Finally, a decent update on how the reconstruction is going in Iraq. It is astonishing that all the thousands of words that spew forth on a daily basis concerning the Iraqi situation manage to impart virtually no useful information. The Economist has a very nice overview of the reconstruction work in Iraq that paints a realistic and encouraging picture.
For many Iraqis, living standards have already risen a lot. Boosted by government make-work programmes, day labourers are getting double their pre-war wages. A university dean’s pay has gone up fourfold, a policeman’s by a factor of ten.
Stacks of such goods now crowd the pavements of Baghdad’s main shopping streets, shaded by ranks of bright new billboards. Prime commercial property, says a real estate broker in the Karada district, easily fetches $1,000 a square metre, four times the level this time last year.
The southern capital, Basra, for example, got only two-to-four hours of electricity a day before the war—and now has a power surplus. Baghdad still works to a regime of three-hours-on/three-hours-off, but the country as a whole is producing as much power as before the war. By spring it will be up by 25%. Within three years, if America sticks to its plan of sinking $5 billion-plus into the sector, power output should have more than doubled.
The repair trajectory for telecoms is even steeper. By February, promises Clifford Mumm, who heads Bechtel’s operations in Iraq, all ten bombed Baghdad exchanges will be working, as well as the national trunk system and an international satellite link. By then, three private cellphone networks should be operating.
Oilfield repairs have also proceeded apace. Production capacity, reduced to one-third of pre-war levels by May, is now up to 75% and on target to match them by March. Exports, now at 1.2m barrels a day, have been held up by sabotage, but Iraqi oilmen see this as a temporary obstacle. It will take years, and billions in investment, before Iraq reaches its full potential. But even if it hits the modest target of 2m barrels a day in exports by mid-2004, its crude could be earning $20 billion a year.
Keep in mind that only some of the work is going to repair war damage – Saddam systematically looted Iraq, and that means there is decades of deferred maintenance to be fixed. All is not rosy, of course:
Yet the downward trickle has not reached everyone. Estimates of unemployment range from 60-75%. Along with around 1m salaried civil servants, some 80,000 policemen and security guards now earn decent wages, 50,000 Iraqis are on long-term reconstruction projects, and double that number profit as day labourers. But Iraq’s workforce numbers some 7m. The disbanding of the army alone put 400,000 on to the street, where they get a meagre and temporary dole. Some 40,000 may be rehired, but the rest are fodder for unrest or worse.
The greater cost, however, is incurred by fuzziness over Iraq’s future. Big oil companies, for example, have yet to be lured. They tend nowadays to look at the lifetime capacity of a field, not at the chance of a quick profit. “You’re talking about a horizon of 10-12 years, minimum,” says a European businessman searching for deals. Despite the high technical calibre of Iraq’s oil ministry, outsiders are not yet confident that long-term contracts will be watertight. Similarly, the promulgation of laws to fling open the Iraqi market to foreign investment has tempted few punters.
Keep in mind also that it has been only six months since the end of the Saddam regime, and try not to fall into the expectations trap – just about the only tools used by most opponents of the American project in Iraq are (a) historical ignorance (both their own and that of their audience) and (b) sky-high (and shifting) expectations. The Economist’s complaints, though well-taken, suffer somewhat from both these flaws. By historical standards, casualties have been extraordinarily low, and the reconstruction is going forward at a brisk clip. Anyone who doubts this is invited to submit counterexamples for discussion.
You can quarrel with the decision to go into Iraq (although at this point it is pretty pointless to do so, and I would rather have a discussion about the occupation and the future of Iraq), but I don’t think you can argue with two points.
One, the war was fought extremely well by the Americans and British, who took more ground faster with fewer casualties than in any other campaign in history. All the carping about poor planning and not enough troops for warfighting were conclusively disproved on the field of battle. We certainly did not need a broader coalition or more multilateral cooperation to win the war.
Two, the reconstruction and occupation of Iraq are going reasonably well so far. Needless to say, there is still much to be done, and many arguments to be had over tactics, but remember to base your expectations on the realities of life in Iraq and the Mideast, not your comfortable and prosperous suburb.
I disagree that the carping about poor planning was disproved, Iraq was incompetant or unwilling to fight, and we generally got lucky during major combat operations. Now if all we had to do was destroy Iraq’s army that wouldn’t be bad, but the intent of this opperation was more than that, and that’s where we have been hurt by poor planning.
We didn’t plan the transition into rebuilding operations well at all, and I think part of our problem was that our major combat operations was too focused on Bagdad and Saddam Hussein, and not focused enough on the real goal, which was to control Iraq. (Those two fed on each other, because we were too agressive and focused early we were out of position for stability and support, because we didn’t do good stability and support planning we didn’t take it into account in planning earlier opperations)
Controlling territory means a lot more than just being the only guy with big guns in the area.
The fault for that doesn’t lie with the troops or local commanders, who preformed and are performing extremely well. Rather I think the Pentagon planners who decided to treat this more like the liberation of France than the occupation of Germany are at fault. While most of the country is not as hard to control as Germany was, it is all harder to control than France was.
