Is Iraq Finished as a Country?

#juan

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I've been trying to find something good that has come with the American invasion of Iraq. The proponents of this war described all the myriad atrocities of Saddam Hussein, but could they be a lot worse than what has happened under the American occupation? The torture at Abu Graibe prison(sp), the tens of thousands of dead civilians, the destruction of infrastructure, and mass killings?




Marines massacred civilians in Haditha, Iraq
By John Catalinotto
Published May 26, 2006 12:52 AM

In the first year of the U.S. occupation of Iraq some voices, even within the U.S. anti-war movement, argued that a hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops would leave Iraq victim of civil war, general chaos and random murders. Some presented this as an argument that U.S. military forces should stay.

Now, after more than three years of continuous U.S. military occupation, Iraq is plagued with general chaos, seemingly random murders and massacres, and something resembling civil war.

President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are commending the new Iraqi government that finally formed after bickering for five months after the election. It would be ridiculous if it weren’t such a crime.

The electricity still doesn’t work. Oil is pumped at lower levels than before the war, with much of it sold illegally.

Iraqi police themselves carry out mass murders while serving narrow political parties or

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#juan

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BAGHDAD This article was reported by Michael Moss, David Rohde and Kirk Semple and written by Moss.

Jon Villanova had just arrived in Basra last spring to help build a police force in southern Iraq when bodies began piling up. Twenty or more Iraqi civilians were dragged from their homes, shot in the head and dumped in the streets.

The evidence pointed to some of the very people he and his team of foreign police advisers were struggling to train: a cluster of senior officers working out of a station called Jamiat.

But local officials resisted efforts to prosecute the officers. By the time officials in Baghdad intervened nine months later, the corruption in Basra had gotten so bad that the 135-member internal affairs unit, set up to police the police, was operating as a ring of extortionists, kidnappers and killers, American and Iraqi officials said.

"There we are, trying to build a police force that people can believe in, and they are committing murders," Villanova said. "It was a quagmire."

So was much of the rest of Iraq. An initial effort by American civilians to rebuild the police, slow to get started and undermanned, had become overwhelmed by corruption, political vengeance and lawlessness unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

A year later, with the insurgency spreading with an unimagined ferocity, the United States military took charge of a second, broader campaign to



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aeon

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#juan said:
I've been trying to find something good that has come with the American invasion of Iraq. The proponents of this war described all the myriad atrocities of Saddam Hussein, but could they be a lot worse than what has happened under the American occupation? The torture at Abu Graibe prison(sp), the tens of thousands of dead civilians, the destruction of infrastructure, and mass killings?




Marines massacred civilians in Haditha, Iraq
By John Catalinotto
Published May 26, 2006 12:52 AM

In the first year of the U.S. occupation of Iraq some voices, even within the U.S. anti-war movement, argued that a hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops would leave Iraq victim of civil war, general chaos and random murders. Some presented this as an argument that U.S. military forces should stay.

Now, after more than three years of continuous U.S. military occupation, Iraq is plagued with general chaos, seemingly random murders and massacres, and something resembling civil war.

President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are commending the new Iraqi government that finally formed after bickering for five months after the election. It would be ridiculous if it weren’t such a crime.

The electricity still doesn’t work. Oil is pumped at lower levels than before the war, with much of it sold illegally.

Iraqi police themselves carry out mass murders while serving narrow political parties or

link




Well positive things about iraq are:

-Weapons sales around the world , is on the rise , which is very very good for our economy.
-Privatization of oil in iraq which is good for USA and UK coorporations
- World bank, are now in iraq
-Iraqie farmer, are now forced to buy genetically modified seeds, which is bought from the west.



We are just great.
 

Finder

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I would say yes. With the Kurdish nationalism in the North west, and a civil war between the Sunni's and Shia's coming. Yeah I'd say Iraq as nation state we know it now is coming to an end.
 

#juan

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Finder wrote:
I would say yes. With the Kurdish nationalism in the North west, and a civil war between the Sunni's and Shia's coming. Yeah I'd say Iraq as nation state we know it now is coming to an end.

How likely is it, that this was the plan all along? Far more infrastructure damage was done during Desert Storm than was neccessary. Saddam's military was destroyed in the first gulf war. The decade of sanctions were not needed unless the second war was planned.
 

aeon

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#juan said:
Finder wrote:
I would say yes. With the Kurdish nationalism in the North west, and a civil war between the Sunni's and Shia's coming. Yeah I'd say Iraq as nation state we know it now is coming to an end.

