How many regard it as their government, and not a foreign puppet ? I also find your distinction between supporting and committing attacks fairly irrelevant.
We are not a neutral party; we are the enemy. Foreign invaders; rapists, torturers and murderers.
This is a US war, not a UN one. Nor is there any reason to believe Iraq will ever stabilize, especially with us there.
No, but we’ve subjected them to an inadvertant propaganda campaign in the form of the occupation, which might as well have been designed to convince them that “democracy” means chaos, violence, deprivation and poverty.
That’s your opinion, however since the Iraqi economy is growing, people in Iraq have more political freedom than most of the countries surrounding them, and have exercised certain democratic political rights, I’ll say they’re on the right course, and it’s UN mandated that the MNF stay there until we’ve helped Iraqis build up security forces and government institutions with the ability to defend themselves and provide good services to the people of Iraq. No amounts of emotion you’re portraying is going to change this.
:rolleyes: Of course we are, a term applicable to the insurgents, not the MNF. Self hating can only go so far.
Yet that ‘chaos violence and deprivation’ was there long before a US soldier set foot on Iraqi soil. It’s not an occupation anymore, like I said the UN mandated the MNF to assist the nascent Iraqi government and it’s security forces until the reached a point of self sufficiency.
Yes, in the capital city the death toll has gone up, but throughout the rest of the country the death toll has remained lower and consistent. Baghdad is an exception because of the size of the civilian population residing there. It’s not indicative of the rest of the country however.
No it wasn’t, it was subjected to direct rule from Westminister from 1972 until the good friday agreement of 1998.
Yet there are certain indicators that civil war will be avoided, apart from the bickering from certain sects of the population, all are committed to the political process they’ve become a part of. You’ve got clerics and Imams from both sides stating that they should join Iraqi security forces and defend the government from insurgents and foreign fighters, and the other side setting up a national reconcilation conference in June. If both sides were committed to fighting a civil war, there’d be no talks, no serious efforts to resolve the conflict raging.
Yes, I shall tell them that the original reasons as to why the British army went into Northern Ireland was to protect the Catholic minority from Protestant persecution.
Well I am. Suit yourself, I however do not like to flush peoples future down a toilet because certain people were opposed to this action because of the original reasons of why we went to war.
The majority of the population I seem to believe, hey, they elected them :rolleyes:
Why? I can say I support Man UTD, but it doesn’t mean I play football or actually even enjoy watching it, supporting a cause and participating in it are two different things. Insurgents maybe supported in principle, defence of the homeland etc, but when it comes to their tactics, the fact that they do nothing to prevent a civil war from happening, is a very different thing. Unless you’re suggesting everyone who supports the insurgents is an insurgent?
I’m not sure why you can’t discuss this issue without the personal insult (Sherlock), but I never said the insurgents weren’t brutal. As for being anti-democratic, I was arguing that the term anti-democratic is too narrow and essentially meaningless to describe the insurgency. For the Sunni insurgency, it is the loss of power that motivates them.
I certainly wouldn’t say that the insurgents aren’t brutal. I have lost a lot of colleagues here. A few weeks ago, one of my Iraqi colleagues was abducted, and tortured to death. They then dumped his body in a gutter. So don’t sit in your comfy living room and tell me they are brutal.
But it doesn’t help anyone’s understanding of the situation to throw around terms like anti-democratic. It also doesn’t help to overplay the role of Zarqawi. His role in the insurgency appears to have been inflated by the US eager to show a foreign presence in the insurgency. By using terms like ‘anti-democratic,’ saying ‘they hate are freedoms,’ calling them ‘cowards’ and focusing on Zarqawi, we are reducing the enemy to cartoon characters. This might help us feel better, but it doesn’t help solve the problem.
I am saying that the majority of the Iraqi people have no experience with democracy and with the exception of exile groups, never expressed a strong desire for democracy. I also think you are trying to label critics of this intervention as racists, which is a technique Bush used in several speeches. It is a strawman.
Also, I’d like to know how you define democracy. Women now have less rights than they did under Hussein’s regime. Many of the parties that have been elected from the south have explicitly un-democratic platforms, including the establishment of a Shia theocracy.
