Stop paying them and I’m betting that problem will resolve itself within about a month.
-Joe
Agreed and the only viable long term strategy has to be energy independence AKA alternative energy.
But it’s not like our economy turns on a dime and it would take a long long time to get ourselves changed over to alternative energy sources. Changing over would be a delicate time, and we wouldn’t be so silly as to say we’d leave ourselves wide open to anyone who wants to screwing with our energy supply.
How can you justify this statement, when confronted with the fact that the USA has left behind stable governments after invading and occupying countries many times in the past?
You mean like Germany and Japan ? Those were quite different, since in those cases we were in the right. We occupied them because they attacked us or declared war on us. Iraq is a blatant case of aggression. And, any minimal degree of goodwill we may have had, we’ve squandered; we’ve done just about everything we could to make us hated.
We didn’t destroy those countries’ institutions and organizations along with their infrastructure. We essentially just took over top management (in a hands-on way, imposing policies we thought necessary like demilitarization), and then we let the existing government institutions continue to operate.
Iraq’s government we destroyed utterly, then we just sat back waiting for the magic of the free market to turn it into a stable, healthy democracy.
Afghanistan was no picnic before the USSR invaded, right. But the Soviet military machine transformed the country into hell on Earth. It’s difficult to fathom the enormity and scope of the damage done and how many people were affected.
A minor point, but Najibullah’s government had an army and several militias. This is why after the USSR left the regime was able to fight the popular resistance for several more years before finally falling. And then the disparate groups, as you point out, were at each other’s throats.
The USSR, using interventionist thinking, failed its moral responsibility by leaving the country in tatters. You seem to disagree because:
Like I said before, we’ll just have to agree to disagree on the idea of states being moral agents, brutal occupations, using force to intervene in the internal fairs of other states, and, as it appears in this case, the idea of crying “democracy!” as an excuse for anything. And trust you me, no internal planner has “duty” on their ledgers.
There is another difference. For better or worse Germany was one “entity”. So was Japan. They each had one government. Those governments were soundly defeated and then rebuilt. Those countries did not have multiple factions running around armed to the teeth fighting each other and us for control. They also did not have the “religious” aspect … which is to say they were not fighting us for their god, they had been fighting for world domination.
In short, those were clearly defined victories. Fortunately for them and for us, we also appointed men who turned out to be competent governors until they could be rebuilt.
We don’t leave until complete victory…
Which means “never”, since we haven’t even defined victory. Besides which, we are the bad guys in all this; we shouldn’t win, in whatever way you want to define winning. Hopefully, we would suffer a disaster that would traumatize us for a generation or two, like Vietnam. That would keep us from similar acts for a while, and is a start on the retribution we deserve.
Agreed
I wasn’t aware of that - my understanding was that outside of Kabul, Soviet / Najibullah control evaporated almost immediately, even if Kabul held on for a bit longer.
I do not disagree that the USSR’s interventionist thinking wasw a failure; I doubt they felt a moral responsibility to Afghanistan any more than they felt a moral responsibility to Czechoslovakia or Romania or Hungary or Ukraine. It was territory they wanted for access to ME oil and they were savage in their repression of anyone who didn’t like it. They had no interest in leaving a viable state behind, unless you consider a puppet entirely beholden to the Soviet Union for it’s very survival a viable state.
Well, that’s not going to be hard because that’s not what I said. I said the US has a duty of care in this particular case, because we started this ball rolling. We have no moral duty of care anywhere else, we are not the World Police, and we certainly aren’t bringing about a Pax Americana, much to the neo-Cons discontent. It’s nice that our moral and economic imperatives happen to cross in this particular case.
I am going to disagree most strongly that our occupation of Iraq is brutal when compared to the Soviets in Afghanistan. More brutal than peace? Yes. But far less brutal than the Soviets in Afghanistan or the French in Algeria.
Do you have anything but vitriol and opinion to bring to the table here?
Vietnam for instance. Cambodia - there’s another winner.
Japan? Germany?
Vietnam was our fault, but I fail to see how we were responsible for Cambodia.
Mistakes have been made. Are you assuming we either won’t or can’t learn from them and do better in Iraq?