Once we were in there we had too few people to start setting up a new democracy. Putting the army and police force out of work was disastrous and helped lead to the civil war in Iraq because you just put hundreds of thousands of guys out of work.

The reason the government in Iraq is a mess is because of the electoral process they set-up with our help. Unfortunately, Paul Bremer and his guys did not force our founding fathers blueprint on them and it was decided that Iraq would not be cut-up into districts like our Congressional districts are divided. So, now they get a government full of zealots and extremists because those are the groups that are more organized and energized to vote.

It is so easy to say that we’re just going to walk out of there, but we still have incentive to stay and keep at it. I’m no Bush supporter and thought Gore was robbed in 2000, but there’s more at work than our military being there acting as a stop-gap. Things aren’t that simple when you are dealing with the economics of a country that was run poorly before the war and poorly after the invasion. The fact is Saddam Hussein kept lots of people happy because the state run institutions were a sham that instilled horrible principles in the people or Iraq. The Iraq dollar was pretty much worthless before the war because his heavily subsidized system was based on cronyism (not unlike the type we experience under the Bush administration) and was not effected by market forces. Why? There was no real market in Iraq because state institutions were immune to them because they received money regardless of their production, efficiency, etc.

I’m not saying the Iraqi people have to think the way of the west, but they will have to adapt to being part of a global economy now and people voluntarily changing the way they think is much harder than occupying a country until they convince themselves they want to change.

And to cap it off, I wish we had never gone in, stayed in, but we’re in too deep to walk away right now.

“I’m sure there will never be a reason to enter such places as Iraq–or anyplace–as the US did, and hopefully {someday} nobody out there finds some sort of non-reason, and people like us (like you?) on this site won’t need to sit around and comment on it~but we might.”

There….that just feels better.

Don’t you remember your music video with all the continents covered with the American flag ?

satchboogieca: um… have you ever met anyone from Tibet and asked what they thougt of being “part of China” and “permitted their own culture”??
it only became “part of China” in 1959 after a brutal invasion.

cheers.

Ask McCain that. 100 years, was it?

I just wonder what will result from the chaos once the U.S. leaves. What kind of government will rule in Iraq? What kind of presense will radical islamic groups like Al-Qaeda have in that country? Hopefully a US-free Iraq will not end up like Afghanistan did.[/quote]

I think the chaos will be much the same… At best, all those other oil thirsty countries mentioned above (China, Western Europe etc.) might step in to “help re-built the infrastructure” - something that never happened in Afghanistan. But even if that happens, it will not be for the benefit of Iraq. Once the U.S. pulls out, it will truly be an opportunity for the Middle East to unite and help their own, I doubt that would happen though.

U.S. will always be there (and everywhere) - bless foreign investors and independent contractors…

Iraq’s democracy is a sham, but their election, as far as I can tell, was not. The problem is that when the people had a chance to vote, they voted in a coalition of sects. The administration has this fantasy that if you just let people vote, that they’ll vote for nice Western-style, non-militant, liberal (in the broad Jeffersonian sense) secular parties and establish the rule of law, economic regulation and all the things that make Western democracies work as well as they do (which isn’t as well as we’d like, of course). But those sorts of institutions and political culture don’t just emerge magically overnight and no ammount of military force is going to make it happen.

Iraq is one piece in a global political puzzle: it can’t be separated from global economic trends, critical alliances, and energy needs. Western Europe needs a source of oil that is not Russian. Iraq is clearly an option. Europe (or China) will eventually be the prime customer for Iraqi oil. I suspect the Europeans have a long-term interest in seeing the US fall on it’s face in Iraq, same with China. If the US wants to benefit from the leverage we have so expensively purchased, we’re going to have to stick and play the game out.

I see long-term self interest at work in a US to NATO to OSCE type military transition in Iraq (eg Kosovo), with the first phase being played out now as Gen. Petraeus is doing the spade work for identifying key partners and leverage points in Iraq.

Anyone who doesn’t think the current policies of carrot (bribes) and stick aren’t working, is not dealing with fact. It’s working, but it’s not sustainable (too expensive, to reliant on personalities currently in the field). The only way anything good can be pulled out of this mess is if the US sticks to its resolve to help Iraq out of the mess it’s in. It’s in our interest -strategically and economically - and it’s in their interest.