If we had better planned the occupation we would have laid-out a loose schedule for the country, and we’d be able to talk about where we were ahead of schedule, and say that we are transfering troops from reserves and places which are more secure than we expected to help with the places where we are having problems. And that would give the reporters news other than casualty counts, and endless statements of “everything is going acording to plan” which are unbelievable and boring.
Unless of course the plan was to “make it up as you go along.”
I think that the idea that there was no plan is a bit unfair. The truth is that there two plans, the one that finally got adopted and the Shinseki plan which was both politically impossible (as it would have required a doubling of the Army) and a great deal more time (we might have been getting ready to invade right about now) and money (we’d be talking about a deficit in spitting distance of $1T).
When the alternatives are a plan that is so slow and heavy that it’s practically designed to fail and a light plan that can actually be done, the light plan won.
Looking back to WW II, there’s a cottage industry in drawing parallels between pessimistic reports then and now about how badly the occupation is happening. The reality is that we’re not doing as well as we should but we’re doing far better than we used to. If Iraq in a few decades time turns into an Italy, I think we’re doing just fine even though there will be bumps along the road.
Michael, hindsight is always 20/20.
In general, I disagree with the core of the ‘poor planning’ criticism. Because this kind of stuff just can’t be planned at any meaningful tactical level. What could be planned ahead was planned, but it would never have been sufficient.
What can happen after the war, how it happens, how much of it and why and when depends entirely on the course of the war itself. War is the cause of post-war. Post-war is the consequence of war. Since when can a consequence – specially one of this magnitude – be properly planned independently of the cause ? It can’t.
America didn’t have a plan to rebuild Japan or Germany either. And both were in a mess. For years. Brilliant successes don’t result in Marshall Plans.
“Make it up as you go along” is indeed most of what is going to happen in a project of this magnitude and complexity. It’s unavoidable initially. Public prejudice and conventional wisdom, combined with domestic politics and electoral pressures make it unacceptable to admit. But that’s exactly what has to go on as a first stage.
What is the he alternative ? To stick to some master plan cooked up by bureaucrats in the depths of the Pentagon and the State Department ?
Interestingly, the same people who complained about American imperialism in this matter also make the same point you’re making, which is that the US did not focus enough on preparing the occupation. So before the war, an American occupation was unacceptable, and it was asserted it was America’s ulterior motive and agenda. But then if the occupation is not well prepared and organized, it’s a scandal. No matter what they do, they get the treatment.
The war against Iraq was certainly not WW2 against the Germans. But occupying and rebuilding Iraq is going to be a lot trickier than occupying Germany. In a way, this explains a lot of the frustration and friction around Iraq. We are all taught to assume the war is the hard part and all is peachy when it’s over.
What has failed us a great deal are our expectations and assumptions, so brilliantly demonstrated by the media. It’s going to be a failure !! No, wait, it’s a brilliant success !! No, wait, it’s a failure again !!
The scale of the undertaking cannot be overestimated. And this is, in my view, one of the administration’s mistake. It did a lousy job preparing public perception of what was to come. And the three-week victory – against all expectations at the time, always remember that – makes it all the more difficult to put the current travails into perspective. Surely, something must have gone wrong somewhere.
Well, maybe it also feels this way because our expectations were set totally backwards : namely we expected a tough war – remember the predictions of a Stalingrad in Baghdad, hundreds of thousands dead, regional conflagration, ethnic factions would fight each other etc etc – followed by peace and a safe trip home after a year or so.
Well, nope. The war was the easy bit. Now comes the real work. And it’s not the kind that can be safely and reliable planned months ahead.
I really don’t think they realized the infrastructure was in as bad shape as it was.
A couple more comments about this article, which I read this morning before heading for work.
The level of unemployment is a great concern and made some reports about the US Army importing much labor from Gulf states to the Philippines to do everything from pouring concrete to doing the laundry all the more damning. Yes, maybe some Iraqi employees will turn out to be a “security risk”. But if you leave them on their own, someone will make them a bigger, collective security risk. It’s no accident the terrorists are so bent on targeting those who work with Americans.
And terrorism is the right word here. Resistance movements have both strong popular and external support, and a known, identifiable leadership. So far, we have little or none of the above.
The second comment is about Bechtel farming out half of its contracts to Iraqi concerns. This is good. That’s what needs to happen. And it could be a short-term silver lining. To the extent security is bad enough to scare foreign corporations, it forces both the occupier and the occupied to get more creative and make it happen themselves.
And when some installation gets blown up that was built by Iraqis, it is more likely to generate the right kind of response from the local populace than if it had been built by foreign contractors and foreign labor.
The more Iraqis can have a hand in , and a paycheck from, the rebuilding of their country, the better.
I was not saying, at the time, or now, that war with Iraq was a bad idea. I approved of it whole-heartedly, and regardless of the problems we are having now, and any number of deaths, I still do.
You may have thought that after the war was over everything would be peachy, but I did not expect that. And the planners had plenty of reasons not to expect that either. But to all signs at least those in the US military didn’t even think about it.