Lebanon and Iraq have completely different cultures and histories. Lebanon has a history of greater openess and access to western ideas and culture. The nation also has a longer history of experimentation with democracy, extending at least to 1943. For the Lebanese, democracy has become an ideal that is accepted by a large segment of the society as something worth fighting for and working at.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. The attack on the mosque was an attempt to escalate sectarain violence. Essentially, they are trying to force people to choose sides in the coming civil war.
Well I screwed up the coding on that. Ryan_Liam’s first quote should have ended with the sentence “it’s not going to be accepted lightly.” Can anyone fix this?
I see what you’re saying about nominal support not equating to full participation, but I don’t think that means that we can dismiss even nominal support as a negligible problem.
After all, when we see polls saying that such-and-such number of Palestinians express support for suicide bombings or such-and-such number of Muslims worldwide express support for Osama bin Laden, we tend to consider that a bad sign (if the numbers are high, that is). We don’t just shrug and say “oh well, who cares if they support it as long as they’re not actually out there doing it.”
Then I don’t suppose you’ll find the Brooking institute report to be any worth. :rolleyes:
Dude, when you proclaim that the ‘occupiers rape and pillage’ it’s not anything but self hatred. You can’t even bring yourself to acknowledge the achievements the Iraqi people have accomplished besides the death and violence. Your emotion in your posts obviously blinds you to the facts, or you just use them to cover the lack of such?
Of course we did, but at least we’re willing to rebuild it, I suppose you won’t put the same judgements onto the last Iraqi government which pretty much bombed whoever it liked?
Their infrastructure was already wrecked from the repressions, wars and murder that was inflicted onto the Iraqi population by their own government.
I think present Coalition countries and the Bush Administration would want nothing more than to be asked to leave. Like I said before, the MNF forces are there by the request of the Iraqi government and mandated by the United Nations, if you have trouble believing this, then I suggest you find out about it.
It’s not representative of the country on a whole, just that more terrorist organisations are concerntrating their attacks in Baghdad as symbolism that the country is in ‘state failure’
Well prove to me it isn’t, considering the election has been endorsed by the UN and deemed valid, seems pretty valid to me, regardless whether or not you like the results.
Then everyone who is an Irish Catholic in NI is a terrorist then, since 90% of them vote for the Sinn Fein, a group linked to the IRA.
madmonk28
I have a feeling that Sunni Iraqi insurgents have the prospect, in the future, to follow methods of political action by the Catholics in NI to get what they want.
Read this, it’s an articles from NYT, just on a blog, it’s an example of how Sunni Arabs are using ‘bullets and the ballot box’ to get into government. But you should understand, in an area still dealing with the emergence of democracy and rule of law, there are going to be groups like the ones in Iraq which will do anything to bring back the type of governance they controlled.
Don’t confuse emotion with reality on the ground, the brutality of the insurgency has nothing to do with them being democratic, like you said, it was about power, and Sunni Arabs have been knocked off their status of being the Political elite by the majority of the Iraqi population, so naturally, like any group which have now been alienated, they’ve resorted to violence to achieve political aims.
If they’re not anti democratic, then why are they so intent on destroying the power sharing process that’s been brought about? It looks like to me that it’s nothing to do with democracy, but the desire to destroy the democratic process already established and return to the status quo of before.
Zarqawi might be small fries, however he’s responsible for most of the carbombing ‘spectaculars’ and most atrocities against the Iraqi population using outright terror to destroy Iraqi society to achieve the aim of civil war. As for them hating ‘our’ freedoms, it’s pretty apparent they hate anyones freedom to not adhere to their particular ideologies. As for the insurgents not affiliated with Zarqawi, the President of Iraq, MNF forces and government officials have all met with representatives of the insurgency, even in the Cairo reconcilation conference last summer, all major ethnic/sectarian groups agreed in principle to resistance of Occupation.
How could the Iraqi people express a desire for democracy if they were unable to express that desire without being put in jail or at worst, executed?
