Quote:
|
Originally Posted by aceventura3
Proves Republicans can take defeat like a "man". Most Democrats ran on a platform of a new direction in Iraq, and before the elections are certified, Rumsfeld recognizes what the vote means.
What is the new direction in Iraq going to be?
|
What's mssing now....in that area of the world? The US took out the authority figure that evolved in that environment....an artificially created, sunni dominated monarchy that morphed over time, into a paranoid repressive, burtal dictatorship. Through it all.....nearly 80 years...the British "set up" did what it was designed to do...."solve" the problem of the Kurd/Turkish conflict in the north, by avoiding creation of a seperate Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border.....
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...401355_pf.html
The Woman Who Put Iraq on the Map
Gertrude Bell, Resting in Relative Peace
.....Bell sketched the boundaries of Iraq on tracing paper after careful consultation with Iraqi tribes, consideration of Britain's need for oil and her own idiosyncratic geopolitical beliefs.
"The truth is I'm becoming a Sunni myself; you know where you are with them, they are staunch and they are guided, according to their lights, by reason; whereas with the Shi'ahs, however well intentioned they may be, at any moment some ignorant fanatic of an alim may tell them that by the order of God and himself they are to think differently," she wrote home........
|
.....the useful purpose of the sunnis was to dominate and repress both the kurds and the shiites. The sunnis preoccupied Iran....with the vaccum that removal of the sunni domination, Iran and sympathethic southern Iraqi shiites are free to focus on other enemies....Israel....and the western culture.
One alternative is to destroy the military capability of Iran, before withdrawing from Iraq. This still leaves an unrestrained, pan shiite presence in Iraq and Iran, and the sunni resistance.
Like it, or not....the best solution to avoid conflict with Turkey in the north, and strengthening Iran via it's strong Iraqi <i>shiite</i> ties...is to...in all seriousness....find a way to restore the previous sunni domination and repression of the kurds and the Iraqi shiites....and renew...Iraq's aggressive posture towards Iraq.
We broke it....we own it. The hypocrisy in all of this...and the lesson...is that the Reagan era policy of providing military and technological support to a sunni strongman in Iraq, is still the best policy. We're not going to do that now....so we are trapped there, militarily, and politcally.
Partition Iraq, and you risk a permanent, disgruntled, ambitious oilless sunni state, a kurd state at war with, or repressed by Turkey, and a stronger and more oil rich union of shiite southern Iraq, and Iran.....what then?