They devoted one step of the four step invasion plan to the most important part. Which would have been fine, if a second plan had then been ready to put in place starting from the assumption of “no major enemy forces, full country occupation.” That plan wouldn’t have anticipated everything, but it should have anticipated major problems we had faced before.
Neither Europe, nor Japan, recovered without aid, but when did we start working on long-term aid? (not just the short term humanitarian aid, which we did fairly well) That’s one of the mistakes we made, which we should have learned from the end of WW2. Someone said Marshall plans don’t come from brilliant successes.. that’s true. But we should have seen we’d need something like it.
I’m not talking detailed or any more inflexible than any battle plan. (arguably it should be more flexible, since the situation is more complex) But it could easily have included things such as “locate local leaders” and “use local leaders to set up elections to a regional council” as steps in a sequence, leaving time periods involved up to the people on the ground. From all appearances, to date no such plan has been implimented.
It may just be hindsight that’s letting me criticize our tactics as hindering the goals of strategy, but I think if we had thought more about what the threats would be to post-conflict security while planning the attack we would have chosen tactics which were more concerned with isolating problems spots from the border than with the all out drive to Bagdad.
Only a quarter of the war plan addressed post conflict, while at the same time, the Pentagon was trying to get that job all to itself. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that the administration ignored the valid points raised in criticism because many of the criticizers were really trying to stop it. Those points are what gave the criticizers strength and legitimacy… they obviously weren’t just crackpots holding up “no blood for oil” signs. And neither they, nor we, can afford to ignore the valid points behind the criticisms today. Such running in-round causes problems for the current campaign, by preventing us from fixing problems that exist. And it causes problems for future campaigns by causing us not to learn from mistakes.
Some efforts may be being made to fix things, we probably wouldn’t see the efforts yet, if things changed as soon as Rice took over, but do *NOT* ignore all criticism just because some of it is politically motivated. There is lots of good news, and the people who are trying to ignore that are wrong. But on the side that is pro-free-iraq there is a prevailing opinion that we can just ignore all the bad news, because that’s what the other side is doing, and that’s also wrong because if we do that then we can’t figure out what mistakes are being made to fix them, and we can’t learn from those mistakes for the next mission.
Michael, I think you leave one major factor out of your evaluation.
We had every reason to believe, up until nearly the last minute, that Turkey would support a second front from the north. I don’t have to rehearse all the maneuverings that went on to prevent that, including France’s brazen threat to veto EU membership if Turkey allowed that to happen.
But the net result is that the Sunni triangle was NOT taken early on, as would have been the case if 4th ID had gone over that northern border in day 1. Remember, one reason the 4th was allocated that front is that they carry some of the most sophisticated “networked warfare” equipment and know how to use it. They are superbly ready to fight the sort of urban guerrilla war that Hussein boasted he would draw us into.
So, there was indeed a great deal of thought paid to issues like managing and winning an urban-based war in Baghdad and in the smaller cities in the Sunni triangle. Had we been able to execute the original WAR plan, the PEACE plan would have gone quite differently.
It’s true that we did not know just how very decripit much of the infrastructure in Iraq was. And it’s hard for anyone who has not lived under the terror of a brutal regime to realize just how passive people would be at first – especially because they KNEW we hadn’t taken the triangle and that many Baathists, including Hussein himself, were still alive, well and well financed there. I have some inkling of that because I grew up with older relatives who escaped after living under the terror of Stalin in the Ukraine.
I can criticize this and that decision being made now. Army friends I know who are posted there say the CPA is way too slow and bureaucratic to make a lot of progress in rebuilding … but then, Army types typically are biased to take action right now and get an 80% solution working, whereas the CPA has the eyes of the world on them and are trying to set precedents that will last for a very very long time.
So yes, it’s a muddle. But Americans are actually pretty good at muddling through to a decent solution, given enough time.
we expected a tough war – remember the predictions of a Stalingrad in Baghdad, hundreds of thousands dead, regional conflagration, ethnic factions would fight each other etc etc – followed by peace and a safe trip home after a year or so.
What do you mean “we”, white man? I don’t know about you, but I was figuring 3-6 months (was a little too pessimistic there, admittedly), followed by eight years, plus or minus two, before power could be turned over to the elected national government.
What’s wrong with making up the plan as we go along? Spontaneity and on-the-spot thinking are pretty effective too. Besides, the best laid plans can and will go wrong, and from-the-top plans aren’t going to be the most flexible or reactive.
I was a soldier too, and I’d always prefer 80% now than 100% later.
Michael, you are missing my main point, which is that you can’t plan the post-war before the war in any level of detail. It just is a pure waste of time. What you’re going to need, how much and when is totally dependent on the war. What kind of shape the infrastructure is in, how much is destroyed by your own bombers and the enemy, even how much guerilla you are going to face. For instance, I think we can agree what if the Iraqi army had fought tooth and nail until exhaustion, and Saddam Hussein had been verifiably killed, the situation today could be very different. And your post-war plans totally relevant or useless as a result. Post-war planning – or any kind of planning for that matter – can only effectively assume a certain range of outcomes. The larger the enterprise, the narrower the range of events you can effectively plan for. For something of this magnitude, I don’t think it can be done.