The US needs to figure out how to deal with this kind of mess. It’s the future, unfortunately. We messed up in Somalia by misreading the situation; we continued on in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. We simply have to re-think how we deal with tribal/family/ethnic politics when all of our diplomatic and security structures are designed to deal with national politics. And unfortunately, none of the current candidates appear to be thinking along these lines.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGcdYntd0dU&feature=related

That raises the fundamental erroneous assumption of Bush’s Iraq War strategy: That Iraqis’ interests (e.g., stability) are not America’s interests. Unsurprisingly, and rather conveniently, acting in Iraq’s interest is also the solution to two current deficiencies of the current Iraq War plan. These deficiencies are: Inability to attract international military assistance and inability to stabilize Iraq’s politics.

The American plan is self-interested and, therefore, fundamentally flawed and unavoidably unsustainable. “Ding-dong, the witch is dead” didn’t work, and, really, it is small wonder why the international community will not commit to securing Iraq. It is not because the international community is unaffected by conflict in the Middle East. It is because the international community simply does not see success in the U.S. plan. Why would it? Sustaining forcibly an unpopular minority government which has no political authority and, in consequence, no hope - short of massacre - of stabilizing Iraq, is a losing battle, quite literally, and that is not good governance for any nation, notwithstanding its interests in Iraq. It is similar, quite metaphorically, to boarding a sinking boat: Don’t buy a ticket.

The Bush Administration is too ready to say to its increasingly poverty-stricken middle-class taxpayers that Bear Stearns and other abusive investment houses put you in a position in which you can let them suffer the consequences of their own practices or, taxpayers, you can bail them out because, if you don’t, you’re going to suffer their consequences too. Bush is too ready to foist the responsibility of his economic mess on taxpayers, and he’s too slow to ask for help in solving Iraq from the international community.

Bush should simply declare to the international community the reality in Iraq and America’s inability to stabilize it: “‘Mission Failed’ and, now, ‘Mission Impossible’; Send help.” What’s the difference? Spread the loss. Make it go away!

A Presidency stained by the courageous blood of 4,000 American and uncounted (truly) Iraqi deaths should witness at least one act of courage by its Commander-in-Chief.

America will never fully abandon Iraq - it is too strategically important. It’s the crude, dude.

I predict that there will always be a presence of American forces in Iraq - in the form of these huge humongous green zone bases with private contractors who can act with total legal impunity. The Iraqi democracy is a sham. The overstayed occupation has become terribly dangerous to the wider problem of middle eastern democratic development. This is the agency of American arrogance and greed. Extreme Makeover: Iraqi Edition. The impetus for chaos - proviso failing to administer peace and reconstruction. Immediately following the fall of Saddam, the problem was true Iraqi self-determination was not in Haliburton et al. best interests.

The wider Chinese comparison is important. Global security has been diminished – ok, how do you measure that - and I don’t think it is quite to say the Chinese are taking advantage because of this precedent without considering the political situtation in China or the history of China in Tibet.

Chinese-Tibetan involvement should not be easily compared to America in Iraq. The Chinese committed Genocide in Tibet in the 60s and 70s. During the Great Leap Forward 6000 Tibetan temples were obliterated. American involvement in Iraq by comparison - and the wider Middle East - during the same period has been cynically opportunistic - an illegal war criminality - but never the scope of China.

I think that this is the most thought provoking part of the whole article.
For any country to want to liberate another nation in the name of democracy, one would think that they would do so with an understanding that other countries are not like our own, here at home. This is where passports and traveling comes in handy in order to better understand other cultures and peoples - to learn how to accept all types of realities and issues that we’re not aquainted with, here in the west. However, I doubt that it is a requirement in Universities or even as a pre-req for making political decisions.
A lot of countries are based historically on their own religions that are quite different from how we relate to religion and each other, here in North America, and a lot of these nations hold onto these traditions for their heritage, unlike the west, where we are allowed to practice whatever we wish. Religion and tradition are very powerful things and it takes a lot of effort and a lot of time for people (let alone countries) to remove prejudices between themselves and other religions.

Who votes we go back to the U.S.’s policy of non-involvement…? Heh.

Certainly not I. To argue that the poor decision to invade Iraq means that any intervention anywhere is invalid is a stretch. I do dislike unilateral action, however. Many who criticize the U.N. have valid points and I think we should concentrate on reforming it (rather than only paying attention to it when we want something) into a more useful institution.[/quote]

…Sorry, maximilian - that last statement was meant to be rather tongue-in-cheek. I guess it didn’t quite come across over the internet.

I just wonder what will result from the chaos once the U.S. leaves. What kind of government will rule in Iraq? What kind of presense will radical islamic groups like Al-Qaeda have in that country? Hopefully a US-free Iraq will not end up like Afghanistan did.