The establishment of a Shia Theocracy maybe in the charter of the parties, but in reality I don’t think it will be achievable considering the opposition from other sects and some Shias themselves. In the Brookings report the polling for an ‘Islamic republic’ got no more than 30%. Much like Hamas having to stall the destruction of Israel which is in it’s charter for political reality.
Women have more rights in the terms of political power than in Saddam Husseins time, but due to the violence and intimidation campaigns to put it bluntly ‘keep them in their place’ they’ve not been able to exercise these rights to their full potential.
A theocracy implies that the Clergy in Iraq (especially Najaf) would participate in the political life of Iraqis, which Ayatollah Sistani has objected too (especially given the example of his next door neighbour, Iran)
That maybe, however the examples are there in the political processes they’ve/are going through, both have histories of Sunni and Shia violence, and both have a government brought about which has/is able to sufficiently deal with the problems of representation.
Yet the political system is pretty much the same as it was since the civil wars and the Syrian Occupation?
But I bet in the beginning the same kinda ethnic confrontations and sectarian rivalry was around just as it’s like in Iraq right now. Right now you see the same type of situation where Iraqis are defending a government they’ve elected and have a stake in, the only difficulty is how to allow the Sunni minority sufficient representation and reigning in of Paramilitary groups.
But most of the people on both sides knew that terrorists were trying to do very that, however, it brought out the best on both sides, with the exception of Sadr, who backtracked once he found out his militia was participating in executions of Sunni Iraqis, many from both sides prayed and worked at making sure they wouldn’t be split apart by the attack.
Well people can support Che Guervara, but it doesn’t equate with them wanting to emulate him or carry out similar attacks he launched.
That’s freedom of expression for you, people can say they support someones actions without actually doing anything for them. That isn’t to say we can’t influence them from supporting them further.
I could be mistaken, but I think madmonk’s point is that it’s not very helpful to describe the insurgents as anti-democratic, not because they aren’t opposed to democracy, but because their opposition isn’t in favour of democracy either. If neither side is pro-democracy, labelling one side as anti-democratic is unhelpful at best and misleading at worst. As I read his posts, madmonk is asserting that this is a straight up struggle for raw power between two factions, not an ideological clash over political principles.
Not if it supports the war; the pro war faction are proven liars.
I said rape and torture, although we are pillaging as well. It’s not self hatred, since I opposed the war and feel no guilt over it.
I don’t believe there are any of significance. Certainly none that compensate for the harm they have suffered.
Oh, garbage; our “rebuilding” is just a scam to hand money over to people like Haliburton; it’s not real. We bomb ( and kidnap and rape and torture and murder ) whomever we like; the main distinction between us and Saddam in Iraq is he did a better job at running the place. I mean that not as a complement to Saddam, but as an insult to us.
No, we did most of the damage.
Pure nonsense; we’ll never leave, till the ME is drained of oil and converted to Christian fundamentalism. That’s why we are building a giant embassy and huge military bases.
And your proof these are all terrorists and not patriots is ?
I am merely trying to clarify what madmonk is saying. I don’t purport to have evidence, though this does jive with my impression of the political scene in Iraq.
**Gorsnak ** very succintly exlained my position. I think throwing words like anti-democratic is merely propaganda. It doesn’t have any relevance to the on the ground realities here.
As for the Brookings report, it doesn’t paint a very rosy picture. It does show some types of combat deaths trending down over the winter, but that really isn’t the fighting season here.
There clearly is a program of ethnic cleansing underway. This will lead to a civil war.
As for the constituted government, the Army is largely Sunni and persecutes the Shia, the police are largely Shia and persecute the Sunni. These are the instruments of government and they do not represent any kind of democratizing force in Iraq.
Yes the Sadrist bloc is complaining of US influence which is trying to curtail one of the most anti democratic forces within the Shia-led government, and it is those who owe allegance with Moktada. No surprises there, bucko. Shame you didn’t know this before you opened your mouth.
Also, the number of parties which are complaining is because of the increasing call of the US and Maliki to have experienced Technocrats, not party favourites of different blocs, to run the country. Step in the right direction.