This idea that post-war threats can be planned for independently of the conflict itself just makes no sense to me. How accurately can Pentagon bureaucrats plan the consequence regardless of the cause ? Nobody can. You are almost implicitly demanding magic here.
The “all-out” drive to Baghdad was unavoidable. Iraq was a centralized socialist state, Baghdad was the seat of power. I don’t understand why and how an alternative tactical plan would have yielded a better post-war situation. And at what cost.
As for your suggestions, such as locating local leaders, they have been implemented and successfully so in many places. The appearance – read : the media – is that it hasn’t been because you almost never hear about anywhere but Baghdad. Special Forces have set up small local governing councils all over the place without making a fuss, but when and where it works, it is of no interest to the media.
(As an aside, remember the number of times we were showed Baghdad marketplaces in the past several years ? Poor residents trying to make some cash selling their 2nd TV or 3rd hand fridge. It was a sad spectacle, meant to show us the unfairness of UN sanctions. How many times have you been show Baghdad’s markets since ? They’re thriving. You can buy anything *and* people in this center of government finally have the money to afford it. Appearances are deceiving, and that cuts both ways…)
You also have to keep in mind that finding those leaders is not always the easiest of tasks, let alone ahead of time from Washington. You have the choice between former Baath party members, Islamists, or people who might not want to step forward out of fear of being shot by the first two. Definitely not something you can improvise in a few days on the ground when you get there, nor plan from Washington. It’s been six months for crying out loud.
I never said we should ignore criticism. The fact remains that most pre-war criticism was proven unfounded, and what have turned out to be real problems now were not seen as the main problems *then*. Hence my opening statement about hindsight being 20/20. But if you have a list of actual constructive suggestions that were made *before* the war that we would all agree would have made a difference on the ground today, I’d like to see them. Because I don’t remember of any. Most politically-motivated criticism is easy to ignore precisely because it’s not constructive, negative and devoid of facts and, by definition, either empty of, or very vague about suggestions on how to fix the alleged issue.
I don’t believe for a minute the war critics knew any more than the Administration on what was going to happen. When a record of predictions shows two of them to be right and 98 to be either wrong or off the mark by a mile, I’m not going to worry that maybe, we should have listened to them. Then you have those people who looked reasonable but had a vested interest in predicting problems. Remember the NGOs who loudly predicted large-scale famine and cholera and a humanitarian disaster ? Like the one they predicted in Afghanistan, it didn’t happen. But of course, these guys don’t have a vested agenda in stoking fears and predicting mayhem to advance their own neat little business. Of course they were going to say that. How do you get funding and donations if you don’t ? They are all in a competition with each other.
I have no issue with making it up as we go along. In fact, I happen to believe it was the only sane, reasonable, initial course of action on the ground.
Jeanne,
White man ? And how would you assert that one, exactly ? What is that supposed to mean anyway ?
If you were less interested in my skin color, you might have read me better. I was not talking about the respective lengths of the war vs. the occupation, or when a local government would take over. I was saying we expected most of the violence to occur during the war. And the post-war period to a be lot lighter in the military department as a result. War, followed by years of support and peace-keeping.
Did you think it was going to be 8 years because there is so much to rebuild, or because that’s how long it was going to take to beat the opposition ? And were you expecting all the troops to stay there for 8 years ? More of them ? Or less ?
During the pre-war debate, I don’t recall anyone putting security, car bombs, sabotage and terrorist threats at the top of their list of concerns after the war. It was all about rebuilding pipelines, roads, who gets the oil money, who gets the contracts, when do we get out, or, for those of us more interested in process than actual work, whether the UN signed the paperwork or not etc. Implicitly, it was expected that most, if not all, of the fighting would be limited to the war ‘period’. That post-war would just be easier by mere virtue of being after the war.
So yeah, we, collectively, did not expect this kind of post-war scenery. Length of time has nothing to do with it. Sure, we’re going to have a presence there for a long time. But there is a huge difference between being present with 40,000 men and fighting on and off with 150,000 for an indefinite amount of time. Somehow, I doubt these were your expectations for the next 8 years. If they were, you could turn out to be way smart, “sister”.
And even if you did foresee this, I will comfortably claim you are the exception to the rule. Most of us thought, explicitly or implicitly, that the costs in the combat and security realms would be front-loaded, with most of them occurring during the war proper and a short unstable transition period following it. Well, we’re still in the unstable transition period and there is not telling how long that will take. Yet.
I did expect a few weeks worth of fighting. Afghanistan took six weeks – remember how we were not supposed to be able to beat them in the winter ?…And we got the same “experts” to prepare us for Iraq… – so I figured 8 weeks or so given the vastly larger amount of resources involved, and the total lack of air support on the Iraqi side.
After that, I would have told you back then I had no idea how it would go. All I knew is that it would probably cost a fortune. And that’s the one bit where I will agree with Michael. There was no way to know how much it would cost. Yet predictions were made and they were clearly low-balled, even before the conflict, even without local instability.
