The argument I've made to george (which nimh notes just above) leads to a very interesting and revealing question. That is, why the hell did the US not do this?
If the US wished, as it claims, to create something like a successful model democracy in a middle east Islamic country, why not Afghanistan?
Things are not very rosy there now, with the warlords (previously suppressed by the Taliban, now supported by the US) back in power and doing the sort of things they are good at (opium production had increased from 185 tons to 3,400 tons in the first year after 'liberation'). Even the single city of Kabul is not secure. Millions of Afghans, many of them children, are living in makeshift camps and suffering starvation, disease and deprivation.
Clearly, the neocon agenda to move on Iraq, and to adopt the policies of unilateralism and pre-emptive warfare, gained ascendancy in the administration, and counter arguments from the State Department and others, both nationally and internationally, were ignored.
Also, it seems about as naive as one might get to ignore the resource difference between the two places. And to ignore the oil interests represented within the administration and its supporters. Might we assume it possible that the energy meetings held between Cheney and the oil boys (minutes of which he's fighting tooth and claw to keep hidden) might contain the word "Iraq" with some frequency?
Further, war is a very profitable enterprise. As one writer in Harpers recently put it...
Quote:Whatever else may or may not have changed after 9-11, one thing has become clear: munitions making and war profiteering have supplanted the energy and telecommunications deals pioneered by Enron and WorldCom in the late 1990s as the most efficient means for well-connected capitalist to engorge themselves at the public trough. To call these companies "private," though, is mere ideology. Munitions making in the United States today is not really private enterprise. It is state socialism.