The US presence in Iraq, how long?

I can handle the truth. If you are right, C.I., so by the end of this term the official language of Iraq will be the U.S. English, majority of believers will be Protestant, and it will apply for acquiring status of the 51st state of the USA. And such a country would be the best neighbor possible to all the countries in the region.

Try some uncensored media, steissd.

Unfortunately, I am not entitled to have French or Russian (or both) security clearance in order to read current documents of their intelligence services. This will be the most reliable uncensored source possible...

Lugar: U.S. 'ill-prepared' for postwar Iraq

Sunday, April 20, 2003 Posted: 11:44 AM EDT (1544 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Democracy in Iraq is at least five years away, but the United States has not adequately prepared for postwar reconstruction, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Sunday.
Interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press," Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Indiana, did not back down from his comments in The Wall Street Journal calling the White House and its choice to administer the country, retired U.S. Army Gen. Jay Garner, "ill-prepared."
"They started very late," he told NBC. "The military strategy, tactics and execution have been brilliant. But we needed to be doing something similar with this [in the reconstruction phase]."
Lugar said it was not clear to Congress or the American people "what the costs are."
He also warned that holding elections in Iraq before the people and country are ready for them would be "disastrous."
Lugar said that U.S. nation-building efforts would benefit from training a new kind of civil servant, who would be "prepared to come and bring some hope, some cohesion."
The senator also said that former Soviet republics pose a greater nuclear threat than Iraq.
He said those countries have 6,000 warheads on missiles. The missiles are not aimed at the United States but that they could be, he said. He added that those countries have about 40,000 metric tons of chemical stocks that have not been accounted for.
"Working with the Russians in securing and destroying it should be a key objective," he said.
In the Middle East, Lugar said the U.S.-led war in Iraq gives the United States a chance to "really radiate our ideas and our influence."
"My guess is we're going to see a lot of changes backed by the fact that there always is a military option," he said.

au,

I say 6 months to a year for us to make the transition to Iraqi government, a few yers for our direct influence and reconstruction efforts and as long as we can wrangle for the rest.

"How long do you believe it will be before there will be enough stability in Iraq to allow that to happen?"

Ironically, we will prove to be the major cause of instability.

But I'd like to know what one considers stability in a country where there are so many factions. Look what we (haven't) accomplished in Afghanistan.

Tartarin
Ironically, we will prove to be the major cause of instability.

If by that you mean freeing people from the tyranny of Saddam is a major cause of instability. You are correct. There is always stability under a totalitarian government there is also you must remember, fear.

steissd, The English language is the language of commerce in the world today. It would be foolish for Iraq to ignore that. c.i.

AMERICAN POLICY FOR IRAQ


You can choose anyone you want to be your leaders -- so long as we concur.

I guess we'll just have to be a tad totalitarian, Au?

But seriously, the longer we stay, the less respect we will have inside and outside of Iraq. We have already shown that we are undiplomatic and inflexible. If we stay in there with the same attitude -- and already after five days they were telling us to get out -- the best we might hope for is that in hating us, they might have grounds for getting together!

We have won the______call it what you will, the question remains can we maintain peace? With the only thing that was holding the country together now gone [Saddam} the US is obligated to remain until a stable government has been established and the economy of the nation has been repaired. Should The US heed the calls of Yankee go home I would predict that a civil war and bloodbath will ensue and another Saddam would soon appear upon the scene.

I think we can do both. I bet if we dangle that aid package we can get Turkish peacekeepers in there. Dunno.

That's the problem -- I don't think the US wants other peacekeepers in there. Not wholly unrelated, the US has refused to let Blix go back in to check WMD's and/or verify finds. Ideally, we'd get out of there in good order and cooperate in a multinational peacekeeping force.

Hmmm - the US is currently pressuring Australia for peace-keepers - have, in fact, named the battalion, or whatever it is, that they want.

I think they are likely to get them.

Of course, we DID tag along for the war - so I would see us as having an ethical obligation to assist with the peace.

Democracy begins to sprout in Iraq

Political parties - from liberal democrats to Islamists - rush to gain a foothold.