You don’t rebuild a country of 24 million wrecked by 30 years of socialism, tyranny, political repression and two murderous wars of conquest with $1,000 or $2,000 per capita, even factoring in an intact oil flow. At least I didn’t think so. Which again, makes me think we clearly did not expect things to be too difficult after the war proper. And as argued above, it couldn’t really be planned either so the ideal, reasonable approach was to be conservative and appropriate huge amounts of funding or make darn sure everybody knew it was going to cost an arm and a leg. Both being extremely tricky politically.
In a way, and contrary to what Michael thinks, we did plan the post-war effort. We assumed and planned for peace-keeping. Except we’re not there yet. Planning is only as good and useful as the assumptions that went into it. Post-war assumptions made before the war are 99.9% likely to turn out wrong.
Sylvain:
Just to interject, Jeanne meant nothing either personal or racial by her “white man” phrase. It’s a bit of colloquial American English. It stems from a popular joke, based on the old Radio/TV character “The Lone Ranger”, a masked cowboy type who roamed the American West righting wrongs, etc. The Lone Ranger had an Indian sidekick named Tonto.
The joke goes:
Tonto and The Lone Ranger are riding across the prairie when they are surrounded by Indians. They try to run for it, but are surrounded. The Lone Ranger picks off a bunch of the Indians with his six-shooters, but starts running out of ammunition. He then turns to Tonto, and says:
“Well, old friend, this is it. We’ve fought bravely, but these Indians have us surrounded. There’s no escape for us now. But at least we’ll be together at the end – we’ll make a last charge and go down fighting.”
Tonto looks back and says “What’s this ‘we’ shit, paleface?”
(rimshot)
Consequently, saying “What’s this ‘we’, white man?” is a version of the original punchline, and means only “Don’t include me in whatever it is you’re going on about”.
I really think this is what Jeanne meant, and that she didn’t mean to give insult.
As a side note, the Lone Ranger also lives on in the phrase “silver bullet” applied to solutions.
Here ends the pedantry corner for today. Please don’t hurt me.
Sparc,
Right, I did jump the gun there. White man sounded a bit more serious than paleface. I’ve heard the latter every now and then, but the former only in, how shall we say, more hostile contexts. The latter definitely sounds like a caricature, even if you’re not aware of the origin. The former has a slight hint of that wonderful PC diversity thought police crap, or worse. At least we now know I don’t like that 🙂
In any case, no offense taken by me or anyone I hope.
AAARGH! “government make-work programs”?
Great (sigh!). How long before the new Iraqi welfare state degenerates into a totalitarian regime like the last time those economic policies were tried in the region?
Why don’t the Americans put in a British National Health Service, a European Common Agricultural Policy, Hillary Clinton to impose anti-smoking policies and gun control preventing shop-keepers from protecting themselves against looters?
[I’m giving them ideas, I know…]
Antoine, who talked about government make-work programs ? I am only talking about Iraqis and Iraqi businesses being employed to do the work. Instead of importing Indian or Pakistani or even Kuweiti labor for security reasons.
The last time that was tried, it was in Germany and Japan. They didn’t exactly turned into failed totalitarian states.
The last time that was tried, it was in Germany and Japan. They didn’t exactly turned into failed totalitarian states.
Please be kind enough to stop that kind of stupid comparisons.
Germany attacked Florida.
Japan destroyed Pearl Harbour.
They both wanted a war they both lost.
Iraq has never attacked anybody, has never wanted any war & is winning its war to throw you out.
“Iraq has never attacked anybody, has never wanted any war & is winning its war to throw you out.”
dude! get a grip… you sometimes have valid points, but you weaken them with rubbish like this… Surely what you mean is “Iraq never attacked any of the players in this war, didn’t want *this* war”, and as for the last bit… i’m not sure.. we’ll see; too early to tell either way… I think the only observers who’re “certain” about the way it’s going are the ones who have partisan interests through which they filter their news.
Oh, & tell the people of Kuwait that Iraq has never attacked anybody.
Yep A_t: my mistake. Koweit + Iran.
I meant that Saddam hasn’t indeed attacked neither the USA nor the UK nor Poland nor Mongolia.
As for the outcome of the illegal, bushist aggression for Iraqi oil & to help Israel to sustain its war-prone attitude, its systematical UN-law-violating approach, its foolish ransacking of Palestine, & of course its satus of sole regional rogue State with uninspected WMD, I think we’re going to have either an accelerated multeralising process to manage a descrete evacuation, or have a (very) accelerated evacuation with a (very) discrete multilateralising process…
Kodiak – get over your obsession with whether the war with Iraq should have been finished.
We are talking about how the reconstruction is going. On that topic, comparisons to Germany and Japan are quite apropos.
I would point out, for your edification, that the first commitment of US troops to WWII was not to invade Germany or Japan, but was instead to invade North Africa, which, like Saddam, never attacked the US mainland. I guess we should have stayed out of North Africa, and let Hitler have Saudi Arabia. We should have also stayed out of the Philippines (after all, they never attacked us, so what business did we have invading the Philippines in 1944?).
Really, Kodiak, for someone who loves to accuse Americans of being simplisme, you have absolutely no grasp of strategy or history.