How likely is it, that this was the plan all along? Far more infrastructure damage was done during Desert Storm than was neccessary. Saddam's military was destroyed in the first gulf war. The decade of sanctions were not needed unless the second war was planned.



My opinion is this was the planned from the begining of the sanctions, all us leaders, from bush 1, clinton and bush 2 , all stated,"" sanctions will not be lifted until there is a regime change"". Sanctions were in place to make sure people doesnt the energy to rebel, so a war would be the only alternative left, the fact that sanctions mostly only targeted iraqies, not saddam, support that claim.
 

#juan

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You are no doubt right. A normal "democracy" wouldn't have a hope of controlling all those different factions. Which makes me wonder why the U.S. is still trying.
 

zoofer

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A lesson for Leftwing Pinko Commie Appeasing Saddamites.
May 26, 2006, 7:19 a.m.
Looking Back at Iraq
A war to be proud of.

By Victor Davis Hanson

There may be a lot to regret about the past policy of the United States in the Middle East, but the removal of Saddam Hussein and the effort to birth democracy in his place is surely not one of them. And we should remember that this Memorial Day.

Whatever our righteous anger at Khomeinist Iran, it was wrong, well aside from the arms-for-hostages scandal, to provide even a modicum of aid to Saddam Hussein, the great butcher of his own, during the Iran-Iraq war.

Inviting the fascist Baathist government of Syria into the allied coalition of the first Gulf War meant that we more or less legitimized the Assad regime’s take-over of Lebanon, with disastrous results for its people.

It may have been strategically in error not to have taken out Saddam in 1991, but it was morally wrong to have then encouraged Shiites and Kurds to rise up—while watching idly as Saddam’s reprieved planes and helicopters slaughtered them in the thousands.

A decade of appeasement of Islamic terrorism, with retaliations after the serial attacks—from the first World Trade Center bombing to Khobar Towers and the USS Cole—never exceeding the occasional cruise missile or stern televised lecture, made September 11 inevitable.

A decade was wasted in subsidizing Yasser Arafat on the pretense that he was something other than a mendacious thug.

I cite these few examples of the now nostalgic past, because it is common to see Iraq written off by the architects of these past failures as the “worst” policy decision in our history, a “quagmire” and a “disaster.” Realists, more worried about Iran and the ongoing cost in our blood and treasure in Iraq, insist that toppling Saddam was a terrible waste of resources. Leftists see the Iraq war as part of an amoral imperialism; often their talking points weirdly end up rehashed in bin Laden’s communiqués and Dr. Zawahiri’s rants.

But what did 2,400 brave and now deceased Americans really sacrifice for in Iraq, along with thousands more who were wounded? And what were billions in treasure spent on? And what about the hundreds of collective years of service offered by our soldiers? What exactly did intrepid officers in the news like a Gen. Petreus, or Col. McMaster, or Lt. Col Kurilla fight for?

First, there is no longer a mass murderer atop one of the oil-richest states in the world. Imagine what Iraq would now look like with $70 a barrel oil, a $50 billion unchecked and ongoing Oil-for-Food U.N. scandal, the 15th year of no-fly zones, a punitative U.N. embargo on the Iraqi people—all perverted by Russian arms sales, European oil concessions, and frenzied Chinese efforts to get energy contracts from Saddam.

The Kurds would remain in perpetual danger. The Shiites would simply be harvested yearly, in quiet, by Saddam’s police state. The Marsh Arabs would by now have been forgotten in their toxic dust-blown desert. Perhaps Saddam would have upped his cash pay-outs for homicide bombers on the West Bank.

Muammar Khaddafi would be starting up his centrifuges and adding to his chemical weapons depots. Syria would still be in Lebanon. Washington would probably have ceased pressuring Egypt and the Gulf States to enact reform. Dr. Khan’s nuclear mail-order house would be in high gear. We would still be hearing of a “militant wing” of Hamas, rather than watching a democratically elected terrorist clique reveal its true creed to the world.

But just as importantly, what did these rare Americans not fight for? Oil, for one thing. The price skyrocketed after they went in. The secret deals with Russia and France ended. The U.N. petroleum perfidy stopped. The Iraqis, and the Iraqis alone—not Saddam, the French, the Russians, or the U.N.—now adjudicate how much of their natural resources they will sell, and to whom.

