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Democracy is taking root in Iraq and there is no turning back.

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Regaining security is rated as by far the highest priority at 85%, followed by holding elections for a national government (30%), ensuring the majority of Iraqis can make a decent living (30%) and reviving the economy (28%).

And only just over a third of people report that their electricity supply is good.

A key concern for the Americans as they prepare to hand over power in June is the unpopularity of the people they are putting in place.

Leaders unloved

Their favoured son Ahmed Chalabi had no support at all, while Saddam Hussein remains one of the six most popular politicians in the country.

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Posted by Telperion the Silver (Member # 6074) on :
 
And of course the new Spanish gov is going to pull out soon. *sigh*
 

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Posted by aka (Member # 139) on :
 
There is a lot of hard work to be done in Iraq. Of course there are terrorists who want to try to scare people into not being free, who want to hold on to their power that they are very frightened of losing, and also ones who want to see repressive cultures reign. Those who are afraid of women and the free flow of information and people being able to choose. We have had those before. They often like to blow up things to scare people.

In Birmingham in the 60s we had those, too. They were terrified of change, so they blew up churches and hotels and shot and lynched people to try and keep their position of relative power. They failed. I very sincerely dislike such people, and want to fight against them wherever they may be found. We must continue our work in Iraq and stay the course. Of course there are violent hoodlums who think they speak for everyone when they blow people up. They are mistaken.

We have to just keep building, as fast as they tear down. We have to keep working and have faith that our work is not in vain. That if we are killed, then someone else will come and work in our place. It's the makers who will prevail in the end. Destroyers are nothing, in the grand scheme of things. Makers are everything.

[ March 17, 2004, 10:59 PM: Message edited by: aka ]
 

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Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
 
If the people of Iraq truly want to be free, won't they seize this opportunity to make it happen? Why exactly is it the US' responsibility to enforce a change on them if they aren't willing to work for it themselves?

There are lots of brutal regimes in the world. Will we take them all on? If not all, how do we decide which ones? If we're going to war against all of them, how do we pay for it? And how do we convince our children that the cause is noble, just, and a very good thing to lose one's life for?

I think Saddam needed to go. I think his own people should've been the ones to do it.

And anyone who attacks us deserves to get stomped in return.

But someone who is brutalizing his own people? I'd offer support where we could to the opposition, but pre-emptive war? I don't think that is in America's best interest.

And I have to ask if the freedom of Iraqis is worth the $100 billion or so it is going to cost us over time. From an economic standpoint, I think we could use that money more wisely to benefit our own people (whose money it is in the first place).

From a humanitarian standpoint, aka, I'm with you all the way. But the only reason I see to stay in Iraq is that we created a vacuum that could be filled by someone even worse than Saddam if we leave. And then the Administration's version of the truth could play out in reality -- a regime that is hell bent on acquiring nuclear weapons to use against the US.
 

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Posted by aka (Member # 139) on :
 
In other words, it's not your problem.
 

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Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
 
Well, you could summarize it that way, I suppose. But the truth is that it is everyone's problem when there are evil regimes. I think the issue is one of what the right course of action is when these people come on the scene. Do we act pre-emptively and basically wreak a bit of havoc on their contries in the hope that we avoid worse destruction later? Do we try to starve them out through international discooperation? Or, what?

And what makes a regime like Saddam's worth our money and sacrifice while the ones in other parts of the world go unchecked? I guess there's a risk assessment, but we've been shown to be pretty poor at collecting good quality intelligence data upon which one might base a risk assessment.

Ultimately, we're just guessing and we're going after the ones we don't like.

In that respect, I think we run some very important risks on the trailing edge of these things. As we target a regime, we also set up a lot of expectations that we'll be the foster parent to the new country. What happens whey they find out that there will still be poverty and inequality and that crime gets worse, and so on? They end up resenting us. And the resentment breeds hatred. And then we've got to fight the terrorists and the people with a grudge in this area we helped.

Anyway, I'm just being pessimistic. I think we have no choice left to us in Iraq. Bush saw to that. So we'd better stay there until that country is running well under it's own power.

And then we'd better let it be known that anyone who messes with Iraq will have to deal with us.