Kodiak, if you’re going to comment, please be relevant and read what you answer. Antoine talks about the evils of make-work state programs in answer to my suggestion to make Iraqis themselves rebuild their countries. He thinks it would produce a totalitarian regime. I point out that the last time people rebuilt their own countries themselves with initial American supervision and funding, it was in Germany and Japan. Not exactly totalitarian regimes, are they ?
And all you have to say is that “Germany attacked Florida” ? And you ask me to stop the “stupid” comparisons ? Hello ? MacFly ? Anybody home ?
So first of all, I suggest, again, that you read before you comment. It would make you look less of an ass around here. Not that you seem to care.
Second of all, I am so sorry to inform you that I am every bit as free to express an opinion as you are, and that you have no business telling anyone to stop saying anything. I know the very fact that people are free to say things you disagree with bothers you immensely. But I suggest you get used to it. After all, since nobody here is censoring you, common courtesy suggests you don’t pretend to have such a right for yourself.
Over and out.
Sylvain: bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla.
I hope Your Majesty won’t be too upset.
And once again, our sophisticated French philosopher demonstrates to the dumb, simplistic “Anglo-Saxon” cowboys haunting this site how one really debates and argues issues.
With substance, reason, facts and above all, courteous respect for one’s interlocutor.
And the stupid cowboys head home in the sunset, awed by, and grateful for, such masterfully imparted timeless wisdom.
Any way. Is it beer o’clock yet ?
True. Iraq never attacked Iran. Nor Kuwait. It never fired missiles at Israel or Saudi Arabia. It never was a threat to anyone in the region. In fact, look at all its neighbors rushing to the help of poor victimized Saddam.
But even if Iraq never was a threat outside its own borders, so what ? Have we become so immoral that we promote international laws that respect the rights of dictators to slaughter, torture and rape to their hearts’ contents at home, so long as they don’t attack us ? So long as we sleep comfortably at night, a Saddam Hussein can be a daily threat to millions of people ?
Surely that is not the case.
After all, Yugoslavia never attacked any neighboring country, it never used chemical weapons against its citizens, it never ignored or violated 16 UN resolutions and it certainly never fired Scud missiles at third-party countries not engaged in a conflict against it. As for its leader, he did not seize power by force. He was elected. Twice, even.
Yet we bombed the crap out of it for 3 months – not three weeks, three months -, mostly in and around cities, with significant collateral damage. And with no UN resolution. We knew the Russians would veto it so we bypassed the UN and agreed on the intervention – “we” meaning the US did 95% of the actual work, as usual – within NATO. There never was any UN resolution for the bombing proper. In other words, and according to our self-appointed experts in international law, it was totally “illegal”, “immoral” and “illegitimate”.
Why did we do it ? Well, Milosevic was slaughtering his opponents and dumping them into mass graves.
No wonder Milosevic is pissed off at his trial. He did a tenth of what Saddam did and the other guy was given 12 years and 16 chances to behave.
The guy is definitely entitled to believe he’s being unfairly singled out. Nobody marched in the street to protest the immorality of trying to take him out. No volunteer human shields for Yugoslavia. Nobody screaming bloody murder for the dead Serb civilians. They were all Nazis, you see….
Iraq never attacked Iran. Nor Kuwait. It never fired missiles at Israel or Saudi Arabia.
Two remarks about that populist bit of demagoguery.
1/ France was attacked by Germany during WW2. So France should “punish” Germany once more even if WW2 has been over for almost 50 years? Iraq attacked some countries of the region during BW1 (Bush’s war n° 1). It was defeated & punished in 1991. But the USA (never attacked by Iraq) claim the right to “punish” Iraq once more by launching BW2 even if BW1 has been over for 12 years…
2/ The hypocritical BW1 was never launched on Humanitarian principles. Rather on oil contingencies… In late July 1990, the US ambassador to Iraq, April Gilspie, met with Saddam Hussein and told him: We have no opinion on your Arab – Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary (of State James) Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960’s that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America. This declaration is a green light, a tacit backing for Saddam to have his ways in Koweit. This hypocritical encouragement has procured in turn an unquestionably convenient casus belli for the self-righteous USA to seize on eagerly & therefore to relish its excellent new opportunity to punish a good old WMD customer that dared display inadmissible hardihood as Iraq had simply told its former US WMD-purveyours to kiss their… Bush.
More hypocrisy with the following: But even if Iraq never was a threat outside its own borders, so what ? Have we become so immoral that we promote international laws that respect the rights of dictators to slaughter, torture and rape to their hearts’ contents at home, so long as they don’t attack us ?
A question for you Sylvain: have you become so immoral that you promote US laws that respect the rights of dictators to slaughter, torture and rape to their hearts’ contents at home, so long as they don’t attack you ? Chile (Pinochet), Nicaragua (contras), East Timor (Indonesian occupying army), Israel, Turkey (repression against the Kurds), Saudi Arabia (full chariah), Indonesia (Suharto), pre-Mandela South Africa (apartheid), Unita (Savimbi), Congo (Mobutu), Venezuela (neocons coup d’Etat against Chavez), Afghanistan (Ben Laden: 1979-1989) etc etc etc.
