Why Nobama

[Ragoczy]

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.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying redrawing Iraq as multiple countries is your preferred solution? Or that you think it's mine? (My a/c broke and it's ninety-degrees outside, so I may be missing something.)

If it wasn't for the oil, multiple nations might be feasible, but the oil wealth is so centralized in one region that it would screw the others -- and result in conflict.

My point is simply that we have to deal with what we have -- and that's an Iraq that does have these challenges. For them to arrive at a real national identity is made harder by those challenges -- the impression I get is that the typical Iraqi outside of the large cities identifies first as something local before identifying as an Iraqi. That presents problems. I simply think they have a better chance as one nation -- and that they have a better chance of achieving that with support until their government's ready. Something they've already begun the process of -- telling the US it's time to talk about withdrawal.

Of course there's more to it than just arranging elections and setting up a government. And most of that more has to come from inside Iraq -- and they may, ultimately, not want it at all. My opinion is that they should, but it's really for them to decide -- I just think we should provide an environment where they might actually be able to, rather than chaos by default.

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.

And if it had been a border dispute between two insignificant countries in 1991, the UN never would have agreed to anyone getting involved then. Iraq has greater import on the world stage because of its oil -- the Rwandans can die by the millions and no government will take action, because it is too obscure.

For the record, I cast the UN as a bloated, corrupt, ineffectual body whose uselessness and venality is rivaled only by the US Congress, most of whom I think should be keelhauled. Regardless, what I think should have happened in 1991 was a continuation on to Baghdad, the ouster of Hussein and a UN administration of supporting the Iraqis in forming a new government and determining their course. "Sanctions" are a fucking joke -- it seems like every sadistic, murdering dictator on the face of the planet is under some form of UN "sanctions" and the only people actually hurt by it are the innocent citizens of those countries. But don't tell me that UN programs to administer "humanitarian" aid did a damn bit of good, because there's too much evidence that the only thing those programs aided was the bank accounts of a few UN and Iraqi officials.

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

Yeah, the history sucks. What should we do?

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.

I don't see it that way. From my perspective, the US was, primarily, left holding the bag on that border. With choices of stay forever, leave or remove the reason for being there.

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.

True, very little in the way of WMDs have been found (not none). But he did continue to act like he had them -- so do you take the risk or act if your neighbor says he has a gun and wants to shoot you?