Well, well, well.... Honestly, I think most questions that start with "Are you with" and end with "or the terrorists" don't rise above the level of
beating-your-wife (yes, that includes my question), but you answered it. Fair enough. Well. Let me have a go at your questions.
Foxfyre wrote:Do you see the USA as the bad guys in Iraq?
Two-part answer.
1) I don't believe in the invasion. And by that I mean: it was pretty clear to everyone that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. It was also pretty clear that Saddam was no danger to the United States.
Sure, he was not exactly cooperating with the UN (not until right pre-invasion, that is), the sanctions did more harm to the population than to the regime, etc.
But in March 2003, Iraq had neither attacked nor was planning to attack the United States. War was at no point the only option other leaving the sanctions in place and the people starve. There are many countries where the Western world seems to be capable of using its influence to slowly move regimes towards democracy. Off the top of my head, I would probably give the Congo or Uganda as examples.
So everything else left aside, in March 2003 the United States were attacking and invading a country that had done no harm to them.
In my book, that is not what "the good guys" are supposed to do. I don't have a lot of trouble with the invasion of Afghanistan. That regime protected the guy behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and basically challenged to US to dare and invade. Well.
I don't know if the reality of a war is something that many Americans can get through their heads. And that's not as in "yeah, well, it's a war and people die, because that's what they do in a war". When war is not something that happens somewhere far away, but right there, where you are living. That war.
2) The mission changed in a very short time from "topple Saddam/regime change/democratisation" to "fight the insurgency". At the current point, the US troops are more or less the third, kind of "observing" party in a civil war. I don't see that as a particularly good or particularly bad thing. Would the mission officially change towards "humanitarian intervention", I would approve of that.
In my opinion, that would require a diplomatic approach (something that has, for reasons completely mysterious to me, not been tried) and a change of the strategy that at the moment appears to be to
wait it out. No, make that "
to stay the course".
Foxfyre wrote:Do you see the terrorists as the bad guys?
Given that the word "terrorist" gets thrown around a lot, that might require a better definition, but I'm too lazy to do that right now. Let me say that I don't view people who get picked up at random traffic checks in Pakistan and subsequently transferred to Guantanamo for no reason at all as terrorists.
On the other hand, there seems to be a great number of people who deserve being called terrorists. I see that escalating violence with quite some fear. You would wonder how you could escalate something like blowing dozens of innocent people up in a busy street, but apparently it happens. People are getting tortured, maimed and executed, sometimes a mere 100m away from the Green Zone.
I'm disgusted at that. That equals or tops the reports of the Rwandan or Bosnian genocides.
Foxfyre wrote:Is there a proportion of badness you would assign to one more than the other?
No. As Thomas already said, the current situation is a consequence of the American invasion of Iraq. That doesn't mean that the US military is responsible for all the deaths and havoc - more likely for a mere fraction of it. But the US are responsible for creating a vacuum of public order, where a right-out civil war was merely a question of time - as numerous White House and Pentagon papers said, years or decades before the current war.
Regarding that part of the Iraq war, I mostly fault the Bush administration for the piss-poor planning of a post-invasion strategy. The situation wound down, as predicted, within mere
days, while the Pentagon and the White House stood by and uttered nonsense about "the last throes of the insurgency", about an "army that you have instead of one that you wish to have" and about "staying the course".
I pity the troops and generals on the ground, though. What a f*cked-up situation to find yourself in.
Foxfyre wrote:Do you resent showing good things the military is doing and representing that as the norm?
No, I don't resent that. The other side of that "norm" you're talking about is that on an average day, 100 Iraqis are blown to pieces.
We don't see a lot of that, either. If you wouldn't mind seeing the pictures of 100 mutilated corpses every single day (because it's the "norm"), then I can't say a lot against some feel-good pictures about what good the US military is achieving in Iraq.