So this is a long term relationship we're investing in. I hope it's worth it.

So far, I think the jury is still out.
 

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Posted by aka (Member # 139) on :
 
If we have love enough, then it will work. I just feel that it will. And it's right. I'm so glad we did it. War is always horrible and yet there are things that are worse.
 

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Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
 
Are you taking a religious stance on this? I'm just wondering whether this is really a place where "love of fellow man" is the ingredient that drove us to invade the country or motivates us to stay there.

I see us acting out of fear and staying because we fear the consequences of not staying.
 

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Posted by fallow (Member # 6268) on :
 
can I butt in?

If the end-goal was to remove a real black-hat of a baddie, that goal's been accomplished. If the end-goal was to liberate Iraqis from this guy... well, that's been accomplished. This kind of begs the question as to what the US's involvement means now. Was there an end-goal?

fallow
 

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Posted by Sopwith (Member # 4640) on :
 
Well Bob, there's the other way to look at the invasion of Iraq...

There are a ton of despotic situations around the world where the leadership treats the people as badly or worse than Saddam did his own. We can't fix all of those problems, no one country could.

So, as Saddam stood up for so long on the world stage, he was setting himself up as a target. After 9/11 the world saw we were vulnerable. Saddam went on with his "I've got 'em/Nope, don't got 'em" routine with the UN and basically was snubbing his nose at them and very much us in the US. Then North Korea starts acting up, and who knows who else would follow along.

So, rather than trying to toss out all of the potential troublemakers, we just took down the most boisterous, the leader of the pack, so to say. And we did it in a way that left no question about our intentions or abilities.

What was the result? Well, Saddam lost his world stage and ended up as a shaggy-faced internee having his teeth checked in front of the world's cameras. And then North Korea begins the first steps of coming to the negotiating table. Qadafi throws in the towel for being an agitator. Syria hushes and even quits openly supporting the terrorists in Israel. The Iranians begin feeling the tremors through their own "elected" leadership. Africa remains generally quiet and Mugabee begins a more quiet repression than the noisy one he had been doing before.

Heck, even Pakistan and India quit rattling their sabers at each other.
 

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Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
 
Sopwith, I like your reasoning except for one small problem. For many years, the US was viewed as a "hands off" target for terrorists because we were willing to go after anyone if they crossed us, and we have the resources to deal with them (in a way).

We didn't change that, and yet they attacked us anyway.

I believe that we ultimately may have simply driven the terror organizations a bit more underground and the links between them and governments to be a little less visible.

By the way, though I believe this is just a negotiating ploy, Korea announced today that the war in Iraq is the reason they WON'T give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons. That they fear the US will invade them if they give up their weapons program.

So...I don't necessarily see the Korea situation as totally good news.

You'll also note that there's another way to look at all those other developments you mention. When we work through the UN, good things happen. When we don't...war happens.

So, I guess the question is what you'd like to emphasize and whether temporal correlation indicates causation.
 

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Posted by Sopwith (Member # 4640) on :
 
Just offering a different view off the top of my head. Personally, I believe what we've done is really no more than a patch, and not a very durable one at that.

There is something much bigger going on, bigger than any terrorist organization or rogue state or possibly even the UN as we know it today.

I just get the feeling that we're at the cusp of some sort of paradigm shift. There's something coming up from the backwater areas and I don't think it has formed completely yet.

Think of a century ago: the US was a backwater state still recovering from a disastrous civil war. Japan was shifting to an industrial society and were on the verge of going to war with the floundering Russian state (and they would eventually whoop them to take their place on the worldwide stage); Britain and France were seeing their empires begin to crumble; China was in the throws of a corrupt regime; and the Czars were being herded by history slowly to the abbatoirs' shop.

No one knew in 1904 where it was going to end up or how it would all shake up. The power players would begin changing, the act was nearly finished and the cannons brought onto the stage were going to be fired before the curtain dropped.

I can't help but wonder if we aren't at that part of the show right now. I both wonder and worry at how it will all shake out.
 

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Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
 
I think it will be good, eventually.
 

