If the US and Halliburton, etc were to fully withdraw from Iraq RIGHT NOW

If the US and Halliburton, etc were to fully withdraw from Iraq RIGHT NOW...

nt

...remains in Iraq.

Pulling Out, dosn't sound manly. G. Carlin

...or else he just slips out.

-me

The republic of Iraq is really mad at the USA for trying to be bigger baby sitter. This is out of control and needs to STOP. What has to happen absolutely though, is a contingent of army guard the borders and start killing the Al Quaedas out of here. What should have happened to begin with.

And lets not have it be americans doing it, get some other forces into the country!!!! British and otherwise forces who want to clean up the heinous mess Tony Blair lying ass has left! :thumbsdown:

You can choose A) Best of all possible worlds or B) Racism: To think that the insurgency would go away, or even die down significantly following a US pullout is a pipe dream. Even with all the attacks on the US - the primary targets of the insurgents are the current Iraqi administration, police and military. It is not even true that the Iraqi's lived peacefully before the US went in. Civil strife was reduced under Hussein (although it still went on and there were many deaths and arrests) but the pre-Sadaam history is farily violent.

without us.

They deserve the chance to prove that they can do it. I sincerely believe that they can.

And if they can't, that's what the UN is for.

if we fuck this up anymore than Bush did thousands more will die. We need the troops there until the Iraqi government actually exists and has hold on the country. Yes, this could take years but thanks to Bush that is the price we will have to pay.

Our troops and mercenaries like Halliburton are there illegally, and fuel enormous resentment by occupying the country.

Why do you want to continue to imposing that on Iraq?


And your comment is funny since the policy you favor treats the Iraqis exactly like kindergarteners.

that it took 100 years and a violent civil war, for the various ruling factions in the United States to get along? and those people had identical religious, ethnic and educational backgrounds. you expect Iraq to pull it off in 3?

Name three post-colonial countries that successfully made the transition to multi-ethnic, peaceful democracies in less than 50 years without a civil war or totalitarian state. I can't actually think of one.

States drawn up by outside powers almost never work. Hell, the Czechs and the Slovaks couldn't get along after the Soviet influence left, and they have no history of violence, but decided they were better off getting divorced.

and they would never provide the troop levels needed. northzax makes a very good point, we can't let them fight a civil war.

without the US around. Why, it's always been that way.

quick, name a decade that Iraq, as a modern nation, lived in peace and harmony without a strong internal military presence.

c'mon, you can do it.

Iraq is a modeen construct, held together by military force, it has never been anything else. Maybe there will come a time when the various factions decide that cooperation in a federal system adds more value to their lives and competition, we'll see. but for right now?

remember, Iraqis didn't choose to become Iraqis, the British chose it for them. Lines on a map, my friend, lines on a map.

decided against it, and urged Bush not to go ahead.

let alone TOTALLY racist.

Look at what happened in Yugoslavia. Or has happened and is happening in Africa. It's not racist to be concerned about ethnic / religious tensions. It's practical. That said, it's also possible to be too concerned over such tensions.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

No, they weren't called "Iraqis" or "Iraq" through those thousands of years...but name change doesn't change the fact that the same tribes now existed then in exactly the geographical spot they're at today.

The Alamo would still be the Alamo, even if Texas changed its name to Bushass.

they were independant entities, usually engaged in minor league conflict with each other.

Different name.

Never been any civil war.

The UK said "we can't leave it'll be chaos and civil war!" during their first attempt to occupy Iraq.

Ain't gonna work any better their 2nd attempt.

that lasted what, 15 years before a military strongman took power? Before the british, there was no Iraq, they made it up for administrative purposes.

Most governments don't last forever. With the exception of Japan and Germany, we haven't been too good at building democracies for other countries. I think we should leave it to the locals to decide what's best for their country.

Besides, once we're gone, we'll see for real if Iraq really IS better off without Saddam...

Right now, we are just Saddam II.

out of Iraq for good...until bush.

Iraq in the DNA of Imperialism

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/occupation/2004/1028colonize.htm

Smithsonian; Iraq’s Unruly Century
Great Britain’s four-decades-long involvement in Iraq 1917-1958 (PDF)
http://smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian/issues03/may03/pdf/smithsonian_may_2003_iraq_unruly_century.pdf

but the Brits left in 1948. The monarchy was overthrown in 1958. http://www.encyclopedia.com/html/section/Iraq_History.asp

There were coups in 1953, 1963 and 1968. There has been one peaceful transfer of power in the modern history of Iraq, when Saddam Hussein took over in 1979. He then proceeded to kill his opponents. The Kurds revolted in 1962-70, 1974, 1985-88 and 1991.

