The only hope is to have a strong, secular leader come to power; perhaps one who even resorts to unethical, strong-arm tactics to keep the violence at bay. Too bad we executed Saddam.
Bolding mine.
WWII is the only example in history (that I know of) where some countries conquer another, overthrow it’s goverment and establish a stable democratic goverment. The current US administration claims to have simular goals. I call that ‘relevance’.
What I describe as meddling has nothing to do with a global scale, all out war. It is about countless corrupt dictators who’s only redeeming quality is that they are ‘anti-communist’ or usefull in the ‘war on drugs’.
Do you really believe we have any interest in a democracy? We want oil.
A democracy would be nice but not necessary.
There are about 70 dictator ships. we are certainly going to busy in the future. Start with the ones that have resources we need of course.
A prerequisite for a stable democracy is a stable middle class. That is why Germany and Japan worked; they both had middle classes endowed with education and perhaps a bit of land. Thus they had more to lose if they joined an insurgency. Iraq’s middle class evaporated to almost nothing after 1990 under UN sanctions. That is why creating a democracy there is a fool’s errand. Few common people stand to gain anything from collaborating with the occupation. They risk getting killed by the myriad groups who stand to gain from opposing the occupation.
It pretty well happened in after WWI in Germany (though Germany had Democracy pre WWI) and technically Germany was not conquered.
The Nazis probably would not have taken power had the Great depression not happened
David Simmons and Brain Wreck, I’m not saying the situations are similar or that everything will turn out rosy in Iraq. I just responded to The Librarian’s contention that meddling had never in history produced a successful democracy.
Well yeah, if you consider WW2 “meddling”. Really it’s more a case of complete and total defeat, and then we had to clean up the mess we made. Even these were somewhat exceptional situations because you had places that had some concept of modern law and liberal democracy; they were just temporarily hijacked by insane military dictatorships. Iraq was likewise hijacked by Saddam, but the only thing he replaced was tribal law.
There has never in history been a successful democracy produced by a nation trying to create one where there’s never been any concept or desire of democracy, nor any middle class to sustain it. So it’s sort of useless to go around squeaking about Japan and Germany, they really don’t resemble the current situation at all.
Germany and Japan both had populations that, in general, wanted, fully, the war to be over and wanted to build a new, stable government.
I don’t sense this yet based on the faction in-fighting news from Iraq…
If the folks there want to keep fighting, presumably trying put there own faction in power (during or after the US leaves), then they won’t have a stable country.
Is the US doing any good? Every now and then, I hear news of some hospital rebuilt, or some school reopened, but in general, this type of news seems to be outnumbered by stories of IED bombings and such. Most of the stuff seems to be happening in the Bagdad centered region. Comparatively little is mentioned about the Kurdish regions up north (Mosul?). Some problems in the coastal areas (policed by the UK contigent), but nothing like Bagdad…
It seems to me that the administration wanted desperately to believe that the poor oppressed folks in Iraq yearned to be free from Saddam, and that they would thank the US for “regime change”, and that they would sincerely works to build a stable democracy. I wish that we (the US) had a backup plan in case what actually happened did happen… but because it appears we didn’t, it appears we aren’t doing any good there now. We appear to be just treading water, hoping that something good happens.
You might like to read this dispatch from Michael Yon, who is an American journalist in Iraq. He seems to think the military is doing a lot of good things now, and he’s seeing definite signs of progress on the ground.
He also says that al-Qaida fighters are getting their asses kicked, and that al-Qaida is suffering huge PR damage right now.
You know, this might be relevant if anybody outside of the White House actually believed that Al Qaeda is the source of even a small part of the carnage in Iraq today. We could kill or capture every last AQ in the country, and the civil war would continue unabated. Is there anyone, anywhere claiming it is AQ that is preventing the Iraqi parliament from completing even one of the benchmarks set for them six months ago? Defeating AQ will accomplish nothing without a political solution, and that is much further away today than it was before the surge.
- Kuwait, Iran and (arguably) Kurdistan.
- Something like the 5th largest army in the world.
Mind you, the (second) Invasion of Iraq was a very bad idea, but let us not let that horrible error turn Saddam Hussain into a saint.
And it almost always turns out that the places we built or “rebuilt” are unusable disasters. Plumbing so bad it rains from the ceiling, fumes that make it unhealthy to breathe, sewage all over, prone to electrical fires, structural unsoundness and so on. Even some of the structures we built for our own people are useless.
As for stuff outside the Baghdad region, those are almost impossible to reach without a serious guard force, so of course you don’t hear much about it.
And as pointed out, he’s an “embedded journalist”; a paid liar, and utter scum, in other words.