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Posted by aka (Member # 139) on :
 
I think the time is coming (or maybe it's already been here for a while but it's taken us some time to realize) when we can no longer think of remote, obscure countries as being a long way removed from us. We can't think that other people's problems are not our problems, or that repression, poverty, disease, wars, slavery, and brutality suffered in other parts of the world aren't sufficiently important to us to warrant our taking a strong stand against them. That they aren't worth our own blood, sweat, tears, and money to do whatever we can to try and fix them.

If this were happening in your neighborhood, you would be concerned and alarmed. You would care enough to commit your own resources and take risks to put things right. Well, I think now the whole planet is our neighborhood. That's what has changed.
 

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Posted by fallow (Member # 6268) on :
 
This is a very dishonest thread contributed to by some of the folks I respect most around here.
 

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Posted by Sopwith (Member # 4640) on :
 
What do you mean Fallow?
 

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Posted by aka (Member # 139) on :
 
Can you explain, fallow? I don't see any dishonesty here. Do you mean me?
 

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Posted by fallow (Member # 6268) on :
 
"dishonest" was an incredibly poor choice of words here for me.

I was knee-jerk quipping as a result of my immense dissatisfaction with any analysis of the Iraq situation (and the situation itself) that I have read anywhere.

I get a deep sense of reasons (with or without intent, with or without party affiliation) for this conflict that are forbidden to discuss.

fallow
 

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Posted by Bob_Scopatz (Member # 1227) on :
 
fallow???

I'm afraid I don't understand. I think this is a place where you say pretty much anything you want as long as you are respectful of our hosts' intentions for this BB in general.

And if you think people here are being less than forthright, you have every right to call us on it. We're not fragile or infallible and you might even save us the trouble of being wrong and not recognizing it if you'd just share your thoughts.
 

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Posted by Sopwith (Member # 4640) on :
 
Please do, sally forth with what you have to say. A new voice taking the stage can do a lot for the general discussion.
 

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Posted by fallow (Member # 6268) on :
 
"forbidden" Another poor choice of words, and that wasn't meant to apply to this forum, either.

I meant that I see a lot of discussion about freedom, oppression, mainly coming from a religious angle. I see discussions of atrocities committed by various black, white and gray hats (and the occasional reference to US guilt/blame in those same atrocities). Then, there's OSC's favored historical geopolitical strategic analyses.

Not that I've read everything. I tend to peruse the news like a lemming. But I don't get the sense that a full picture is ever being painted. I don't "know" what that picture is, just that I get the sense that important things are being left out. (not censored)

I just get fed-up with reading the same rationales with personal "testimonials" attached. Seeing the minds of otherwise critical thinkers wrenching themselves into cognitive pretzels in order to make the world make sense.

darnit. I don't think I'm going to be able to express this coherently.

[ March 20, 2004, 09:57 PM: Message edited by: fallow ]
 

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Posted by aka (Member # 139) on :
 
I don't know what to say. I don't decide national policy, I just decide how to direct my own efforts. I'm so glad there's actually a chance now for peace and democracy in Iraq and I want to do everything I possibly can to foster it and help it along. I think it would be disasterous for us to pull out now. I have faith that our efforts are not meaningless, but will mean something, even if we don't succeed.

I look at, say, the Spanish Civil war, and how just and important a cause that was, and how it failed. That is always possible here in Iraq as well. I look also at the civil rights movement in the south in the 60s, and I see that it largely succeeded. It inspires me.

It is always worthwhile to take a stand against tyranny and brutality and torture and mass executions. If you succeed then you have made a real difference in the world and if you don't then maybe you are an inspiration to someone somewhere. Your efforts still have meaning, even if you fail.

I guess this is religious for me. To have faith in a better world, to have faith that our species can survive, and to work to bring it about. There are plenty of opportunities to be cynical all around. Yet I choose faith over cynicism. A cautious, wary, informed faith, hopefully, and not a blind faith. But without faith in the possibility of a better future, it seems to me that we can never accomplish anything.
 

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Posted by aka (Member # 139) on :
 
I am very interested to hear what other people think, though. As I said, I want to go in with eyes open.
 

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Posted by fallow (Member # 6268) on :
 
aka,

nevermind me. been trying to work out my own perspective on this thing. I have a hard time comprehending most things without a great deal of information and concrete examples.

fallow
 

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