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Originally posted by Signym:

Well, and of course Putin would NEVER lie because he would NEVER want to see our troops tied up in Iraq, and would NEVER want to see us spending hundreds of billions of dollars, bankrupting our economy, and diverting both world and Islamist fanatic attention

from Chechnya! And being the ex-head of the KBG, Putin is an honest man who only has our interests at heart! HAHAHAHAHA!!! Snort! Guffaw!

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Originally posted by Signym:

I know this is hard to keep in mind, but Iraqs were not "our enemies" until we invaded. Their interests are vitally different from the (less than 5% of) foreign fighters, who really are terrorists and who migrated into Iraq specifically to fight the great Satan. If you lump

them all together, you will eventually find that every Iraqi becomes an "enemy" in any policy that you might propose, and you simply can't win that kind of fight.

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Full entry from dictionary.com

ter·ror·ism ( P ) Pronunciation Key (tr-rzm)
n.

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

Main Entry: ter·ror·ism
Pronunciation: 'ter-&r-"i-z&m
Function: noun
1 : the unlawful use or threat of violence esp. against the state or the public as a politically motivated means of attack or coercion
2 : violent and intimidating gang activity —ter·ror·ist /-ist/ adj or noun —ter·ror·is·tic /"ter-&r-'is-tik/ adjective

Source: Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law, © 1996 Merriam-Webster, Inc.

terrorism

n : the calculated use of violence (or threat of violence) against civilians in order to attain goals that are political or religious or ideological in nature; this is done through intimindation or coercion or instilling fear [syn: act of terrorism, terrorist act]

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by the admission of our own pentagon, being conducted more or less at random in civilian populations, our

leaders are essentially attempting to foster an environment of fear in order to forward a political agenda.

So too, when our leaders discuss the threats potentially posed by our enemy, Al Qaeda, in real and imagined terrorist acts such as attack with biological and chemical weapons poisoning our water supply and our air, our leaders are trying to foster in us an

atmosphere of fear, in order to forward a political agenda.

So, definitively, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld et. al. are terrorists who have laid seige not only to Iraq but to America. Their own doctrine which has been made into our law dictates that we must stop them or America is forfeit.


Lynch,

you're error in your argument against Chris is that you don't really seem to know what Al Qaeda is. Al Qaeda is a communication network, not a command structure. But it is discreet and organized. If someone has connections to Al Qaeda, and can use the Al Qaeda

network, that does not mean a damn thing. People who know that person are unlikely to ever learn that they are an Al Qaeda operative. This would be as daft as saying that these Al Qaeda people who had contact with people who worked for Valerie Plame were

CIA agents, or that she was an Al Qaeda operative. This is absurd. In order to be a CIA agent you need to have access to agency resources. Ditto Al Qaeda. Saddam did not have access to Al Qaeda resources. I feel this case is extremely closed. It's about as

closed as whether or not Daffy Duck shot JFK.

Furthermore, no, you're trying to convince people that a connection known not to exist does exist, something you know definitively to be not true. The response you get is identical to the one you would get if you tried to sell us all on intelligent design.

Whether or not we did the right thing is another issue. Clearly at this point we didn't, because we f^&ked it up so horridly. But could it have been the right thing to do? It would have been a very solidly social militarist thing to do, and historically that means it fits

somewhere into the left fringe of the democratic party or perhaps somewhere over in some socialist party, so it's not likely to be a position that I would support. Ever. But was it right to remove Saddam, if that's all we did? Maybe. Provided two things: 1) that the iraqi

people wanted him gone, and 2) that we replace him with something better. Since we have yet to prove either is the case, it's dubious. But I'd be blissfully happy if this discussion moved in that direction, away from this blatant attempt to misinform the public.



Signym, again

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I think the USA is making serious but (on the whole) reversible mistakes. Maybe we need to rid ourselves of some cherished but unrealistic goals in order to see our way.

Just after we invaded, I thought about the natural constituencies in Iraq and I realized that there was no natural constituency for a united, secular, democratic Iraq. Every major power had SOMETHING against that formula: The Kurds didn't really want unity, the Sunnis

didn't want democracy, and the Shias didn't want secularism. It's not a winning formula. What happens if we jigger the goals?

Ooops I will have to finish this tomorrow.

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Three State Solution.



