tryingtohelp wrote:It is not a war on Iraq. It is an invasion. It is a war on the terrorists. Our President had every right to send the troops in and I am glad he did. It was about time was my response. It should have been done earlier.
This is a false statement. Even the Shrub--whose puppetmaster, Cheney, had gone out to inferentially suggest there was a connection between al Qaeda and Iraq--did not attempt to make any such claim in his infamous State of the Union address for 2002 (delivered in January, 2003). This is a point of view peddled to simple-minded folks who don't wish to inquite to deeply into the cause and effect of such decisions, and who are not informed at all on the history of the middle east, or Muslim fundamentalists, or the greivances which those who do engage in terror attacks allege.
In my first response to this thread, i posted a link to the letter sent to President Clinton in 1998 by the Project for a New American Century, and signed by Cheney, Perle, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, among a number of other neo-cons. The desire to invade Iraq pre-dates the attack on
USS Cole, as well as the September 11th, 2001 attack. The neo-cons, taking counsel of their capitalist-driven desires, have long wanted to establish military bases in southwest Asia, and have specifically stated, prior to those attacks which i mentioned, that they wished to see military bases established in southwest Asia. Hence, the invasion of Iraq, which was a goal of the neo-cons and high-ranking members of this administration before the terror attack of September 11th gave them the leverage to delude the uncritical supporters of said administration.
As i also point out in my first response to this thread, Iraq has a long history of sectarian violence, and violence against foreign occupying forces. Iraq was created by Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill for the express purpose of uniting the petroleum rich regions on Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, to become a mandate protected by England, which could then exploit it to their advantage. In the 1920s, the English faced as violent an insurrgency, if one less well-armed and less well-lead than the one which today exists in Iraq.
When Iraq was created, it encompassed three distinct groups. In the northern, Mosul region, the Kurds were the largest single ethnic group. The Kurds include Sunni Muslims, Shi'ite Muslims, Christians, Animists and a handful of confessional Jews. They have consistently been united by their shared ethnicity since before this abortion of a "nation" existed. In the central portion of Iraq resided (and resides today) a Sunni Muslim "Arab" minority (it is not at all certain that Arab ancestry is a significant contributing factor in their ethnicity--although they are certainly semitic, and the Arab culture is strong enough to justify the label). In the south resided and resides today the majority of the population of that "nation," and they are Shi'ite Muslims. Because the English propped up a Hashemite monarch, they thoughtlessly and carelessly assured the dominance of the Sunni minority--to the eventual bloody cost of the Shi'ites.
Today, the Sunni minority largely comprises the insurgency, because they have lost nearly everything, including their hold on power which they exercised for four generations, and have nothing left to lose. But their defeat was sufficiently thorough that neither they, nor we, can prevent the Shi'ite majority from taking power, sooner or later, and most likely, sooner rather than later. The Shi'ites have the largest number of "militia," and the charge is justifiably made that the Iraqi army and police are dominated by Shi'ites, who use their position to wreak vengeance on Sunnis in Iraq.
This situation derives directly from the decision taken by the neo-cons to work for an invasion of Iraq, a decision taken before the al Qaeda attack on
USS Cole and before the September 11th attacks. The decision was based on the desire to establish military bases in the region of the world with the largest production of the most highly-valued petroleum, and has never had anything to do with a "war on terror." The so-called war on terror was sufficiently unimportant to the Shrub and his Forty Theives of Baghdad that they were willing to rush through Afghanistan, and abandon the effort there to NATO, to re-install the warlords and heroine trafficers who so terrorized their own people that those people embraced the Taliban after the expulsion of the Soviets. The Afghans may hate the Taliban by now, but with the old warlords back in power, thanks to this administration which never cared if they engaged in "nation building," they have no reason not to hate us. The Canadians, English and Dutch have made a hell of an effort over the last six months to destroy the resurrgent Taliban in southern Afghanistan, but you don't even hear that on the news in the United States, because we are so focussed on the horrendous and unnecessary mess we're in in Iraq.
Iraq was never about terrorism, but in a marvelous example of self-fulfilling prophecy, this administration has made it a vector for terrorism, and the dissemination of the propaganda upon which terrorist recruiters rely.
