zen_tom

I don't know if the benefits we in the west enjoy are necessarily the product of our free, open and enlightened societies more than they have to do with our expansionist history and the accumulated wealth from exploiting the resources from other parts of the world. It's easy being a democracy when you're sitting pretty on wealth amassed from past adventures.

And I would say that the Western world has most definitely not been built on these values, more that they were doled out to the people as a means of placating them when the elite realised the power of the mob, and their inability to control them through the more traditional methods of might and religion.

The West was built on adventure, private enterprise, imperialism, slavery and exploitation, a far cry from freedom, human rights or anything else so lofty.

Freedom is however, an infectious idea and has been shown to express itself spontaneously throughout history without its being forced from outside (interested) parties. Once achieved, it is also a much more efficient form of organisation.

But that doesn't help solve the current problem. The problem with the suicide-bomb is that it is next to impossible to defend against. The US could triple the troop numbers and still fail to provide any security. The very freedoms we are hoping to provide are being used against us. The presence of troops is counter-productive and swelling the ranks of the disaffected

Against this type of action, you have to either walk away, or swamp the area with troops.

Walking away would be disastrous and force the power-vacuum issue in Iraq - yes there would be a civil war, and yes it would be one that we precipitated, and yes, it would probably result in an Islamic dictator with a similarly firm grip on the region as the one Saddam held.

Another slight tangent - might it be possible to suggest that the reason a strict dictator rose to power in Iraq be due to the fact that only a strict dictator would be able to hold such a disparate country together? Here we are dealing with a rising tide of insurgency, and we are using violence to quell and counter it, and then calling Saddam a tyrant because he used the same methods. Might control over Iraq require those methods? Maybe Saddam was the only man vicious enough to keep Iraq from the meltdown we see at the moment. If this is the case, there is little hope for the goals of the coalition.

So what can we do?
Partition Iraq? As a policy that has been frowned on based on the histories of India/Pakistan/Kashmir, Israel/Palestine and Ireland/Northern Ireland.

Turn our backs while fighting and genocide start to occur as per the Balkan States (after the fall of the strict communist regimes that held them together) and coming back to help clean up the mess? No one is going to thank us for that either.

Or stick it out and hope the elections will precipitate some kind of normality? Personally, given the situation, I'd want to swamp the country with an international peace-keeping force with a strict mandate not to engage in activity other than providing security to the population. I'd bring an equal number of journalists in to try and enforce (or at least document) the correct behavior of those troops and try and involve other Arab nations in the rebuilding efforts.

These things however are all difficult to achieve given the coalition's insistence on war without sanction from the UN, and Bush's inflammatory remarks about the Axis of Evil and other such gung-ho-isms re the (politically beneficial for Bush) war on terror. We need as many friends as possible to help defuse this situation, and I'd like to see more steps being taken to try and smooth waters that could become rapidly very troubled indeed.

The West can't do this by themselves, no matter how much freedom and democracy we throw around.