It works out pretty well. There might be small amounts of relocation, but everyone gets a fair share of the oil, and we have a base in each territory to provide support if requested. This is the way it should be. We shouldn't leave, we owe them protection now, or

they'll just get eaten by Iran. But that protection should be in the US Bases we are building, not patrolling their streets. This is very similar to what became the ultimate solution in Bosnia.



And again, Signym,

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However, it's also clear that we can't stay in Iraq, since our presence is destabilizing. So... how can we w/draw from Iraq and assure our security in the area?

The current plan seems to be to ditch at least one of the "legs" of the three stated goals (unified, secular, democratic) and possibly two: We are no longer insisting on a secular government, and may be okay with a government that oppresses 70% (women plus

Sunnis) of the population. In other words, we are throwing our weight behind a Shiite theocracy. I suspect that this is exactly what the Sunni insurgents fear- payback being such a b*tch and all that.

I would suggest that it would be best if we simply allowed Iraq to break up. Iraq now is like former Yugoslavia: a synthetic nation created for the convenience of an empire. And Hussein was like Tito: A strongman holding together a pastiche of ethnic, language, and

religious minorities through sheer terror. It took seventy years and over 250,000 deaths until the Yugoslavian fantasy was allowed to dissolve. http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa011998.htm

What are the possible repurcussions, and how could we control them in our favor?

Neither the Kurds nor the Shias have any love for AQ. That leaves the Sunnis, who might be looking for support and who are nominally of the same religion as AQ.

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There are several things to take into consideration here:

1) First, the three state solution is coded in to the new Iraq constitution as a possibilty of the differences don't resolve reasonably.
2) The one state solution was arrived at by the British at the end of WWI. It was inherently corrupt in it's design, so there is nothing sacred about it. Iraq, which had been some 20 some califates were suddenly lumped into one nation with essentially the main goal of

preventing the French from having any oil.
3) The problem in Yugoslavia is extremely pertinent. I have a friend who was on the UN team that redrew those borders and they experienced some of the headache and heartache that went with it, but their ultimate solution is probably applicable here, because the

two seem very similar, so it would be logical to skip all the massacres and jump straight to the end solution.
4) This means relocation for some people. Expensive and tricky, but probably necessary. Cities will be especially tricky, if they are sectioned off they may need to be walled off. Attempts to retain the multi-ethnic style of Sarajevo were a disaster.
5) It means maintaining an arms length military presence but not an active combat presence. Each state will have the right to ask us to leave, but after we're sure that we're it's safe.
6) Oil ownership issues are something that are best addressed at a time when Bush is not president of the US and when the leader of Iraq is not Al Zarqawi. It's pretty obvious that ownership of the oil should not be handed to an American company in a sweetheart

deal, and nor should it be given to a Jordanian terrorist or his Eqyptian master. It's equally clear that it should be given to the Iraqi people. I'd like to see it broken up into several oil companies, and a portion of those companies shares to more or less be

distributed among the people, so the people of Iraq would have a dividend to start building their lives back. This would be similar to what's done in Kuwait and Alaska.

I think the casualties in the Yugoslav disaster were far higher than that. And, yes, I agree, these multi-ethnic states are a socialist fantasy that only lives as long as no human freedom is allowed. When I was in Yugoslavia a few years back, the war had ended quite

recently, and I was quite impressed by how well everyone was getting along. I remember I was chatting with a friend of mine who was a slovene but had fought in croatia, and a guy I had met there who was a serb. After the serb left the slovene turned to me and

said: every day I burried the bodies of 1000 people, they'd arrive in dump trucks often with their hearts cut out. Every day for two years. His people did that. But he didn't do that. He's a good guy.

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Originally posted by Hayward79:

Except for post-war Germany and Japan, where enforced democracy has seemed to work pretty well. I think that pretty summarily destroys your view on this point.

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originally posted by 7%,

Hey, way to come to the party late, out of context, and wrong. Glad you could pick me as your date.

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originally posted by 7%,

Comparing creating democracy in Iraq to the aftermath of WWII is like comparing apples to carburetors

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The houseguest has move on after deciding in a paranoid was that I was trying to get him away from heroin, which was his medicine, his cure that he needed to survive, and now he's somewhere homeless in Portland, OR, sticking a needle in his arm.

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