Irvine511 said:
you're so transparant. you've offered nothing again. and you've offered nothing to make up for the lies and deception that have gotten us into this situation into the first place, and you're offering up the classic republican strategy of "either you're with us or you love brutal dictators." talk about lacking an original thought. STING, all, yes ALL, your posts on this subject are interchangeable. they all contain the same language and have been posted with little modification over the past 3 years.
simply pointing out that Iraq is indeed in a Civil War, as pro-war conservatives like Colin Powell and Fareed Zakaria admit, and that the occupation has failed at many of the most basic goals (stability, electricity) and that the Iraqi army and government are deeply distrusted by the Iraqi people, that the army and police have been deeply infiltrated by Shiite death squads who kill Sunnis by the dozens every night in Baghdad, none of this is a wish for Saddam to come back into power.
it's a wish for events to have unfolded in a far, far different fashion in 2002/3. it was a wish to have effectively dealt with Afghanistan, first, and then dealt with Iraq. don't stand there and tell me that there was only one option in 2002/3, that it was either act then in March 2003 or else the world would have fallen apart and the Upper East Side would have been light up by Iraqi WMDs used by Al-Qaeda. that's complete and total garbage. the containment policy, combined with inspections, were effective as a matter of course, but not a means to an end, but a unilateral invasion has certainly proved to be exaclty the wrong answer to the Saddam situation.
given the current situation across the Middle East and given the fact that Iraq has proved a convenient point of radicalization for Muslim youth across the Middle East and Europe, and according to the NIE, the world would have been a safer place without this tragicomedic invasion and occupation. that's not a wish for Saddam to stay in power -- though i imagine you'll construct a false choice in response, as you do -- but a wish for something different to have happened over the past 3 and a half years.
Well, if I've offered "nothing", why even respond? I've offered what my own assesment of the situation and what I think needs to be done. I don't see your post as being any less interchangable over the past three years either or new. So What? If something has happened or caused you to change your opinion on a particular issue, fine. If not, thats ok as well. This has nothing to do with the topic of the thread. If you want to talk specifically about other people, why don't you start a new thread. This thread is about IRAQ, not the posting habits of any particular poster in the forum.
The Police force has been infilltrated by Shia Militia's, but that is not the same as the Iraqi Military. But, you go ahead and lump the two together as if the problems are the same, and they are not at all. Electricity is being provided across a wider area of Iraq, and Shia area's that never had electricity under Saddam now have it greater amounts in their provinces. That of course has meant that Sunni's no longer enjoy all of the benefits, this being one of them, that they once had under Saddam. Resources are being more evenly distributed. There are problems with the Police forming death squads and murdering Sunni's, but that is not a large problem in the Iraqi military. There is distrust of the Iraqi military in Sunni Provinces, but not in the rest of Iraq relative to the Sunni Provinces. You can't take the problems in 4 Sunni Provinces and extrapolate them over all of Iraq and make them out to be representive of Iraq.
Dealing with Afghanistan is something that will take years, if not decades. The idea that the United States could simply wait that long to deal with other pressing national security issues like Iraq is simply laughably absurd.
Its not about the Upper East Side, but what would happen to a country like Kuwait or Eastern Saudi Arabia in the near future which is the concern. Repeating the situation that happened in 1990 is simply unacceptable. The line that would be crossed this time is Saddam's cooperation with the Ceacefire Agreement, specifically designed to prevent a repeat of August 1990. The world luckily avoided a total disaster in 1990 because of Saddam's mis-caculations and the largest deployment of US troops since World War II.
The containment policy which involved sanctions and the weapons embargo had completely fallen apart by the Summer of 2000. How can you have effective sanctions and a weapons embargo when anything can cross the Syrian/Iraqi border? How can you have an effective containment policy when Saddam is in fact profiting from the policy to the tune of 3 Billion dollars a year through business on the black market? Inspections were supposed of verifiably disarmed Saddam within 2 years of the end of the 1991 War, 12 years later Saddam had still not verifiably disarmed of all WMD and was still in violation of 17 UN Security Council resolutions. Inspections only WORK when Saddam cooperates fully, and he NEVER did! It would be simply pathetic to continue down the same road of hide and seek inspections and watch the remaining remnents of the sanctions and embargo finally crumble allowing Saddam time and money to rearm in ways that would pose new threats and unacceptable challenges to security in the Gulf.
There were many mistakes early during the occupation phase that might have dramitically changed the circumstances on the ground today. But its impossible to see how leaving Saddam in power with virtually no sanctions or embargo in place, little possiblity of achieving the UN disarmament goals unless Saddam changed his tune, would benefit security anywhere.
Today, oil supplies in Kuwait and Eastern Saudi Arabia is safer than it has ever been in decades thanks to removal of Saddam's regime. You can never ignore the fundemental facts of this region in which an Iraq that is strong enough to defend itself from Iran will always be capable of overruning a country like Kuwait in hours. That situation is ok when you have a relatively benign dictator in power there, but is a grave threat when you have a regime as unpredictable and aggressive as Saddams. The inspections and resolutions were an opportunity for Saddam to change his tune and for the world to judge if it could live with Saddam. Saddam's failure to cooperate at every level, combined with the crumbling of the containment regime, made regime change a necessity.
