Omnivorous writes:
quote:
It seems likely that only an authoritarian regime could hold Iraq together--the Brits and the French drew the current lines which contain the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds--groups so mutually repelling that removing Sadam was like loosing nuclear bonds.
Correct, and that point about France and Britian having drawn the geopolitical entity we call Iraq is crucial. At its very beginning, the nation of Iraq was imposed upon the Middle East by Western powers. From the Arab perspective, it would seem there's little reason for Iraq to even exist. Its entire history has been spent under some sort of military or police domination. It has never known anything like what we consider "freedom", or even "democracy".
One of the biggest Bush lies of all has been this nonsense about how the people of Iraq "yearn for freedom". I think we all see by now that what the people of Iraq yearn for is revenge. The shia want revenge on the sunni and vice versa. Their religion teaches them to yearn for that revenge.
The people of Iraq are at war with each other because they believe that their god wants them to be at war with each other. It's possible that we could put enough troops into the country to force some sort of shaky peace on them, but the people of Iraq have proved themselves fully willing and quite capable of carrying vengeful grudges for centuries. By the logic being used to justify our continued presence there - that the shaky government of Iraq will implode if we leave now - we will never be able to leave because the people of Iraq will never lose their desire for revenge on one another. These people will simply not fit together into any political whole. Iraq can't exist as anything resembling what we would call a free nation.
I hate to sound so cynical, but unless someone can show me some damn strong evidence that the power of religion over the Iraqi people is waning rapidly - rather than growing rapidly, which appears to me to be what's happening - then I don't believe there's any hope at all for a peaceful future in Iraq, at least not until a bloody civil war plays itself out and/or the territory of Iraq is absorbed into other, existing states.
W.W.E.D.?