In Iraq, "Longing for the Devil they Know"

Raleigh, NC News and Observer columnist Dennis Rogers interviews an Iraqi expat in Raleigh, who discusses the daily experiences of his brother and two sisters in Baghdad and his feelings about how the country he adopted almost 20 years ago has affected his homeland:

http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/573361.html

Imagine trying to live every day in the conditions he describes.

Excerpt:

To better understand Ali, consider how it would feel if you emigrated to a new country, only to see that new country attack your homeland.

"You feel incredible guilt and anger," he says. "Guilt that you can't be there with your family and angry that it is happening. Your country is being annihilated and you're part of it. ... I was terribly disappointed in this country. I never imagined it would do the things it has.

"No one in this country can say they had nothing to do with it, either. Americans by their votes are complicit in the deaths of thousands. People here need to know the results of their actions."

""If you took a vote in Iraq today, 99.9 percent of the people would say go back to what we had four years ago," he says. "Everybody had it better under Saddam. We only thought it was bad then. We didn't know how bad things could get. As bad at it was under Saddam, multiply it by 10 and that's what you have now."

Restore the Baath, to the extent it can be done. Reassemble the old army on vastly increased pay, and make it clear that killing civilians will not be tolerated, and neither will a jihadi presence.

Throw the present rabble of sectarian opportunists out and hand power to the only section of opinion that believes in a strong, inclusive Iraqi nationhood. Make clear that Kurdish autonomy is part of the deal. That shouldn't bother the Baath - they accepted it in 1970.

There's a viable Baath leadership. Izzat Ibrahim was Saddam's #2 and will command the allegiance of most party loyalists. He's spoken out against the jihadis' sectarian killing. he's no America-hater, he just wants his country back. And he's unlikely to repeat Saddam's nutty foreign escapades. He won't be in a position to.

There's the way out. Has America the courage to do it?

With the amount of money we are spending in Iraq, we could bribe/beg/cajole/convince the UN to get in there and start making some progress.

Maybe partitioning Iraq is a good idea. The Kurds probably want to be independent. The UN could oversee a partition.

No progress will be made until the profiteering US cabal is no longer in control.

It's a scheme to leave a Sunni rump state with no resources. The populations are also so intermingled it's nonsensical. Even this nightmare of local sectarian "cleansing" hasn't undone that. The oil majors would love partition, as it allows them to deal separately with the Kurdish and Shia communities whose territory conrtains most of the oldfields. Partition would be a crime: territorial changes effected by military aggression should not be recognized.

Let's just restore Iraq. Undo this crime, to the extent possible.

That's how the current state of Iraq came to be.

... and it falls under what would nowadays count as decolonization - but for the immediate recolonization by Britain.