Don’t even mention Yugoslavia for it was just the full-scale rehearsal of US military incompetence now fully demonstrated in Iraq. The Yugoslavian army was still intact after the Russians had them surrender.
eeewww…..What’s that smell ?
Pointless off-topic screed deleted by Samizdata Admin.
you must have all heard what bush said in his speech about brining Freedom and Democracy to the the middle east my question is why not implement Democracy in Iraq now? Why not hold free elections? The answer is simple; a free election would be likely to result in the Americans getting the boot. The earliest signs clearly showed that the Iraqis wanted to rebuild their country based on Islamic/Arabic principals and not on western liberal democracy. Hence she would not be able to secure her oil and other strategic interests in that country. What Iraq proves is that the US version of “Democracy” is not about giving the masses a legitimate voice but acting in their name without their consent for the sole purpose of full-filling ones self interest. Now why highlight Syria and Iran (Egypt is simply a red herring to demonstrate US objectivity in proclaiming her intention). What happened to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar? –- Or should we read it as Republic of Saudi Arabia, Republic of Kuwait and Republic of Qatar, since they all provide military bases and plenty of petro-dollars for the US? Surely this is not even shameless hypocrisy, but utter nonsense and stupidity emanating from this Jerry Springer nation. Mr Richard Perl, a member of Neo-Con, who is known to be an influential pro-Israeli policy maker within the US, also passes comments urging military strike on Iran and Syria. In addition this is also to distract from the embarrassing point that the native Iraqi’s (not Saddam loyalists or “foreign” fighters) are fighting the US occupying forces. The numerous reports in the media makes it abundantly clear. What is even more ridiculous is Mr Perl and US governments assertion that the Polish and Ukrainian forces can fight in favour of US in Iraq (who are not described as foreigners but as members of coalition forces!) but Syrians and Iranians who share the same language, culture, religion and history cannot help their fellow brothers and sisters in Iraq.
Then there is Israel, the only “Democracy” in the Middle East as she often proclaims. Whilst the rest of the world has branded it as an apartheid and a racist state on the basis of its laws and conduct. The “law of return” allows any Jew residing in Europe or America to come and occupy lands usurped from the Palestinians but the Palestinians have no right to return to a land that they have been living on for thousands of years. No wonder the US sees Israel as a light of Democracy, since both share the common heritage of usurping other peoples land, and in the process labelling them as terrorists and savages. Like Iraq’s mythical WMD, the US also has its mythical values of “Democracy”, “Liberty” and “Human rights” imprinted in their minds but not reflected in their history and their deeds.
Pure Hypocrisy!
Well to an extent I would actually agree with Abu Ameer’s view that the USA is not primarily interested in fostering democracy in Iraq above all else. If ‘democracy’ means turning Iraq over to the religious nutjobs who will impose their primitive collectivist values on others by force (i.e. via the democratic political process), then screw democracy. Democracy is just a means to an end, not an end in and of itself… so sure… two cheers for Human Rights and Liberty but to hell with Democracy if that is just a means to allow yet another tyranny in iraq employing “Islamic/Arabic principals”.
Oh, and the Syrian and Iranian Armies are both armies keeping mass murdering tyrannies in power, so yeah, keep them the hell out of Iraq too.
Perry I think you will find Bush, Bair and Ariel Sharon are also mass murderers so may be we should kick them out as well not forgetting that they support maintain and uphold the same regimes you are referring to.
Human rights what a joke, I think you will find it only applies to the west, not to Muslims as we see in Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan Chechnya, Kashmir etc… You will only cry out for it when your people are affected by it not anyone else.
As for Islam (the ideology which you call primitive) is about to make a come back on the political arena once again, no matter how much propaganda you or the American, British, French governments churn out, we say no matter how much you spend in your propagation it will make no difference, the Muslims are returning to Islam for the solution to the problems of today and the non-Muslims are embracing it by the hundreds. So Perry the giant which has been asleep for a very long time is slowly awakening from its slumber
Abu Ameer: Like all collectivist irrationalisms (such as socialism or whatever) that offer the ‘certainly’ of simplistic stasis-based belief sets, Islam has the potential to get people throwing bombs at more successful and sophisticated societies, that is for sure. To that extent it is wise of others to take note of Islam on a basic ‘know your enemy’ basis, but Islam is no sleeping giant because giant implies strength. Like all collectivisms, its very nature is the source of its own weakness and one only needs to look at the economic and technological state of the Islamic world to realise that, in the long run, the rest of the world has little to fear from it. Just as communism strangled itself with its own absurdities, it is hard to see the attraction of such a dour world view as that offered by Islam. It provides neither prosperity nor objective enquiry, substituting instead superstitious faith and force backed prohibition against intellectual enquiry that might bring that superstition into question. Sorry, but whilst I take the short term threat of Islamic militancy seriously, Islam is intellectually insignificant and has been for centuries.
