Declare Iraq democratized and leave

Since
(1) the Iraq situation seems to be beyond the U.S.'s “go it alone” ability to solve,
(2) Bush doesn’t want to give the the international community what it wants to step forward and help,
(3) Bush went into Iraq on his own – O.K. Blair helped too – and doesn’t care what the international community thinks,

why doesn’t he simply declare, “As of [insert date of your choosing here] we’re pulling out. The rest of the world can sit back and watch or they can move in and help restore the society, the U. S. doesn’t care.”

“P.S. - we’re keeping the oil”

Well, aside from the ethical implications I can’t think of a bigger election issue to hand the democrats.

1- How exactly can he pull out of Iraq and “keep the oil”? That is impossible.

2- The blow to the reputation of the USA would be huge.

3- The blow to the reputation of President Bush and his party would be huge.

4- The Iraqi people. … . let’s face it, Bush doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Iraqi people or even about the US troops who are paying in blood for his arrogance.

What reputation?

Even without pulling out, the US will be hard pressed to prevent Iraq 2004 becoming Iran 1978. Withdrawal would IMO make this transformation a near certainty.

A lot of people still like him on this side of the puddle, unlike over there. While I think his welcome’s about to wear thin, he still outpolls his prospective Democratic opponents.

I agree that it’s morally dicey to walk away from a mess like this, when you’re the one who created it.

My alternative would be to give Iraq to the Saudis, as a token of our gratitude for their cooperation in the War on Terrorism. :slight_smile:

This was done in our name. That fact deeply pisses me off, but it is nonetheless a fact. We have to clean it up.

Then we can show the world what real Western Civ. is all about: we can kick the buggers out!

Want to spread democracy? Show 'em that it works.

I keep my fingers crossed in the hope that the US will help set up a government system that works best for the people of Iraq, and then bid a hasty retreat. If the new government asks for help in the future, we should give 'em help. But we shouldn’t hold its hand every step of the way, even if I know that means it’ll most likely just become just a slightly-lessened version of the previous government.

Well, there’s the conundrum, which is why there’s no clear goal in Iraq (‘democracy’ is a goal, but in that environment, it’s a damned fuzzy one), and no roadmap to get there.

You’ve got a nation whose borders were drawn by the colonial powers, that’s never really been a nation in the sense that France or China is. It’s, what, ~60% Shi’ite, 25% Sunni, and 15% Kurd, and what’s good for one group, isn’t for the other two. What sort of governmental structure will serve all three? We apparently aren’t willing to let Iraq become a Shi’ite state; we aren’t willing to let it trifurcate because giving the Kurds their independence would piss off the Turks. Some sort of confederation where the three were technically one nation but each ran their own part of the country would have the same problem, since it would surely soon break up into three separate entities, which would probably soon be at war with one another (and the Kurds with Turkey as well).

All this was known a year ago, and there just ain’t no good solution. (Actually, it was known a dozen years ago: in early 1992, Dick Cheney said, “You’re faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq. Is it going to be a Kurdish government or a Sh’ia government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to have to leave there to keep it propped up, how many casualties are you going to take through the course of the operation?” But I digress.) But we got in here anyway, and the Bushies clearly have no clue about where the exit door is, even by your measure, SPOOFE. And neither do I.

The main argument for going in there was to “sort things out for the oppressed Iraqi people because we care” though, wasn’t it?

I’m not so sure it will be as hard as people think. I’m afraid I don’t recall where I found the study results, but they’d taken polls of Iraqis and concluded that there was pretty good support for a western-style secular democracy. Not 100%, but 60% openly in favor of it. There was only 30% of the [I forget what the Iranians are, Sunni or Shiite, but that was it) who advocated that sort of system.

I think the big problem with going down the religious nation road is that these people have been watching the outside world: Iran and Saudia Arabia and Afganistan, and they don’t want to end up like that either. Iraq has been a secularized nation for a long time, since Saddam wouldn’t tolerate any religious challenge to his rule.

True, this is going to be a hard road to forge a new government. but Karzai is doing it in Afganistan, despite the fact that it should be much harder there. It can be done, and most people in Iraq don’t seem to be objecting. Of course, there are Baathists trying desperately to attack us, but that will fail.

I really don’t think he cares that much about it. Frankly, it was always obvious that attacking Iraq would in no way help him or any oil companies, nor would it increase US supplies of oil. people simply assumed the connection and then made up theories to justify the assumption.

[quopte]why doesn’t he simply declare, “As of [insert date of your choosing here] we’re pulling out. The rest of the world can sit back and watch or they can move in and help restore the society, the U. S. doesn’t care.”
[/quote]

I don’t think you or, indeed, most of the people on this board understand what is going on here. Taking Iraq was neccessary, ultimately for one reason: to transform it. And to show the Arab world (for Afganistan is not part of that world) that they can succeed without trying to tear down everyone else. And that our culture offers a better way than blind hate or Arab Nationalism. The goal here is not to crush Iraq or any Arab nation, but to make them wake up and recognize they’ve been going down a dead end.

this is already happening. There are new articles and stories in the Arab press questioning why they are such failures: questioning those failed government’s right to rule.

Well, that and the fact that Sadam was a major benefactor of several terrorist groups, although not usually the ones that wanted to get rid of him.