Iraq has been at war with another state for 42 of the last 50 years, and has been engaged in a low grade civil war between the Kurds and the Sunni/Shias for most of that time as well. No government has ever been elected and then given up power in the next election.

Please read your history. I have no doubt that the three major ethnic groups in Iraq can make their own states, I just don't see them making one multi-ethnic state anytime soon.

In fact the Brits maintained control over Iraq until 1958 with significant British military left in Iraq until 1955.

Non-military Brits remained until the bloody coup of 1958.

:)

there was in fact a puppet government, that is unarguable, and King Faisal was, in essence, a vassal of the Queen, but the British were increasingly pulling away, troop levels by 1958 were negligible.

(And if it ain't fact, then I got words for my Master's degree ME Studies professors!) :D

Britain handed over their last 2 airbases to Iraq in 1955, and most Brit troops were pulled out of Iraq at that time. There were UK troops remaining in Iraq 3 years later, until the coup in 1958.

Britain ruled Iraq from 1917-1958, through force, through British puppet-governments and through laws & economics.

Didn't work then, isn't working now, won't work now.

Iraq, with it's current borders and makeup never existed before the Brits withdrew from the region.

the whole concept of "nation state" was unknown in the Middle East.

Various chunks of land were occupied with greater or lesser tenacity by various (semi)nomadic tribes, all of them owing greater or lesser fealty to the Sublime Porte, the political and religious power center of the Ottoman Empire.

World War I decisively ended Ottoman power, and the Allies divided up its territory into spheres of influence, which for convenience they accounted as countries. But that certainly doesn't mean that Iraqi nationalism necessarily followed. Such a think only existed when the Ba'ath Party needed something to rally around. (At least Egyptian nationalism had a cause: the singing of Om Kaltsum.)

I refer the interested reader to A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin. The short version is that the reason the Middle East is so fucked up is that the WWI victors made a bunch of inconsistent and short-sighted decisions about it.

borders are; Iraqis -whatever they're called- have lived for example in Baghdad, together, nary a civil war, for thousands of years.

We can change America's name to Bushica. We can annex Canada for Bushica. And Americans by any new name (Bushicans? Yuck!) will still have been living on the same land for hundreds of years that they live on now.

Iraq (Mesopotamia) 500BC-1000AD

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/06/wam/ht06wam.htm

Iraq History and Culture From Noah to Present

762 AD: As capital of the caliphate, Baghdad was also to become the cultural capital of the Islamic world. Baghdad became a center of power in the world, where Arab and Persian cultures mingled to produce a blaze of philosophical, scientific, and literary glory.
http://www.arabo.com/links/,199,225,218,209,199,222/,202,199,209,237,206/more3.html

The Iraq border is completely porous and until the border is secure Iraqis will have a difficult time rebuilding their country.

And pull the profiteers out and build a real coalition. It will take years to undo the damage through other military operations, but it won't be anything like it is now.

I think people think about Iraq in a national supremacist manner. People seem to refer to "the problem" in Iraq as "insurgents" (meaning the people fighting the American insurgents and people they view as supporting them) killing people. This view implicitly justifies the American presence.

The real problem, the one that should come to mind when someone refers to "the problem" in Iraq, is that a foreign invader (America) has committed a massacre. The invader does not have a valid role in anything related to it's victim's future, except in repaying it's victims.

There is a choice between staying as invaders in the country until we are finally defeated, or colonizing Iraq with enough brutally to demoralize their culture to the point that they pose no significant threat to our power, like what has been done to the natives of this country we are currently occupying and calling America, or we could liberate Iraq from the American invaders, by leaving.

I have an analogy. If a person breaks into a house, kills the parents and a kid or two, in order to liberate the other kids from their abusive parents, it is not credible for the invader to then say he must stay or else the surviving kids won't know how to take care of themselves. Obviously the psycho should be out of the house.

Under what circumstances would you think it would be okay for the psycho to be involved in helping the kids? America is that psycho tens of thousands of times over. It should be out of Iraq.

People will die. The innocent will die. There are no good solutions in Iraq. There is one choice that brings death, despair and destruction and another choice that brings death, despair and destruction. The difference is in degrees.

Your poll is worthless. It allows no gray area and the world only knows gray areas.

It's a messy process, but once the lines are drawn in the sand, the fighting should end. The UN should then be involved to enforce the peace like the present-day situation in the Balkans after Yugoslavia broke apart.

I think it's a far less bloody proposition than staying 5 to 10 years fighting people who want revenge for their dead loved ones that we killed when we invaded their country and tore apart their lives.

all breaking up?

