Aerothorn on 8/6/2006 at 03:25
what sort of news is this?
If the mission was to disarm Iraq of its WMDs (and whatever any real motive for invading, that was the stated mission), then I think the mission was lost when they figured out they didn't have any...which was before the invasion...so the mission was lost before the mission took place, I suppose.
aguywhoplaysthief on 8/6/2006 at 05:54
Guess it's time to pull out of the cities and let them kill each other for a while, right?
tungsten on 8/6/2006 at 06:35
I refuse to believe it's not butter!
Convict on 8/6/2006 at 09:17
Quote Posted by aguywhoplaysthief
Guess it's time to pull out of the cities and let them kill each other for a while, right?
I think this is an important point - the war was wrong to begin with but now that the damage is done, should we stay there and try to fix the problems?
Rogue Keeper on 8/6/2006 at 09:41
Quote Posted by aguywhoplaysthief
Guess it's time to pull out of the cities and let them kill each other for a while, right?
Sorry, but somehow I have trouble imagining you care more about lives of the Iraqis than lives of the GIs... Don't you want to have them back home? I believe they would be happy. They would be killing each other anyway. Except that rogue GIs wouldn't deliberately execute civilians.
Right, this really is a stalemate situation. In this aspect...
Quote Posted by Pyrian
The mission was to enrich the President's cronies - oil and military contractor executives
... the mission has been accomplished from a significant part, but it also made the US gvt new wrinkles on their foreheads. All those unforeseen consequences.
In the meantime, a giant US embassy is rising in Baghdad. There are not enough money for reconstruction of schools, hospitals and infrastructure, but always for stupidities like this. Locals call it "George W's Palace". Ridiculous.
(
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-04-19-us-embassy_x.htm)
jstnomega on 8/6/2006 at 12:42
Quote Posted by aguywhoplaysthief
Guess it's time to pull out of the cities and let them kill each other for a while, right?
Roger that.
War is about killing people and breaking things. War is passé. The future belongs to those w/the stomach for genocide. Haven't the stomach for genocide? Then the only solution is to STAY THE HELL HOME.
Fragony on 8/6/2006 at 13:09
USA troops should just let it happen, civil wars have the habit of bringing peace. Just keep a minimum of troops at the borders to prevent foreign forces to enter iraq and get out of the towns, what use is it being a target. Let them fight their fight and eventualy there will be peace, won't be fun but we shouldn't try to stop iraq from finding it's own ballance, nothing is lost.
Rogue Keeper on 8/6/2006 at 13:25
As long as any foreign military troops will are in any other country, it smells of occupation and the citizens won't feel like true rulers of the country. But then Iraq would seriously need a peacekeeping force in the current situation... Damn it, I don't know what the UN is doing. They should deploy some peacekeeping forces there. But as long as the Coalition claims responsibility, it won't happen.
Bush was asking for UN's help also. Great strategy: explain yourself the UN Resolution in your own way, invade Iraq and when things are getting out of control, ask the UN for help with cleaning the mess. This way the costs for maintaining global hegemony will be shared by international community.
The fact that the UN is quite incompetent and inflexible lately just helps them. :erg:
With "them" I mean certain circles in the US, not America in general so it won't be perceived as yet another average America bashing... eventually it will be anyway. Hey, I'm from dirty Coalition country too!
Fragony on 8/6/2006 at 13:49
They were tipped about his whereabouts by locals, that means something. I think most are just fed up with the current situation and would welcome anything. Don't forget that the coalition was welcomed at the beginning but screwed up, I doubt that every peacekeeping force would be seen as occupation, the european troops usualy did a pretty good job of getting popular support. Nothing we can't fix really, but first the civil war will just have to be fought or any attempt is futile.
Rogue Keeper on 8/6/2006 at 14:28
Main question should be : How can such an ethnically and religiously diverse country reach permanent peace? Unless most of them won't be wiped out...? Surely, different groups have different interests.
Arabs don't like Kurds and Kurds don't like Arabs. Shiites and Sunnites don't like each other much. Kurds don't like Assyrians and Turkomans, who aren't liked by Arabs either. Christian minorities like Chaldeans are almost screwed
as nobody really likes them. And so on.
And besides all this cultural hatred, they have common post-war criminality, abductions, bomb attacks targeted at US/UN/Western targets, what you have. Some citizens may develop some trust in occupying forces, but then the troops will loose their nerves from all that pressure and danger and start killing other civilians, eventually family of the sympathizers. Now try to live in this...
Observers say that the main obstacle for functional democracy of western concept in the Middle East isn't Islam as such, but their social structure based on strong traditional tribalism. And you can't take them their tribal structure, it's they way of living, it's in their blood. Dictatorship was good to keep them all on leash. In 2003 probably the same observers strongly warned that such invasion and sudden fall of the regime may cause serious instability in the region. Predictable shit happened.
