so if we leave there will be peace in the world?....
this concerted effort on the part of conservatives to avoid admitting their president and their vision for Iraq was fatally flawed is getting tedious.
1. we were attacked on 9/11 by folks who had absolutely nothing to do with Iraq.
2. Iraq was run by a mean-ass dictator who was a total prick to his people and who had rattled his sabre in the region for a long time.... in the past we had been both his enemy and his friend... immediately prior to the attacks of 9/11, our own secretary of state proclaimed that Saddam was NOT a threat to us and not a threat to his neighbors...AND... he was as despised by the folks that attacked us almost as much as they despised us. Even if Saddam had had any WMD's, he sure as hell would never have given them to OBL.
3. Despite being a total prick, Saddam did three things very well: a. he kept sunnis and shiites from wholesale slaughter. b. he kept wahabbist islamic extremists (the guys who actually did attack us) from using his country as a base of operations ( which was one big reason why their base of operations was Afghanistan!) andc. he kept Iranian regional hegemony in check. Don't we wish today that we could do any of those things as well as Saddam had done them?
4. We removed the strongman dictator that was the ONLY thing keeping sunnis, shiites and kurds living together within the confines of post WWI, european constructed artificial state called Iraq.
5. Now that he is gone, we are beginning to realize that, no matter how much we wish and wish and wish that it might be so, Iraqi sunnis and shiites will never be able to live together in that artificially constructed state with any form of government that even approaches the multicultural jeffersonian democracy that the PNAC folks so strongly promoted.
6. The presence of our troops does not "cause" Iraqis to kill one another, but it does make it easier for them to do so in some areas and a little bit harder in others. We don't have enough american "cops on the beat", so to speak, to patrol every block of every neighborhood of every town in Iraq. And when we "surge" a bunch of additional cops into a neighborhood, their presence there causes the death rate to marginally decrease because the insurgents need to become more inventive in their slaughter mechanisms, and/or they merely hop in their cars and drive to another town or another neighborhood where the additional cops are NOT, and pick up where they left off.
7. Our presence DOES insure that one casualty statistic will continue to rise: the number of body bags headed back to the USA has not slowed a bit. In fact, in the last twelve months, the numbers of body bags headed home has been nearly 40% higher than the previous twelve months.
8. Democracy will not work in Iraq as it is presently constituted. Iraq needs to be partitioned into three states. The negotiations as to how to divide up the territory and assets will not be successfully begun, let alone concluded, by an occupying army from the west, but by Iraqis and the various supporting/interested/neighboring Islamic states in the region. What ends up will undoubtedly look a whole lot different than what Dubya and Karl and Shooter and Scooter and Wolfie and Perle and Rummy had in mind when they got us into this mess, and it will undoubtedly NOT be as conducive to our long or short term interests or strategic initiatives as it was before we knocked it off the shelf and broke it... But I firmly believe that whatever comes from this mess will come from Iraqis and muslims and arabs cleaning it up, and regardless of the fact that our bumbling started this thing unravelling, we are powerless to stop it from continuing on to its logical and inevitable conclusion.
All we do by staying is to make OURSELVES poorer, fewer, less safe, and more despised.
Now...if MY party had gotten America into that mess, I would probably want to remain in denial like you republicans are doing....but you really need to stop it. It is not helping Iraq and it is REALLY hurting America.