Almost EVERY tribe in Iraq has both Sunni AND Shia branches; Sunni live in the north south east west of Iraq; Shia live in the north south east west of Iraq.

Sunni & Shia intermarry and have for generations.

It's like saying the US is broken up between Catholics, Protestants and fundies. (Maybe it should be, lol!)

This "sectarian divide" thing is a myth.

It is a fact that Saddam's regime favored Sunnis over Shia. It is true that Saddam's regime also had Shia in it, but they never held the top positions unlike his inner circle. Decades of that will not disappear overnight. That stuff is not forgotten easily, especially since it was his regime that killed thousands in those years.

Saddam was an equal opportunity oppressor. He oppressed Sunnis just as much as he did Kurds, Christians, Shia.

*****

The warning of an imminent civil war has no historical basis.

We should also be very suspicious of US claims that the mainly Sunni-based armed resistance is targeting Shias. For example, after the horrific dual bombings in Karbala and Baghdad in March that killed over 200 people, hundreds of people in the Sunni city of Fallujah-the heart of the armed resistance-queued to donate blood to the mostly Shia victims.

http://www.iso.org.au/socialistworker/531/p6c.html

The Sunni Versus Shia Myth

Much that has been written about the ‘division’ between the Sunni and Shia in Iraq is not only a total distortion of the demographics of the Iraqi population, it also feeds into the propaganda campaign of ‘divide and rule’ tactics that even opponents of the war and occupation can fall into the trap of accepting as true...

http://www.williambowles.info/ini/ini-0156.html

As regards the Shias in the south, their divide from Baghdad has been much exaggerated as part of the anti-Saddam propaganda. It is totally overlooked that the historic Sunni-Shia divide no longer exists.

http://asianaffairs.com/may2003/us_invasion.htm

On Iraq Division

Iraq does not divide logically or neatly between Sunni Arab and Shia Arab. They live intermixed in much of Iraq and in Baghdad, where an estimated 60 percent of the population is Shia, 20 percent Sunni Arab, and 20 percent Kurd and Turkman. Sunni Arabs live in the southern cities of Basra and Zubayr and along the borders with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iraq's Arabs-Sunni or Shia-do not now and never have sought division.

There is a long tradition of inter-communal cooperation and intermarriage. Many Sunni Arab clans and families, including Saddam's, have Sunni and Shia branches.Iraq's Sunni and Shia Arabs are Iraqi first and pan-Arab last. Arab nationalist sympathies have a long history in Iraq.

http://www.menavista.com/articles/yaphe.htm

Bush and Blair continue to peddle the myth, beloved of old colonialists, that Iraqis will start a civil war if the "benevolent" presence of the occupation forces is removed.

It is the US-led presence itself which is dividing Iraqis now. The US is deepening a split between a minority for and an overwhelming majority against the US-led forces.

-Sami Ramadani is a senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan University and was a political exile from Saddam's regime

http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-ramadani030704.htm

Dahr Jamail; Unembedded in Iraq

The Shia/Sunni rift is largely a CIA generated myth. There are countless tribes and marriages alike that are both Shia/Sunni. There are mosques here where they pray together.

There is the possibility of war if the Kurds go independent, but the more likely possibility of that war would be Turkey invading Kurdistan before any Shia/Sunni action would occur regarding this.

Another Iraqi man pointed out that if there were a civil war, no Shia or Kurdish attack on Fallujah could ever possibly compare to the devastation the US military has caused there. I think he makes a good point.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20669

The Bush administration has promoted the idea that Iraq will descend into civil war and chaos without the occupation. This argument is no more credible than the “terrorist base” argument.

Unlike the United States, Iraq has never had a full-fledged civil war. There have been various revolts and revolutions, but never a full-fledged civil war on the scale of the American civil war. This propaganda about the inevitability of civil war if the US pulls out plays off stereotypes and prejudices many Americans have about “third world” peoples – that “they” are extremely unstable, have lots of civil wars, frequent coups and major ethnic tensions. Such stereotypes simply do not apply to Iraq.
http://question-everything.mahost.org/Socio-Politics/Iraq.html

The elevatio of Sunni over Shia there commenced with the monarchy itself, by the elevation of the Hashemite Feisal to the throne to suit England's regional convenience, they having promised the man a kingdom in Syria for services rendered during the war, but having had to stand by as the French chased him out of Damascus, and by 1922 needing some sort of figurehead to put in place over Mesopotamia....

The Sunnis of Fallujah waged constant battle against Hussein. There were Sunnis in Hussein's hometown of Tikrit that were oppressed by Hussein and cheered his ouster.

