Posted on 07/30/2006 12:15:30 PM PDT by Zakeet
BBAGHDAD--"How was Afghanistan?" asks an aide to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. "Dusty," I reply, pointing at my shoes, which show every evidence of having been in Kandahar hours earlier. "And remarkably stable," I add: The press corps following Donald Rumsfeld drove from Kabul airport to the U.S. Embassy compound with no significant security, a sharp contrast to the helicopter ride that prudence dictated we take into Baghdad's Green Zone. "We'd sure like to have that kind of situation," my interlocutor says. So why does he think the U.S. mission here has been so much harder? Maybe, he says, because the Taliban didn't have 35 years to create the infrastructure of a totalitarian state, with millions of party apparatchiks and a KGB-trained intelligence service--"the same people who are still killing us today."
It's the best answer I heard to a question that nagged me on a recent visit to two of the hottest battlefronts in the war on terror. Iraq, a cosmopolitan civilization, actually knew something of representative democracy before the Baath rose to power in the 1960s. It has an educated middle class, and at least 80% of its population hated the regime when we liberated it. It seemed as fertile ground as any to test the idea that the force of U.S. arms could help improve political evolution in the Muslim world. Iraqis have vindicated that idea by bravely turning out for two elections and a constitutional referendum; but the security situation in Baghdad continues to deteriorate. And the middle class--upon whom so much depends--is fleeing Iraq in numbers.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Pollock's conclusion -- things went better in Afghanistan because they were forced to solve their own problems their own way than in Iraq because we tried to solve their own problems for them.
In my opinion, his contention could also be applied to a number of other social and political issues, both here and abroad.
There is no pair of ducks about it - look West, Syria; look East, Iran; look in a hole in the ground, Saddam. AFLAC
Because Iraq (unlike Afganistan) should have been partioned ....
Agreed. Give the Kurds their own state and let the Sunnis and Shiites continue their fighting.
Or because the State department and the CIA vetoed the idea of installing the Iraqi exiles as the provisional government.
The Kurds have their state. But will the Turks let them keep it? Will we help them, which ought to stand to reason because they could help us put pressure on the Iranians, since so many Kurds live in Iran.
" Give the Kurds their own state and let the Sunnis and Shiites continue their fighting."
One way or another, you would have to determine whether or not Kirkuk is included in the Kurdish state, which would probably be a flashpoint either way and deal with the issue of Turkey, especially if Kurdish terrorist groups were still launching raids into Turkey from Iraqi Kurdistan.
The problem with partition is that each side will argue over the partition borders. Especially with all of Iraq's oil.
I think that the USA has no business setting up an Islamic state anywhere in the world. It can not possibly be anything but a place of terror.
Irag has OIL.
Do you mean New Orleans?
The exiles were not Islamists. Generally they were secularists.
Iraq has lots of oil, but the main concern has been strageic. Look at where it is.
Best answer yet!
I've got a better idea.
Give the Kurds their own state.
Annex Iran to Iraq, with the Iraqi govt in control enforced by US 50 year occupation.
Imams be gone.
BUMP
Any real estate broker will tell you it's all about location, location, location.
BUMP
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