Why Nobama

[gagged_Louise]

Well, I didn't imagine you were despising the Iraqis as individuals, or as a "nation" - and of course this is a country with a cultural heritage that goes far back into history, back to Sumer. With "a ragbag" I was pointing to your assertion that the country doesn't have any real unity, and so it can be freely redrawn. I agree the borders of Iraq and Syria today are an outcome of the colonial era, but if the country is so tribalized it can blow apart at any moment unless it's kept down by the military, then what chances ar there of bringing about a democratic state? The Kurds want a state of their won, today they are effectively living in their own country but many of them, and many exile Kurds, wish to have a "larger Kurdistan" including large parts of present Turkey and some of NW Iran. That's not going to happen for reasons of big politics, but as long as Iraq is as tribal as this, building democracy isn't just a question of arranging elections and setting up an Iraqi government.

The country is pretty much walking on crutches and is not choosing how to handle its own trade, business, foreign policy and so on. The American influence on all of those fields, and on the economy, is overwhelming.

By the way, the United Nations is under no obligation to safeguard the precise borders that existed in 1945 or at any point after, and do it indefinitely. If that was it they would have tried to stop the German reunification in 1990. You're casting the UN and the "international community" (mostly enemies of the USA it seems) as a slow, conserving force that doesn't accept any kind of change in borders or state system. Now, the UN involvement in Iraq was more about trying to prevent aggressive war and trying to assure the people were not put to more suffering. This may be niff-naff to you, but the human costs of the embargo in the 1990s (medicines, milk, foodstuffs) and the Iraq war since 2003 have been huge and there is really no reason why the Iraqi people should pay. Let's be honest, if Saddam had been a dictator of Mali or Kenya the US would not have tried to oust him, it would have been a too obscure affair.

I'm not entirely sure what your point is. The Japanese were an aggressor long before Pearl Harbor, taking significant land in Asia before attacking the US.
My point was that the US, faced with guarding another country's border for the next fifty years, might be reasonably expected to eliminate the need to do that. If you're comparing the US's involvement in Iraq with the, say, the Japanese invasion of Korea, then I think your analogy is faulty. The US has never had the intent of conquering and ruling Iraq -- the intent has always been to stabilize an elected Iraqi government and then leave.

As to Pearl Harbor, I think it was a brilliantly executed military operation and those who characterize it as a "cowardly sneak attack" are fucking idiots. In war, you're supposed to try and catch the other bastard sleeping.

The US may not have any major land possessions in the Middle East but its presence through military bases, subsidies to regimes and corporate power is overwhelming. In the fifties the US and British effectively deposed the Iranian prime minister Mossadeq when he became too uppity and tried to nationalize the oil industry - as all major oil companies in the countyry were foreign (mostly English and American) and oil was the major export goods of the country, those companies and could easily kill any budding independent competing private companies before they grew big, so nationalization was really the only option to create your own oil industry. I think the Iranians were right in viewing it as a national interest - just consider what would happen in war if their oil industry had been foreign controlled - but it wasn't hard for the US to put him out of action. In Iran and among politically interested people in the Middle East, they have never forgotten that, just as you have never forgotten the Tehran Embassy occupation of 1979-81. Both of those are kind of defining symbols to either side.

That kind of meddling has been going on all through the past century, and I would not agree that the US soldiers guarding the Kuwait -Iraq border between 1991 and 2003 were just keeping up a UN resolution or a ceasefire for the good of Kuwait - it was about US political and corporate interests too. We can argue till Hell freezes over about how much of a real chance the Iraqis had to successfully rebel against Saddam on their own or about how sane the US-Saddam tug-of-war really was after the mid-90s. The main points to me are that
1)the US would become an aggressor too when conflict flared up - as it did several times in those years, airspace control and so on. When war broke out in 2003, triggered by the US, America became the instigator.

2)Saddam was not a potentially powerful man outside Iraq after ca 1993; and not any big threat to peace. From most evidence, he had been forced by then to give up all resources to manufacture any WMD's (=any kind of ABC-weapons), and he had lost the respect he needed to stir up major terrorist attacks on other countries. He never rebuilt his WMD capacity; the technical evidence has proved hopelessly elusive after years of post-2003 search. There have been lots of those "petty dictators" and mostly the USA doesn't move in for any reason.