Reply #93: This is not the either/or scenario you depict, trumad [View All]

[IrateCitizen]

Trumad, you are exhibiting the a kind of conditioned response on this thread that mirrors that on the right. You presuppose that any continued presence in the region is a MILITARY presence, and that any attempts to help Iraq rebuild itself must be through MILITARY means. This is a false dichotomy, one that leaves out several other, perhaps more viable options. But, none of them are "easy".

Not everyone who is advocating staying in Iraq in some form is an advocate of occupation. Some of us might actually have a desire to see Iraq rebuild its infrastructure and pursue its own path to self-determination -- but realize that it is currently in some pretty dire straights and is in desperate need of outside help, primarily in the area of monetary aid.

Water treatment plants cost money. Power generating facilities cost money. Public infrastructure costs money. Maintaining control of civil society to the extent that girls can venture out their front doors w/o serious fear of being raped costs money. Last I checked, Iraq didn't really have any money. Nor did they have any of the other things I listed above, primarily thanks to the sanctions and invasion that we visited upon them.

Do I support the military occupation? Not in the least. But I also recognize that there is no easy black-and-white solution to this problem. What I would propose is a UN team to head up the short-term political needs of Iraq that would function primarily as an intermediary between the various factions of the country, helping them to work together and figure out what kind of future government would work best for them -- and go about helping them make it a reality. WRT monetary investment, clearly the overwhelming majority of funds should come from the United States -- but the US should not have any role in administering those funds outside of a single international voice that weighs no more than any of the other voices involved. Haliburton, Bechtel, and all other outside firms favored in US contracts should be thrown out on their collective asses. Funds should be concentrated on a community-development level, with citizen councils (possibly the bedrock of a future government) leading the efforts to take on the bigger infrastructure problems like power generation and water treatment. NGO's with training in these kinds of things would be invaluable in identifying people on the ground that can be trusted, and working with those people.

I'd also immediately abandon those plans to build 14 permanent bases in Iraq, and go even further by beginning to dismantle our military "footprint" in the entire region.

Of course, there would be much more to it than this, but it should be clear that this is NOT a military solution. If civil society could be restored, many of the security needs could vanish almost overnight. Iraq is a country that has large numbers of trained engineers, scientists, technicians and skilled laborers. By ASSISTING them in rebuilding THEIR infrastructure, we could see unemployment shrink dramatically and the possibility of a civil society take hold in Iraq.

Cutting and running is as foolish of an option as continuing to try and impose our military will on the country. Both proposals are indicative of groups who operate more out of pure ideology than the concept of just finding things that work, and changing approaches that don't.

Furthermore, what do you think would happen if we just cut and ran? Do you really trivialize the brutal and bloody civil war that would almost surely follow? It would possibly make Rwanda's civil war look like a boy scout camp. And in the aftermath, supposing that we do continue to maintain our military "footprint" in the region, do you not think that Iraq would then become a haven for fundamentalists seeking to carry out acts of violence in order to try and evict us from the region? Do you remember what happened when we left Afghanistan to the warlords and Taliban in the wake of our military support of their mujahadeen against the Soviets? Could there possibly be a lesson to be learned there?

There are a lot of questions that your simplistic strategy has not yet addressed. While I am certainly NOT happy about the way things have gone over there, all the way from the sanctions, through the invasion and now the occupation, I also recognize that actions taken out of emotional basis and fear (which is where your proposal comes from) quite often lead to disastrous results.