It sure looks like the Bad Guys are winning in Iraq. This is very sad news for anybody there who wants to live in the civilized world, where people own their own bodies, minds, the fruits of their labors, and contracts they freely engage with their fellows, where race and gender and confession have no official regard, where people live under rule by officials elected by the people, where every soul answers equally to the same laws, where those laws must honor the consequences of "self-ownership" sometimes described as "inalienable rights", where all laws and government officials ultimately trace back to what the governed themselves have expressed at the ballot box.
This an ideal, of course, which no nation 100% succeeds in obtaining, but only some precious few at least attempt to obtain. I approximate the US as achieving this ideal somewhere around 90%. But I am certain that whichever anti-US forces win in the non-Kurdish Iraqi areas, the people will settle into a situation close to 0%, with no official attempt at ever achiving the free socieity I have described. Where the US would have its way, as it has in Iraq's Kurdistan, I am convinced that the people would enjoy something close to the USA's success in achieving a modern civilization.
I do fault Bush with not more perfectly implimenting his invasion and rebuilding of Iraq. But the success in Kurdistan proves to me that he did a good enough job that the hope of civilization rested with the Iraqi people themselves: the people of the Kurdish third of the nation collectively wanted civilization to overcome the tyrants in their midst, but apparently not the collective populations of the Sunni and Shia two-thirds. We now see what would have happened back in '92 had Bush I honored his committment with Shia leaders to invade then and extract the Hussein Baathist autocracy: an equally retarded Shia autocracy.
3 comments:
The bad guys ordered the invasion of Iraq in the first place. They put a bad guy in power there and then decided after they saw how bad he was that they would take him out.
I am not convinced that John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence, who has a history of using death squads to accomplish Republican political goals, isn't behind the death squads that are fomenting violence in Iraq. I'm not accusing him, but I'm not convinced that he doesn't know anything about it.
"But the success in Kurdistan proves to me that he did a good enough job that the hope of civilization rested with the Iraqi people themselves"
The Kurds have been autonomous for a few years. They had a head start, and help from the US and UK while Saddam was in power. There was no sectarian violence because the majority of people in the area are kurds.
You're comparing apples to oranges.
But Bush's army didn't go in and steal oil or destroy infrastructure and kill civillians indescriminantly, as you claim, "waging war on the Iraqi people." The Kurds demonstrates precisely and conclusively what Bush's invasion seeks: where people conduct themselves in a civil manner, US forces having nothing to do -- and do nothing -- which includes not stealing petro or performing other nefarious acts.
The difference betweent these the civil and the uncivil regions are indeed "apples and oranges": starkly different conduct by the indiginous residents. The uncivil area is dominated by people who would rather destroy their own water treatment facilities, generation plants, bridges, schools, petroleum production and distribution networks, and random human lives than to permit a civilized government to materialize, as it has in Kurdistan.
If, as you claim, Bush's goal was to install a puppet regime, steal oil, and "wage war on the people", the easiest place for him to do this is in the area where US forces meet the least resistance. But there, in Kurdistan, US troops barely operate, and the people conduct themselves in exactly the manny Bush has claimed he wants for all of Iraq: autonomously and civilly.
Why do the people there not hate Bush and the US? Doesn't the US military also occupy that region? Doesn't its government also derive from US military actions? Why don't armed groups there form to attack US personel, to exact revenge on Sunnis, to enforce religious superstitions, to destroy the infrastructure and terrorize the populace so as to make a mess of the US occupation?
You dismiss the triumph of civilization there because it already existed before Bush's invasion. But how did it come to exist? How has its existance survived from its inception through the end of Hussein's rule? Answer: a combination of US military force plus the civilized conduct of its populace.
The same US military operates in the Sunni and Shia areas. What's the difference? Obviously, the people.
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