I don’t think so, that would imply that the Shias and Sunnis were ethnically different to each other. I believe there is enough support left in each Sectarian bloc to make allocations and work hard to stamp out the insurgency. These people don’t wanna be at each other’s throats.
I’ll make you a bet, there will be absolutely no civil war in 2 years, a wide margin, plenty of time for me to be proven wrong, but I am adamant that there will be no civil war in Iraq, there just won’t be, because all sides realise the political and economic costs of what a civil war will bring them.
I’m sorry but this is frankly rubbish, the majority of both forces are Shia and Kurdish, with representation of the Sunnis in each arm of the security force around or below 10%. And futher for me to add, the Army is trusted more and is perceived to be more competent than their Police counterparts. Command level Sunnis maybe in the majority due to their experience, however I’d believe it would be difficult to turn Shia forces against a Shia population in order to enact revenge on them.
Yes they do, both of those security forces provide the bulwark against the type of terrorism we’re witnessing within Iraq, so all the more reason to get them intergrated, representative of Iraqis on a whole, and well armed equipped and loyal to the state and not to any particular people in office.
Which would be? Here? I would presume you’re in Iraq right now as we speak?
No the Brookings report doesn’t paint a rosy picture, however it does highlight the fact on the political freedoms index, Iraq comes 5th, behind Lebanon, Morrocco, both more freer Arab states. Not bad for three years work. Also, Iraq has estimated growth rates of 16.8% this year, with per capita income rising, inflation down to 20%, and falling unemployment down to 27%. It’s growth rates are comparable to the rates of the expanding economies of Asia. All this combined with political uncertainty, a raging insurgency and damaged infrastructure.
Der Trihs prove the elections aren’t valid before I respond to any of your posts.
Yes, Ryan, as you’ll see from madmonk’s “Location” field, he identifies himself as currently being in Baghdad. He has also referred to Iraq as “here” in other posts in this thread, and referred to his work there:
I’m sorry, kid, but weren’t you just saying upthread that
and yet I’ve just shown you a a Shiite group (with considerable power and pull for Muqtada al-Sadr is both a hero by religious lineage and for his actions in Najaf, Sadr City and Basra ) that wants you the hell out?
Sunnies? Do even want to go there? Why, this just in:
Read “a familly in Iraq”, Baghdad Burning, and Free Iraq .These are 3 blogs from Iraq. It gives you the other side. They are sporadic because electricity is off and on.They call the US occupiers.
Which can be countered by Iraq the Model, Iraqi Pundit and Mesopotamian all of which are outstanding blogs. They don’t exactly praise the US, but they don’t blame them for everything either, and don’t term the US occupiers until the cows come home.
Well Bucko, Sadrists do not represent the Iraqi people, and have been blamed for many atrocities against Iraqis, Sunni and Shia alike. Heh, a Hero who is a ‘scholar’ who couldn’t even finish his religious studies, because he was itching for his own power base. Sadr commands no where near the respect the established religious clergy has, that clergy lead by Sistani, an educated revered man which can bypass any rants made by Sadr, who is basically abusing his fathers name and his own heritage for his own aims.
The MNF favours neither the Sunnis or the Shias into controlling Iraq, because the only way in which Iraq will succeed is when all groups come to an agreement of powersharing in government. US mediation got Sunnis more seats in the Cabinet, and more people writing the constitution, it also got them a review of the constitution over sensitive arguements concerning federalism. So yes, the US has killed Sunnis, Shias, but in the political sense it favours neither over the other in order to succeed in bringing about a government of national unity.
They were validated by the UN, if they were false, they wouldn’t have a hells chance in succeeding, and I might as well point out that Afghanistan is ‘occupied’ and has similar elections which were validated by the UN.
Are you trying to insult me or something? You do not have to provide me with examples of him talking about people being shot dead in order to verify a yes. However I’ll take where he claims to be with a pinch of salt until I see some evidence he IS actually there.
So why did he get the account of the Iraqi Army being nearly completely Sunni and the Iraqi Police nearly all Shia if he’s in the heart of the action so to speak? Look I’m not saying he’s lying, I just find it odd he would make such an obvious error.