Our soldiers fought for the chance of a democracy; that fact is uncontestable. Before they came to Iraq, there was a fascist dictatorship. Now, after three elections, there is an indigenous democratic government for the first time in the history of the Middle East. True, thousands of Iraqis have died publicly in the resulting sectarian mess; but thousands were dying silently each year under Saddam—with no hope that their sacrifice would ever result in the first steps that we have already long passed.

Our soldiers also removed a great threat to the United States. Again, the crisis brewing over Iran reminds us of what Iraq would have reemerged as. Like Iran, Saddam reaped petroprofits, sponsored terror, and sought weapons of mass destruction. But unlike Iran, he had already attacked four of his neighbors, gassed thousands of his own, and violated every agreement he had ever signed. There would have been no nascent new democracy in Iran that might some day have undermined Saddam, and, again unlike Iran, no internal dissident movement that might have come to power through a revolution or peaceful evolution.

No, Saddam’s police state was wounded, but would have recovered, given high oil prices, Chinese and Russian perfidy, and Western exhaustion with enforcement of U.N. sanctions. Moreover, the American military took the war against radical Islam right to its heart in the ancient caliphate. It has not only killed thousands of jihadists, but dismantled the hierarchy of al Qaeda and its networks, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Critics say that we “took our eye off the ball” by going to Iraq and purportedly leaving bin Laden alone in the Hindu Kush. But more likely, al Qaeda took its eye off the American homeland as the promised theater of operations once American ground troops began dealing with Islamic terrorists in Iraq. As we near five years after September 11, note how less common becomes the expression “not if, but when” concerning the next anticipated terror attack in the U.S.

Some believe that the odyssey of jihadists to Iraq means we created terrorists, but again, it is far more likely, as al Qaeda communiqués attest, that we drew those with such propensities into Iraq. Once there, they have finally shown the world that they hate democracy, but love to kill and behead—and that has brought a great deal of moral clarity to the struggle. After Iraq, the reputation of bin Laden and radical Islam has not been enhanced as alleged, but has plummeted. For all the propaganda on al Jazeera, the chattering classes in the Arab coffeehouses still watch Americans fighting to give Arabs the vote, and radical Islamists in turn beheading men and women to stop it.

If many in the Middle East once thought it was cute that 19 killers could burn a 20-acre hole in Manhattan, I am not sure what they think of Americans now in their backyard not living to die, but willing to die so that other Arabs might live freely.

All of our achievements are hard to see right now. The Iraqis are torn by sectarianism, and are not yet willing to show gratitude to America for saving them from Saddam and pledging its youth and billions to give them something better. We are nearing the third national election of the war, and Iraq has become so politicized that our efforts are now beyond caricature. An archivist is needed to remind the American people of the record of all the loud politicians and the national pundits who once were on record in support of the war.

Europeans have demonized our efforts—but not so much lately, as pacifist Europe sits on its simmering volcano of Islamic fundamentalism and unassimilated Muslim immigrants. Our own Left has tossed out “no blood for oil”—that is, until the sky-rocketing prices, the U.N. Oil-for-Food scandal, and a new autonomous Iraqi oil ministry cooled that rhetoric. Halliburton is also now not so commonly alleged as the real casus belli, when few contractors of any sort wish to rush into Iraq to profit.

“Bush lied, thousands died” grows stale when the WMD threat was reiterated by Arabs, the U.N., and the Europeans. The “too few troops” debate is not the sort that characterizes imperialism, especially when no American proconsul argues that we must permanently stay in large numbers in Iraq. The new Iraqi-elected president, not Donald Rumsfeld, is more likely to be seen on television, insisting that Americans remain longer.

A geography more uninviting for our soldiers than Iraq cannot be imagined—7,000 miles away, surrounded by Baathist Syria, Wahhabist Saudi Arabia, and theocratic Iran. The harsh landscape rivals the worst of past battlefields—blazing temperatures, wind, and dust. The host culture that our soldiers faced was Orwellian—a society terrorized by a mass murderer for 30 years, who ruled by alternately promising Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish collaborationists that cooperation meant only that fewer of their own would die.

The timing was equally awful—in an era of easy anti-Americanism in Europe, and endemic ingratitude in the Muslim world that asks nothing of itself, everything of us, and blissfully forgets the thousands of Muslims saved by Americans in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, and the billions more lavished on Jordanians, Palestinians, and Egyptians.

