Two years later, does U.S. still belong in Iraq?

JWR ^ | 3-22-05 | Jonathan Gurwitz

[FlyLow]

A question is popping up around the globe as the topic of cocktail conversations. Even in countries where cocktails aren't served as a matter of religious propriety, people are incredulously asking, "Could George W. Bush be right?"

Youssef Ibrahim, a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, now head of a consulting firm in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, writing in the Washington Post:

"Regardless of Bush's intentions — which many Arabs and Muslims still view with suspicion — the U.S. president and his neoconservative crowd are helping to spawn a spirit of reform and a new vigor to confront dynastic dictatorships and other assorted ills.

"It's enough for someone like me, who has felt that Bush's attitude toward the Mideast has been all wrong, to wonder whether his idea of setting the Muslim house in order is right."

Columnist Richard Gwyn, a Bush and Iraq war critic, writing in the Toronto Star:

"Here it is time to set down in type the most difficult sentence in the English language. That sentence is short and simple. It is this: Bush was right.

"President George W. Bush wasn't right to invade Iraq. His justifications for doing so were (almost all of them) either frivolous, in comparison to the scale of the venture, or were outright fraudulent.

"Having conquered Iraq and deposed Saddam Hussein, Bush and his officials and generals then made every blunder that could be imagined by an occupying power, adding several original ones of their own.

"But on the defining, fundamental question, Bush was right."

Journalist Claus Christian Malzahn writing for Der Spiegel Online:

"When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall and demanded that Gorbachev 'tear down this wall,' he was lampooned the next day on the editorial pages.

[LilDarlin]

Not only does Iraq "belong" to the US; the US never had the intention of "owning" Irag.

Iraq belongs to the Iraqi people; for whatever good or ill that may bring.

It does not belong to the US; it's troops; or it's whinning politicians.

Nor does it - at least anymore - belong to a cruel, murderous dictator.

[infidel29]

If the Iraqi people aren't ready to go it alone yet, then Yes, the U.S. should still be there.

[InvisibleChurch]

60 years later, do we still belong in germany? beats me

[Delta 21]

We havent fully pulled out of "West" Germany yet and we have been oppressing that country since we occupied it in 1945.

Korea since 1951.....

Qutar hasnt been complaining too much since we invaded and started our US oppression just before the first gulf war..........

[Delta 21]

This story clearly stated that "Bush was right" at least two times!?!

I must of woke up in somekind of alternative universe or something...

[joesnuffy]

We are a rescue party in Iraq..killing bad guys saving good guys their wives, children and parents

We are turning over a bad regime and assisting... that democracy be established

Anyone who cannot see that is either blind, stupid or just plain evil natured.

Whether in the end this will change the middle east will depend upon the citizens of Iraq and any other nations we free.

However if we continue to ignore the Saudi threat and their WAhhabist pollution of the middle east...we do so at the freed people of Iraq's peril and our own credibility

imo