Here I am ... <grins>
Sofia wrote:Quote:I do also think that there's a difference between taking over temporary administrative control over a country to stop an ongoing, gruesome civil war and taking over temporary control to oust a specific political leader one doesnt like.
I think Saddam may have done a little more than fall out of Bush's favor. I'm surprised you would characterize it so.
Oh, to
my judgement he's guilty of vastly more things than falling out of Bush's favour.
But to
Bush's judgement ... well, I cant look into his head. But I dont think Bush's track record on other tyrants in the world suggests much in the way of "pity for the poor victims" being a strong determinant in his decisions to intervene on someone or not.
In any case, the intervention into Bosnia and Kosovo was based on the case to stop an attempted genocide, that was in full swing as we were speaking, from being completed.
This, obviously, was not the case in Iraq. The Kurds had been safe from Saddam's reach for already a decade - their "Bosnian" or "Kosovar" role had been back in the late eighties. The helicopters that gunned down the Shi'ites had flown over the South-Iraqi swamps around 1992. At both those points in time, the US would have had a fair case to make for military intervention along the lines of the 'Yugoslav' one. In 2003, it didnt. Though Saddam's terror surely simmered on in the way that, say, US-supported Uzbekistan's Karimov is simmering on right now, it was hardly an acute case for war without delay. While it was the case for war without delay that the US was making, this winter.
Anywho, I think this is actually a distraction from my point. (Are you doing that on purpose?). After all, I did nicely add that, instead of "ousting the leader you dont like (together with his WMD)", one could also read, "liberating the people from him". And then again, I didnt come up with the concept of "regime change" myself, which pretty much comes down to "ousting the leader you dont like" as much as anything would.
My point was, obviously, an altogether different one. The UN came to Bosnia to stop a civil war - to stop Bosnians killing each other. That by definition implies a longer follow-up presence in the country: you gotta stay there till the resumption of civil war has become unlikely enough. The US, on the other hand - according to its self-assigned brief - came to rid Iraq of Saddam and his WMD. Well, they're gone now, it seems.
In case of Bosnia, the argument to take it slowly-slowly with devolving power to local authorities and democratic elections was obviously based on the people concerned having been bashing each others' heads in, until the UN came in - that being
why the UN came in. In Iraq, on the other hand, the "why" of Americans coming in (supposedly) was about "liberating the Iraqis" from their evil dictator. Well, they're liberated now - the dictator is gone - so when do they get to vote?
There's no more WMD now (if there were any in the first place) - and though I can understand wanting to stay around till you catch Saddam & his top men, that doesnt need to stop you from starting to devolve power to national authorities in the meantime. So why exactly does the devolution of power seem to be taking place more slowly even than in Bosnia, where the foreign troops came in with the explicit mission to "freeze" the process for a while?