Perry your lack of understanding of Islam is apparent from your reply, First of all let me assure you that there is no Islamic World or as I would say no Islamic state today we have Muslim countries ( about 53 of them) all ruled by apostates who are the puppets of the west. As for the economy of those countries you know as well as I do that they are controlled by the west and so is the technology. But as Muslims technology has never bothered us and one of the examples (and there are many) for you to think about is Afghanistan a small group of men have taken on the superpower and its coalition with all the sophisticated weaponry and still the fight continues. Don’t believe the media hype that war is over the small group of men are causing heavy losses on the Americans and its coalition forces, the same in Iraq and who can forget Somalia and so on.
The Muslim World is enriched with so many natural resources that it could hold the western world to ransom but while we have these puppets there this will never happen, that is why there are many groups focussing on removing these dictators like the present status quo in Saudi Arabia and across the Muslim world, once a country falls into the hands of the so called extremists you will see a domino effect across the rest of the Muslim countries. That would be your worst nightmare.
Islam spread across two thirds of the world at a phenomenal rate that there is no Ideology which has done the same since, As for your quote that it is a “superstitious faith and force backed prohibition against intellectual enquiry that might bring that superstition into question” I can assure you that with a dim quote like that you have neither studied Islam or understood it. Please by all means bring your intellectual enquiries forward lets see how intellectually stimulating they are. Islam is based upon a solid foundation therefore it will never crumble like many other Ideologies have and are crumbling.
As for making people throw bombs into successful and sophisticated societies what a joke, you call these societies sophisticated where men are sleeping with men, animals, young children etc.. I do not call a society successful where rape, crime drugs, alcohol, suicide are all rampant. Please do not cite me the present day Muslim countries as they are not Islamic (i.e. they do not rule by Islam). They are capitalist countries just like the one you are living in the only difference is that the majority of the people there are Muslims. As for the martyrdom operations (not suicide) you people do not have the testicular fortitude to carry them out nor is your belief as solid as there’s. Islam is what we believe in Live by and are willing to die for.
Abu: I have great difficulty taking any religion seriously, given that I regard arguments between religions as (to quote Paul Coulam) tantamount to a debate as to who has the best invisible imaginary friend. I realise I have as much chance of changing your mind as to the intellectual insignificance of Islam in a modern technological world as you do of convincing me of the contrary. My views are really not at all unusual as I am sure you know if you spend much time surfing that splendid product of the capitalist mind, the Internet.
If it comes to a true all-out ‘war’ between civilizations, I have no doubt that if pushed hard enough and scared enough, ‘The West’ has the wherewithal and the will to simply wipe Islamic civilization off the face of the earth in the most literally and physical sense, if push came to shove… but that is not what is going to happen. It will not all end in some great World War 2 style Gotterdammerung. I mean if even a tiny pocket of Western civilization (more or less) like Israel can survive, do you really expect Western civilization as a whole to be quaking in their collective boots because a bunch of Islamic ‘heros’ can blow up Jewish civilians in pizza parlours?
My suspicion is that Islam will go the same way Christianity has gone… creeping secularization and irrelevance… the economic fruits of rationalism are simply too tempting for any dour religion to compete with, and the banalities of bourgeois comforts are too seductive. It is not the B-52’s and the laser guided bombs that will make Islam wither away (although they will also have a role to play), it is Baywatch, Alias, Black Adder, daft game shows, short skirts, cool shoes, Playboy, cheap DVD players, the Internet and all the technological babbles people in the West take for granted that are the true weapons in this kulturkampf… it is the blaring TV and the discordant screech of the modem which will drown out the muezzin’s call.
Sure, your suicidal ‘martyrs’ can blow some people up, but that will change nothing in the long run. I am not your enemy, it is my whole civilization that is your enemy, not because it hates Islam but because it does not even notice Islam… all Western civilization sees is a bunch of oil wells run with Western capital and expertise, and a bunch of people who are just new markets for its products… and the way I see it, you do not stand a chance in hell because if Islamic civilization offers people what some old book says they need, capitalist civilization offers people what they want. Sorry, there is no doubt in my mind as to who will win that contest in the end.
The only quibble I would have with Perry’s take on this has to do with WMD’s. If the Islamist nutters get their hands on germs or nukes, the war between the Islamist nutters and West will escalate very far very fast, and some kind of Gotterdammerung becomes much more likely. The end, of course, will be the extinction of expansionist Islam.
You have seen the reaction from 3,000 Americans killed. Does anyone really believe that the nation that nuked Japan would simply roll over if it lost 10,000, or 100,000 or an entire city? We killed half a million of our own in our Civil War, over a million Japanese in WWII – we Americans are quite capable of killing as many Islamists (and innocents) as it takes to ensure our security.
9/11 changed the minds of a great many Americans about the wisdom of accomodating terrorism and Islamism, and pushed those who are more conciliatory up against the political wall. I believe another major terrorist attack on the American mainland would loose the whirlwind.
Oh I agree… if that happens, the response will be genocidal. That is indeed the ‘doomsday’ scenario… bad for us and doomsday for them. We lose a city… or two… and start simply exterminating twenty times as many in response. Muslim populations in the west would simply be expelled or wiped out and large population centres in the Islamic world could even end up radioactive glass. Just look at what the Industrialised World did in World War 2. Not only would we take the loses, it would screw our civil liberties for a generation until the last political muslim was dead. If it comes to that, all bets are off. A nightmare for sure.