The common folk, regardless whether they were Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Christian or anything else, were oppressed. It was not Sunni vs Shia, or Sunni vs Kurds.

It was the elites vs everyone else.

This "Sunni-Shia" divide in Iraq is a myth. Most tribes in Iraq include both Sunni & Shia and they've been marrying, having kids, worshipping & living together for a very long time. TRIBES bitch and spat against each other, but it's never been Sunni vs Shia or Kurds.

Nor is it an invention of the C.I.A., as one of the persons you cite above alleges.

Nor does it make any difference to the fact of the thing that others were oppressed. People are so constituted that their own difficulties, and the difficulties of those near to them, have more signifigance, and even more reality, than those of people unlike themselves off at a distance. So the thing you urge, while true enough, lacks any political signifigance: it will not effect the feelings of anyone outraged at their own treatment, and the treatment of their fellows.

To give just one example, at no point in the history of the Balkans was it untrue that the different peoples and confessions married, had children, lived and even on occassion worshipped together: it has never stopped that region from being endemically divided on ethnic and religious lines, and breaking out routinely in murderous war these lines define. Within tribes, different clans bicker and fight, within clans, different septs do so as well, and within these, even different families pursue fueds from time to time.

The division between Sunni and Shia long predates modern Iraq, and is one of the great facts of the region. From the days of the Ottoman, it has with only a few exceptions served to mark the political divide between Ottoman and Persian rule, which fluctuated in the area of Mesopotamia, which served for centuries as the border march of their contest. The sectarian division is very bitter, and has caused a tremendous quantity of bloodshed over the years. It is doing so still today, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It cannot be dismissed merely because it seems inconvenient to a political view.

Iraqis are TRIBAL. They are not divided by Sunni vs Shia. Almost ALL tribes in Iraq have BOTH Sunni & Shia branches.

It was the ruling elites (mostly Sunni, but also Shia and Kurd and Christian) who oppressed everyone else, including Sunni and Shia and Kurds.

Saddam was an equal-opportunity oppressor, Iraqis divide by tribes, not by sects.

The "Sunni-Shia" divide in Iraq is a myth.

:)

"Iraq's past is not that of a sectarian minority in government, but of a hybrid state ruling through an intricate web of clan allegiances, in a climate of corruption and fear."

The majority of Iraqis are Arabs, both historically and culturally.

The Americans may have failed to uncover military weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but they may yet succeed in bringing a social weapon of mass destruction to the region -- that of Arab societies divided along sectarian lines.
-Dr. Azmi Bishara

http://www.amin.org/eng/azmi_bishara/2003/jul31.html

It will not effect the situation one little bit, nor will it alter my view of the thing.

I believe IRAQIS would know.

;)

Al-Yawar rejected the idea that Iraqis are divided along ethnic and sectarian lines.

"We do not have, really, any racial or sectarian problem between different parts of the society. After all, we are all Iraqis and we are all proud of being Iraqis,"

***

Iraqis should remain united and vigilant against attempts to invoke sectarian conflict.

"There is a persistent effort to fuel tension and cause fitna (strife) between Iraq's Sunnis and Shi'ites," Sheikh Mahmoud Al-Ethawy, the imam of Abdel-Qader Al-Kilani Mosque in central Baghdad.

***

Ibrahim Al- Gaafary;

"Neither the Iraqi Sunnis nor the Shi'ites think of themselves along religious lines. This kind of thinking does not exist in reality as both sects are interconnected through familial and tribal ties. It sounds absurd to make such an arbitrary division,"

***

Throughout their history Iraqis hardly organised themselves along religious or sectarian lines. It was, however, the US-led occupation authority which invoked the sectarian and ethnic identity as the primary criteria for power sharing in post-war Iraq.

...despite the injustices inflicted on the Iraqi Shi'ites under Saddam's rule, they (Shia) do not hold Sunnis responsible.

"Many Sunni Ulama (religious scholars), like Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al-Badri and Nazem Al-Amy, have fallen victim to Saddam. Everybody suffered under Saddam and Iraqis are well aware of this,"

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/670/re2.htm

"Don't underestimate nationalism," says Wamidh Nadhmi, a professor of political science at Baghdad University. "And don't exaggerate Shiite-Sunni differences, but remember that they are both Arabs. There is no religion called Shiism and no religion called Sunnism. They are both Muslims."

***

I guess someone forgot to tell these IRAQIS about the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq.

Once the shooting has started....

One shouldn't presume that's the case for everyone.

Good day.

:)

"When the idealist comes down from his ivory tower, he tends to go straight for the gutter."

I believe he found your remark highly condescending.

:)

My wife suggests he stick to his knitting....

