From time to time, some advance the peculiar claim that Iraqis are grateful to George W. Bush for invading their country. Let’s disabuse them of that ignorance.
The author is a humor writer for The New Yorker
From the linked page
:smack: :smack: :smack:
Gullible septimus was caught up again? :o :o :smack:
Hey, if you’re going to get hoodwinked, The Borowitz Report is grade-A stuff to get hoodwinked by. 
So times the line between truth and satire is just too fine…
How long before Trump claims he saw thousands of Iraqis celebrating Jeb’s withdrawal?
After reading only the OP I knew that had to be a joke article. I seriously doubt the general population of Iraqis had any clue that Bush’s brother was even running. I doubt they have much concept of what a Western, democratic nation’s political party nomination process even is, let alone that it would outweigh Islamic sectarian lines… :rolleyes:
Well, one thing I know is that I work with Iraqis on a regular basis, and all of them view the invasion of Iraq as the ruination of their country. When you ask them anything about their culture and society, they always preface their answers by sighing, and then saying something like, “Do you mean before or after the invasion? Because after the invasion, everything just went to hell. . .” Occasionally they ask me if I can explain just what the hell the Bush administration thought is was doing.
As soon as I saw “Kurds”, I knew something was wrong.
Making an example out of Saddam and Iraq to the Islamic Middle Eastern world in the wake of 9/11. Exporting that level of savage brutal civilian terrorism to the West will get any of you utterly destroyed. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
Why did Dillinger rob banks? That’s where the money is…
[GD territory ahead:]
So these people preferred living under Saddam’s dictatorship?
I would, too, I suppose–because back then you at least had basic stability and a steady job, which is better than the chaos and bombs in the marketplaces of today’s Iraq. But do they really take any pride in Saddam?
Can you ask your Iraqi friends if they see the logical conclusion of this question? They are admitting that their country needed Sadam in power…because Iraqis are incapable of governing themselves. They need a dictator telling them what to do (and proudly killing anybody who disagrees).
Bush invaded, --and gave the Iraqi people the chance, for the first time in their lives- to vote. They chose their own leaders, their own future… and their own disaster.
Things certainly went to hell…but do your friends not realize that it isn’t all America’s fault?
I could, but honestly, I’d rather not even get into it–it would probably end up in an hour-long, detailed listing, when we’ve got other things to do. I think their general view is that so many things were done wrong by the occupying forces from the start that it never could have worked right, and that, in any case, they never actually had the good of the Iraqi people as their goal.
Bush invaded, allowed a wave of looting and disorder that caused many of Iraq’s top professionals to flee the country. He disbanded the Iraqi Army, leaving the trained military unpaid and unemployed and causing more instability. He imposed hyper-capitalist kleptocracy on their economy. Then, despite that such cultures had evolved their own erratic, but time-tested, methods of decision and compromise, Bush-Cheney imposed a Western-style election in which 51% could impose their will on the 49%.
And you want to treat all this as mostly the Iraqis’ own fault? Good heavens!
Don’t be too harsh on septimus. The Iraqis-dancing-in-the-streets-story has been confirmed by Baghdad Bob.
That guy over there mugged me, so I’m going to shoot you to prevent it from happening again.
Yeah, that makes sense.
This. It WAS 99% the USA’s fault.
That is not a logical conclusion.
What is the logical conclusion is that violent interventions from outside that break social and state structures open up state collapse and civil war in any divided society… Only prejudice and excuse making for the american incompetence leads to an “incapable” conclusion.
No, the americans did not even do this, which if it had been at least a true capitalist system would have been an improvement over the failures of the arab socialism.
They instead had their cartoon vision of how the market economies work and then completely failed to even manage to organize this in the Iraq, leaving only both broken private sectors and the broken state firms that were already under the regime economic failures.
It was a gross incompetence all around neither succeeding in a positive transition to a private market capitalism, or succeeding in the reform of the state sector, already a failure.
This is a silly statement.
The dictatorship had already broken the historical systems.
We all look alike.
It is the lynching mentality of terror.
This discussion is starting to drift into GD territory. So, too, then shall the thread.
Though I realize it may come back, depending on how things pan out. Thread relocated.