And here at home? There are few Ernie Pyles in Iraq to record the heroism of our soldiers; no John Fords to film their valor—but legions to write ad nauseam of Abu Ghraib, and to make up stories of flushed Korans and Americans terrorizing Iraqi women and children.

Yet here we are with an elected government in place, an Iraqi security force growing, and an autocratic Middle East dealing with the aftershocks of the democratic concussion unleashed by American soldiers in Iraq.

Reading about Gettysburg, Okinawa, Choisun, Hue, and Mogadishu is often to wonder how such soldiers did what they did. Yet never has America asked its youth to fight under such a cultural, political, and tactical paradox as in Iraq, as bizarre a mission as it is lethal. And never has the American military—especially the U.S. Army and Marines—in this, the supposedly most cynical and affluent age of our nation, performed so well.

We should remember the achievement this Memorial Day of those in the field who alone crushed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, stayed on to offer a new alternative other than autocracy and theocracy, and kept a targeted United States safe from attack for over four years.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

National Review Online - http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmRiZDliMjI2Y2Y0Yjg2MmUxOWYzMDVhOGM5NzExZjE=
 

Johnny Utah

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It seems the Lefties have no faith in the Iraqi people to give them a real chance. Lefties will be proven wrong when History judges the ultimate outcome in Iraq..
 

darkbeaver

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RE: Is Iraq Finished as a

I have every faith in the Iraqi freedom fighters ability to destroy the rotten American led coallition of the corrupt corporate pricks, I support the right of Iraq to kill invaders and drive out the emperialist liars, everyone they get in Iraq is one we won't have to eventually get in Canada. Coalition personell are just dirtbag murdering war criminals.
 

FiveParadox

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Dec 20, 2005
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Re: The Fate of Iraq

I hope that the Republic of Iraq can continue its new practice of democratic governance; however, at this time, I don't think that the system to which they have been moved is going to serve them as intended. I would suggest that, whether or not the intentions of the United States of America were good and honest or not, the system of governance set up is doomed to be crushed under its own weight.

I think that Iraq, at this time, needs a somewhat "tempered" democracy. Perhaps, for a time, Iraq should create a system based on the one that Upper Canada had used would be more appropriate for Iraq under its current situation and circumstances. For example, they could have a Lower House which would bring the grievances of the population to the attention of the Government of Iraq (since no majority would have to be present in the lower chamber to serve this purpose), and the Upper House could be an appointed chamber where laws and regulations could be drafted and approved.
 

#juan

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It seems the Lefties have no faith in the Iraqi people to give them a real chance. Lefties will be proven wrong when History judges the ultimate outcome in Iraq..

History has judged. Iraq is destroyed. Fifty or sixty Iraqis are killed every week in something that looks an awful lot like a civil war. The Kurds will take their bit, and the Sunnies and the Shiites will fight over the rest. Iraq, as a country is gone.
 

Johnny Utah

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Sounds like The Lefties here want Iraq to fail, afterall if you had you're way Saddam would still be in power today leaving Iraq for Uday to oneday take control of.. :roll:
 

darkbeaver

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RE: Is Iraq Finished as a

Iraq has already been pounded into the stone age and poisoned, murder and starvation are the order of the day and everythings been privatized (stolen). What do you think failure looks like JohhnyEinstien?
 

Finder

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I don't want Iraq to fail but there looks to be little hope and very few opitions. Besides getting an international effort which would have to have heavy support from the middle east to rebuild Iraq and give liticmacy to the American presance there. The USA doesn't have the best credibility in the Middle east right now because of this war and they really should have waited.
 

#juan

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Sounds like The Lefties here want Iraq to fail, afterall if you had you're way Saddam would still be in power today leaving Iraq for Uday to oneday take control of..

As I recall, about three hundred and fifty brave American troops surrounded Uday and his brother, and a young boy about twelve, and shot them full of holes. If I had my way, they wouldn't have killed a hundred thousand Iraqis. They wouldn't have destroyed the water treatment plants, or the sewage treatment plants, and all the infrastruucture. This war has been one cock up after another. How can you talk to people after you've killed their family? I'm sure most families in Iraq have lost someone.
 

Finder

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#juan,But when you think about it... now that the war has already happend what can we do to make sure things don't get worse. Can you not see if the USA leaves tomorrow they will leave a power vacum which one only make things worse and the frigile government in place right now, I highly doubt would last very long. Besides complaining about the war, what can be done about it?