There are three points that seem to me worth making explicitly here.

First, it is understandable why some are at pains to press the point you are attempting here. The sense that there will likely be civil war in Iraq after the U.S. departs does serve for many as a reason to prolong the U.S. presence, and so the idea of destroying this perception is a natural counter. But the argument the U.S. should stay to prevent a civil war is a very poor one, and best demolished on its own terms. The longer the U.S. maintains this ill-begotten venture, the more harm it will sustain, in terms of prestige, perception of the limits of its power, good will, and loss of treasure and blood. Most of our country's people will be susceptible to the argument that no benefit to Iraq and Iraqis is worth the slightest harm to our own country, and indeed, many will take a mean satisfaction in the thought the place will fall to bloody chaos on our departure in our best interest. Our people indeed do like to do good, but only on the cheap, and in our own interests. Altruism and noblesse oblige are largely absent from our political character.

Second, the fact that a few academics can be found to say something impresses me very little. Professors, particularly of the softer disciplines, are more prone even than politicians to find what they wish were true reflected back at them when they look at the world. It would be child's play, for example, to find a couple of degreed fellows eager to state that race and ethnic identity play only a small part in our country's political life by compare to class status, or that regional identifications play no signifigant role in our politics. But no person charged with practical political manipulations here would entertain either notion for a second, and a person so charged who did would be doomed to defeat and out of a job in a heartbeat.

Third, the sort of ties you speak of as militating against a civil war have never in history actually operated in such a wise, once the political and social contradictions have reached sufficient heat. Our own Civil War is just one example. That the North was rife with Copperheads and the South shot through with Unionists did not prevent either the outbreak nor the prosecution of the thing. Even family ties closer than those you refer to had no unifying effect: brother did indeed kill brother on the battlefield, and many were never again on speaking terms with their nearest relations once the fighting had ceased. The operation of a social entity in a state of rest and normalcy, and its operation in a state of passion and violence, resemble one another no more than do ice and steam.

If one wishes to understand how Persia became Iraq, Kuwaite and Saudi Arabia I believe that is the period to study.

I don't feel that Iraq will become a unified Republic without being forced by a strong military to do so. Even if the U.S. and it's cohorts stay there for 20 years there will be resistence to the notion. The Kurds definetly don't want to be under the yoke of a centralized Shi'ite power structure. They want their own state. The Sunni's and Shi'ites want their own territories. I cannot envision what the Bush Regime says will happen.

Gives you the idea Iraq was a peaceful place before the present day?

Since its creation by the India Office after the Great War, its history has been marked by intercine strife and political murder and repression.

The principal business of its government, whether under English or native rule, has been war to hold onto the southern portion of the Kurdish homeland, including the oilfields round Mosul and Kirkuk. The quiesence of the Shia in the south to central rule by Sunnis has been achieved only by extremities of repression throughout the period of native rule, that reached terrific proportion under Hussein. The place is not a natural polity; it is a patchwork of quite disperate provinces of the Ottoman empire cobbled together for English convenience in 1919. Numerous persons knowledgeable about the region advised then against the course, and their advice remains as cogent today. There is not a shadow of doubt that, without a repressive central government, the place will fly apart into its natural fragments, and that the process will be a bloody one. The process of holding it together, too, has always been a bloody one, and will remain so.

The Whiskey Rebellion, Shay's Rebellion, Bloody Kansas, the Indian wars, and that little disagreement called the Civil War.

Somehow we managed to survive the whole sorry mess.

I imagine the Iraqis will sort out their differences, hopefully peacefully, without our "help" that has led to the disaster and looming (if not already in progress) civil war.

Bush Regime Iraq Successes

1. Saddam will no longer sell Iraqi oil via the Euro.

2, A military foothold in the ME. Other than Saudi Arabia.

3, No countries will be able to buy Iraqi oil that the U.S. disapproves of.

4. The Multi-Intl. Oil Corps are reaping great profits, esp. Bush Junta fave ally Saudi Dicktatorshit.

Now it is evident to me that the Occupation shall continue unless the Congress refuses to fund it or the Iraqis unite and demand that it end.

Seems like the Iraqis, through the "insurgency" are demanding that we get the hell out of the country.

What everybody misses, is that the "insurgents" can't survive without the approval, aid, and silence of the Iraqi people.

Chariman Mao had many faults, but he was right when he said, "The guerilla is like a fish that swims in the sea of the people." Or, something near that. Without the support of the people the "insurgency" would disappear.

Therein lies the rub. The Bush Regime has cast it simply as terrorists that are killers that want to stop democracy in Iraq. Seems that most Amerikans buy that simple lie.