By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

BAGHDAD, IRAQ – Up from the rubble of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, the first tentative seedlings of democracy are poking their heads, as political parties of every shape and form race to put down roots in the new Iraq. Commandeering abandoned buildings, putting up flags and banners to announce their presence, and signing up new members, communists, monarchists, Islamists, liberal democrats, and army generals are taking advantage of freedoms that their country has not known for decades.
Some of that freedom is the fruit of the anarchy that still prevails in Iraq, with no functioning government, few public services, and wide uncertainty among ordinary citizens about what their future holds.
The disorder extends to the nascent democracy.
Jassem Hamed has set up a branch office of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress in the cramped reception area of a former Baghdad passport office that was burned, looted, and trashed. While his colleagues make tea in the courtyard on a fire fueled by passport records, he explains that he joined the party a week ago, and was given his responsibility because a cousin works as a bodyguard to INC leader Ahmed Chalabi.
He is unclear exactly what his party stands for. "They say the INC will publish a booklet explaining what it is about, and when I read it, if I am convinced, I will stay," he says. "If not, I will leave. For the moment, it is just about democracy."
Across town, Communist Party Central Committee member Adel Khaled voices a more politically astute viewpoint.Recently emerged from five years of underground organizing, he is clearly delighted by the bustle of activity in his makeshift headquarters as the committed and the curious elbow their way to a table piled with clenched fist posters and copies of the party newspaper.
"If people feel secure, if they are allowed to express how they feel, they will come to us," he says confidently. "The party has existed for and from the people so they have been aware of us for a long time."
Iraq does not yet have the interim government that US officials say is planned, and it is not even clear who will be appointed to it, aside from two leading Kurdish parties and the INC.
But already the first flush of democratic excitement is unsettling some participants.
"It is normal ... that people are enthusiastic, because they can express their ideas," says Khasro Jaaf, head of the Baghdad office of the Kurdish Democratic Party. "But there is a hairsbreadth of difference between democracy and the jungle. The longer the Americans stay, the safer it will be for each party to present its ideas."
Others are encouraged by the "anything goes" mood. "There are parties opening up that we have never heard of," says Zaab Sethna, spokesman for the INC. "In general, we think it is a very good thing, a very good sign of the beginnings of civil society."
Mr. Jaaf, an architect with a mane of gray hair and a flamboyant manner, has chosen a Baghdad headquarters for his party after his own style: the marbled mansion once occupied by Saddam Hussein's personal team of palace architects.
Other parties seem to have chosen and occupied other abandoned public buildings with which they feel some affinity: The Communist Party has installed itself in an apartment block that once housed Soviet advisers, and draped it with red banners proclaiming the party slogan - "A free country and a happy people."
The Islamist Dawa party has set up in the Sindbad youth center - its overgrown garden pitted with sandbagged foxholes - and hung a handpainted banner from the fence declaring that "The will of Allah rules."
The INC has established its temporary headquarters in the Iraqi Hunting Club, once a favorite haunt of Saddam's elder son Uday in the capital's posh Mansour district.
For all Iraqi wannabe politicians, returning from exile or emerging from clandestinity, the first order of business is to introduce themselves to the public.
Mr. Chalabi has been meeting supporters who risked their lives inside Iraq to send his organization information.
The KDP office's role is to "spread our program of democracy and federalism" to the 1 million Kurds who live in the capital, Jaaf says.
The Free Officers and Civilians Movement, led by former Iraqi Gen. Najib Salihi, is signing up new members in thick ledgers, name by carefully numbered name, from the cool recesses of a private house lent to them by a benefactor. Some have already been issued membership cards - a map of Iraq emblazoned with "Iraq First" on one side, the owner's name, date of birth, and blood type on the other.
"We are just taking names and telling people to wait until General Salihi arrives," says an officer in charge of registration. "He will be here in a few days."
From his INC branch office on Haifa St., Mr. Hamed is handing out yellow, blue, and green party flags and posters of Mr. Chalabi. "I tell people who ask for the posters that I want them to know Mr. Chalabi and what he is doing, not just put up the pictures as they did with Saddam Hussein," he says.
Hamed cannot help, however, when people come - as he says they often do - to ask when electricity or running water will return to their neighborhoods. "I advise them to go to our main office, because I have no information," he explains. "I cannot tell them much because I don't know."
Communist Party militants are distributing their party newspaper, "The Peoples' Press," whose appearance in Baghdad last weekend - the first paper to be published since the former government fell - was an early sign of the party's organizational skills.
Once the biggest party in Iraq, the Communist Party was brutally repressed by President Hussein, who saw it as a serious threat to his power. But thousands of activists continued to organize secret cells, Mr. Khaled says, and now they are coming out of hiding to build their party anew.
Among their converts on Tuesday was Col. Ghassan Nouri, who teaches at the Iraqi Army Staff College in Baghdad. He had stopped by the Free Officers and Civilian Movement that morning, he said, but found "a few people sitting around doing nothing. I was not satisfied that they were serious."
"This is a clearer organization," he said of the Communists. "They are the oldest party in Iraq, most members are very educated and very nationalist, and the Communist Party has done nothing shameful to this country. They have always fought against the regimes."
The birth pangs of democracy have spawned one fiasco already. One INC operative who reached Baghdad ahead of his leaders, Mohammed Mehsin al Zubeidi, announced to the world last week that he had been chosen as the capital's top civilian official by a gathering of intellectuals, tribal leaders, and policemen, and that he was working in tandem with the Americans.
Barbara Bodine, coordinator for central Iraq in the US civil administration, disowned him, however, on Monday, saying she did not know how he had been elected.
"We haven't had any contact with him since we got to Baghdad," says INC spokesman Sethna. "In fact, he is off the reservation."
Some observers expect the flood of new political parties to recede once the initial fervor dies down, and the largest, best established groups impose their authority.
"The next few months will tell who is strong and who is not," says Khaled. "We have just come out of the war, and if democracy establishes itself you'll see a lot of changes."

Good post, au.

But Powell and Rumsfeld have both indicated that they have absolutely no intention of allowing the Iraqis to have a democracy.

Both has stated unequivocally that an Islamic government will not be tolerated -- no matter how many Iraqis decide that is what they want.

Frank Apisa
Of course they want a democratic, representative form of government. What is not wanted is a theocracy. Which is the antithesis of democracy.

What if the democracy wants a theocracy?

Will the US stop the democracy?

its wouldn't be democratic to let the people chose a theocratic government, um whats wrong with this picture? As Henry Ford said "you can have any colour you want as long as its black"

au

As you can see, dys and dlowen have a problem with the notion that we want them to have a democracy -- but they cannot choose one of the options open to them.

A theocracy is not necessarily the antithesis of democracy -- not if, as was mentioned, the people choose it.

I think the administration is being extremely hypocritical in this thing.