You may disagree with the ideas we Pubbies are using in this, but our actions and beliefs are logical, stem from the evidence, and internally consistent. So far, I believe the war for Iraq has been successful, despite the unforeseen assassination campaign. We have a people looking for something more than dictatorship and wanting to avoid war, a new shakeup of the old systems which, I believe will bring about a new and better era in the ME, and so forth.

Or, it might all fall apart like a house of cards and we could all die.

“But then, how would that be different from any other day” -Morpheus (God, I love that line)

I think we all know where this is headed. But before that, thank you smiling bandit for providing a moment of much needed clarity.

If the ONE reason for the war was to transform Iraq, I guess you agree with the basic premise – that the U. S. can simply leave, since we have in fact transformed it from a dictatorial, barely functional terrorist state into a war lord dominated, dysfunctional police state.

Tell me, smilingbandit, why didn’t we just assist the Iraqi people in overthrowing their hated, tyrannical overlords?

Why didn’t we back up the Kurds after the first Gulf War?

Why did we pull away from Iraq in the first place?

And what evidence exists that you believe justifies this war?

The white man’s burden: go forth and teach those savages how superior we are. Teach them democracy but make sure they can only elect suitable leaders. Teach them to be free. And those who do not wish to be free, force* them to be free. We know what’s good for them.

In exchange it is only fair that we take their oil and plant military bases in their country. You just can’t trust the bastards. Just look at Afghanistan: two years later and still a bloody mess.

Azael, you are, of course, being sarcastic. Yes?

Witness these gems of clarity…

WOOHAHAHA…

And that most definately includes you.
Didn’t you just admit you thought the gassing of the Kurds occured in 1992, as a reprisal for Desert Storm’?

snort
Goddammit you made me spit my wine all over the screen.

Yeeees, right.
The kohinor of clarity

sigh…

And here I thought it had been something about the threat posed to us by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, combined with the believed likelihood that they would fall into the hands of terrorists.

The argument you mention was a purely secondary one, useful for speechifying, but not worthy of inclusion in Congressional or U.N. resolutions. But in the absence of WMDs, it’s the only remaining justification for having gone into Iraq in the first place. If we don’t leave it a better place for the people of Iraq, then there will have been NO justification for the Iraqi war.

Other than “Saddam was bad, and we will smack those bad people we feel like smacking, and ally with equally bad people that we decide we want to cuddle up with. These people may not even be different people, but simply the same bad people at different times.”

Azael, where we all know this is headed is into the land of rational thought and debate. If the Bush Administration and its defenders want to keep on advancing the same bad propositions, we’ll keep smacking 'em down. Sigh all you want.

It’s hard to see much evidence on the ground for this.

First I’d heard of it. So a cite would be appreciated.

Even if it’s the way they actually feel, though, the problem is that (as I keep saying) you’ve got to find a model for western-style democracy that’s workable given the realities of the religious and ethnic divisions in Iraq. A majority-dominated system is automatically a Shi’ite-dominated system that’s fundamentally unfair to the Sunni and Kurdish minorities; a loosely-conjoined federation of Shi’ite, Sunni, and Kurd sub-states is likely to break up and make war with each other like Yugoslavia after Tito. (Plus a Turkish war on Kurdistan.)

Do you have an answer to this conundrum? I’ve been waiting to hear of one, particularly from the Bushies. I’m still waiting. I doubt that a sufficient answer exists. What’s more, I think that was obvious in advance. (That’s what Cheney thought once; can’t see what’s changed.)

Remember that they’re not like us. It’s quite possible that many of them have been looking at Iran and Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan under the Taliban, and thinking that that is what they want.

Karzai, with our help, controls most of Kabul. The rest of Afghanistan is controlled by warlords and drug lords; the law no longer dictates that women wear the burqa, but they do so anyway out of fear.

Can you say ‘hubris’?

What makes us think we can go into a part of the world whose culture, loyalties and quarrels we understand weakly at best, and remake it in our image in a few years? The British were in India for a frickin’ century, and it took them that long to leave as much of an effect on the culture there as they did. But India is still distinctly Indian.

(Sigh.) Cite?

They may be logical and internally consistent, but so is Noetherian ring theory. However, the relationship between the ideas and the evidence appears to be lacking.

The problem in Iraq is, we’re mostly gambling with the lives of the Iraqis. Who are we to tell them it’s time to take a chance on us? Yeah, it’s a wonderfully bold and daring line, and it will surely comfort the families of the Iraqis murdered on the streets of Baghdad that Saddam used to police, and we aren’t able to. Meanwhile, the worst that can happen to us is that we’ll lose some money and a relative handful of lives.

I’m not even gogint o bother with that one. That he was giving 25,000$ to every suicide-bombing Palestinian is a matter of public record. He went on arab TV to state make the offer, and it was taken up. Repeatedly.

Its true, we are gambling with their lives. But lets face it: Saddam’s police were Saddam’s servants. They brutally killed people all over the country, constantly, year after year. People died at a rate of at least 5,000 per month, and that refers only to children dying from lack of resources, according to the UN itself.

This is on top of all the dissappearences, the military genocides, the rather unpleasant courts (and their unofficial criminal code had a few things in their we don’t expect, such as “not voting for Saddam, punishable by death”). Things would have to get a lot, lot, lot worse than under Saddam before we could justifiably be accused of bringing more misery to Iraq.

Iraq was a lot like Russia under Stalin or China under Mao: they were all led by an extremely centralized govenrment headed by the absolute power of one man. Not quite as bad as say, North Korea, but bad enough that you couldn’t pay enough money to live there.