable than Yugoslavia. This is Iraq's future with or without the coalition, because we lack the will to actually stay in Iraq as a governing entity for a generation or two.

What Iraq is, is a territory with a lot of people who do not really get along. If anything, we have gone a long way toward radicalizing a large element of what was a predominently pluralist society.

If we were there for the Iraqi people, we would have behaved quite a bit differently than we already have. We are there to screw the Saudis, pump a lot of oil to customers east and west (mostly east).

As for the venality of the UN... I find that a canard at best and projection at worst. If, by some miracle, Iraq were to reamain a single nation, it would be because the UN was able to bring pressure to bear on the Syrians, Turks, Saudis, and Iranians not just to respect Iraqi territorial boundaries and resources. Are you seriously suggesting that we will stand steadfastly by them? After the Shia's betrayal in 91', do you seriously now suggest that we are trusted?

America's passion for Iraq's self determination and civil society is notable as an exception. Where were we for the Cambodians, the Rwandans, the Congolese, and the other genocidal states like myanmar? What does Iraq have that makes them so different?

Yep, Saddam was a brutal dictator. That is generally the kind of person who holds such states together. Either he will be superceeded by a more brutal dictator, or Iraq will fall apart. Since Bush is not president for life, it will be the latter. The UN will try, but fail to hold what we leave them together.

We went into Iraq to use their oil. To steal it outright if we could, or flood the market and break OPEC if not. It sounds like you have sincere feelings for the Iraqis... so do I, one of my childhood friends was Iraqi. But you are hallucinating if you think what we are doing there right now is laying the foundations for a pluralist democracy. Iraq as a state has too much sand, blood and fire- and not enough bedrock for that at this point.

Without the UN actively involved, Kurds will be a subject people of Turkey, The Sunni Triangle will be Syrian, and the south will be gobbled up by Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iran as soon as we leave, which is about a week after the full civil war starts.

That is the future we have doomed Iraq to, because little Caligula did not want to work with the UN and work toward a multilateral solution.
Instead he bombed, shattered, and poisoned Iraq for his own agenda.
This is the war that unilateral premption made, and the whole world accuses us rightly.