How would you handle Iraq?

[Fear_Itself]

[QUOTE=ralph124c]
Pursue a scorched earth policy: if an attack is made on a US convoy, everybody in the vicinity dies.
[/QUOTE]
Isn’t that the sort of thing we hung Saddam for?

Dujail

[Uzi]

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
What **FRDE ** said. Also :

1 : They were psychologically primed for change, because they knew that their own actions were largely to blame for their losses. Whether they thought they were morally to blame in setting out to conquer people, or just felt they had done a bad job of it, they knew that they had screwed up and need to change.
[/QUOTE]

None of which would have occurred if they had not lost the war. If they had won they would most likely not have realized that at all.

The Iraqis, on the other hand, are the victims of an unprovoked attack; they see no reason to blame themselves for their present problems, since nothing they did or didn’t do would have stopped us from attacking.

Nor will “re-educating” the population convince them to ever feel anything but hate for us; they know what we have done to them, and that none of it is their fault.

It is unlikely they would blame themselves, or think themselves at fault, even if we did consider they had done something wrong. What we consider wrong and what they consider wrong can be two different things and probably are in this case. Please read the link for a better understanding of things and maybe you will see why ‘right and wrong’ don’t necessarily apply in this case.

Honor and Shame in a Middle Eastern Setting

2 : Both were real nations, with actual national culture and national loyalties, not an artificial construct with few loyalists and no cultural unity. They have no emotional investment in making Iraq hold together; the Japanese did in Japan, and the Germans in Germany.

Then the answer would be to divide the country into different subsets and then aid each area individually. That would stop the fighting between groups and all you’d have to do is patrol the line between each group. But, it still wouldn’t prevent another dictator from arising.

[glee]

If I were Bush (thank God I’m not) I would:

• pull all troops out of Iraq now
• send them immediately to Afghanistan
• capture Bin Laden
• hold a press conference saying how I had caught the man responsible for 9/11

[FRDE]

Snag is that Bin Laden is probably long dead

• otherwise we would see a lot more of the cretin

I agree about Afghanistan, even if we can’t sort it out, it is a better sandpit than Oman

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

[QUOTE=Uzi]
I’m saying that if you want to pacify Iraq you have the power to do so. What you lack is the will to do so, or maybe the ruthlessness to do so. I think it would be tough for any modern democratic nation to do so given how we feel about human rights.
[/quote]

We’re not in a conflict with Iraq. Iraq is not the enemy. Iraq is supposedly our ally. Why would we want to “pacify” a state that we ourselves put into place?

“War” is just semantics. Are your soldiers shooting at people and being shot at on a regular basis? Call it whatever you want.

The word “war” was not what I objected to. What I objected to was not your implication that we are “at war,” but that we are at war with IRAQ. We are not at war with Iraq. Iraq is our ally.

Your President says there is a defensive reason for you to be there, and you elected him, so the analogy is valid, if not perfect.

Thanks for the laugh.

Also, I am not advocating that you take the steps necessary to pacify Iraq. I’m just saying that you could do it if you wanted to, but it would involve being as ruthless as Saddam was. The alternative should be to pull out asap and cut your losses and let the Iraqis sort it out themselves.

It sounds like we agree then.