Posted by RS on 06/02/06 15:22

Richard Crowley wrote:
> "Ralf Hutter" wrote...
>
>> And it is a war WE instigated. Our lousy foreign policy of the last
>> 40 years has come back to haunt us.
>
>
> What a good little sheep you are. Believe anything you
> get from CNN and NYT, et.al., do you?

Well, lets see now. Iraq exists because Britan was on the winning side
in WWI, and they drew some lines on a map and called it Iraq. Its
tradition before that has been tribal and feudal governement structures.
This was maintained up to and including Saddam. Saddam kind of
reminded me of a line from Monty Python's Life of Brian where a local
resistance group is talking about the Romans and one says. "Well, you
gotta hand it to the Roman's, they certainly know how to keep order."
And the other says. "Yeah, who else could in a place like this!"

So, in between WWI and now, Oil becomes the grease the runs the world
and lots of money falls into places like Iraq, which means that the
tribal/feudal leaders get a crapload of money and everyone else gets
squat. Although, outside of the fact that Saddam was a freeking loony
and his kids psycho's, Iraq was running as good or better than the best
of Middle Eastern nations.

Then along comes Gulf One and sanctions and containment, which, in
retrospect were working better than we had thought. The Kurdish regoin
had a decade to build up its own infrastructure without Saddam some in
and kicking the whole house down every couple years, and hence, its now
perhaps the best functioning part of Iraq. Their milita, the Peshmerga
is unifed and efficent without seeming to engage in random violence
(Although the Kirkut situation will possibly be a flash point in the not
too distant future). The population is fairly pro American without its
government institutions needing to be kept friendly with frequent
American cash infusions. It appears they are attempting to do it the old
fashioned way, though investment and hard work. They are uniformly
Muslim, but have a tradition of being tolerant of other sects, which is
more than you can say out the Sunni/Shia situation south of them.

In Iraq war retrospect, far too much of it was based on a foundation of
a wish and a prayer. It was assumed we'd be the happy liberators and it
was assumed that hundreds of years of feudal rule would be dropped in
favor of 'hey, lets all do Democracy and work together'. We seemed
suprised when they spent a year arguing over what color the draps should be.

Sorry, I didn't get any of that from CNN or the NYT.

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