According to this article from the LA Times, there are some positive trends in Iraq this year, but an overall deterioration of the situation. There’s a graphic in the printed edition but not on the site above that lists Glimmers of Hope, such as:
- Arms caches being found at 3 times the rate of a year ago
- signs of normalcy in Baghdad - soccer games, markets etc
- young Sunnis signing up for army and police
but has a much grimmer list of The Down Side:
- the April-June quarter was the worst yet for coalition forces, 29 in July alone
- militants are penetrating the Green Zone more frequently
- Iraqi government basically a collection of mutually hostile factions
- Iraqi government has failed to pass any of the promised laws to help national cohesion and economic recovery
- none of the 3 main benchmarks have come about - laws to fairly divide oil resources, oil revenue, amnesty for ex-Baathists
Basically the Iraqi government is a microcosm of Iraq: hopelessly divided. I therefore suspect that no matter when the US leave there will be a full-scale civil war (as Colin Powell is now predicting). IMO the only hope is to split the country up into Kurdistan (make Turkey hand over their part in exchange for EU entry), give Iran the Shi’ite part in exchange for their part of Kurdistan and decommissioning their nukes, and either make the rest a freestanding state or split it up between its Sunni neighbours Jordan, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi.
For God’s sake. Michael Yon is an independent journalist. If you read his blog, you’ll find that he makes the money for his trips through reader donations. He is reporting in actual combat conditions. He’s the guy who took this picture, which has been on the front page of magazines and was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. He is an ex-special forces soldier who decided to make his life’s work returning to the battlefield as a civilian to cover the story. Because he’s very capable, military units allow him to go where other journalists can’t, and he gets pictures and stories right from the combat zone, with bullets whizzing around him. And he’s no apologist for the Bush regime. He calls it as he sees it, and repeats exactly what he sees and hears.
If you’d open your mind a bit, you’d find his writing fascinating. For instance, in this current dispatch he interviews an Iraqi insurgent leader who is currently working with the U.S. to eradicate al-Qaida. In the interview, the man calmly admits to fighting Americans, and that he’s working with them now only because al-Qaida is the greater of two evils. He says that after al-Qaida is wiped out and Iraq achieves a measure of stability, the U.S. had better leave his country or he’ll start killing them again.
This kind of reporting is incredibly important - not just for today’s political debates but for history. Yon is capturing a side of the war you simply can’t get from the green zone or from inside an APC a mile away from the action. The guy deserves a medal.
But I should have known the scorn would come out in large helpings in this thread. Of course, if Yon was reporting nothing but disaster, you guys would want to put him on a pedestal as an ex-soldier speaking truth to power. But since his reporting isn’t quite aligning with your simplistic ‘all is lost’ model, he’s ‘scum’.
I’m not so sure about this.
There’re several comments from Rumsfeld that the thing would be over in a matter of months at the outside.
Additionally, there’s Fukyama’s assessment that the planners looked to Eastern Europe post-Soviet experience as a model.
I think that the planner were genuinely blindsided by reality on this one.
You ignore the point about why WW2 was fought. There were treaties with Governments.
Britain never intended to occupy Germany or Japan and keep their natural resources (like the US does in Iraq).
There was a previous democratic Government in Germany (it got subverted by the Nazis, but the Germans knew all about democracy). Iraq was artificially formed and has never had democracy. Saddam was put in power by the CIA.
The US said it needed to attack Iraq because of WMDs. Nothing to do with regime change (which was illegal anyway).
Nothing like the above applies to WW2.
Unlike WW2, which started because of the invasion of Poland, Saddam had already been driven out of those countries years before.
His armed forces had been smashed in the previous Gulf War and for example Allied planes were flying at will over Iraq, enforcing no-fly zones. Are you suggesting that the ‘5th largest army in the World’ was a threat to anyone?!
Nobody says Saddam was a saint. He was a genocidal dictator.
Which makes it very depressing that the US put him in power, sold him weapons of mass destruction (used horrifically in the Iran-Iraq war), left him in power after the first Gulf War (even after he slaughtered thousands of Kurdish civilians), then finally invaded, laughably claiming he was ‘linked to 9/11’ and had ‘WMDs’.
I will see your Yon and raise you a few thousand vets.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/nancy_youssef/story/17836.html Yep we are so benevolent. I do understand that when you go to war atrocities happen. Always have always will. That is why I set a high bar for going to war. Bush does not in my opinion.
We are doing so much damage to our world standing and will have great difficulty recovering from what we have done.
Petraeus will say exactly what Bush wants in Sept. or he will be replaced. The Generals are able to speak only after they are willing to kill their careers.