Reply #3: religious oligarchies are doomed to fail

[sui generis]

no matter which one you prop up, there will be atrocities.

Saddam, all other evil aside, realized that religious neutrality was paramount to having a stable government.

Musharraf in Pakistan knows this lesson too and walks a tightrope to avoid civil war.

Everywhere that there are religious extremists, including right here in the American "Homeland", stable nonreligious government is an obstacle to their goals of dominion and domination.

The fact is, we as westerners don't "get" tribal culture. We most profoundly don't understand it or else misinterpret it to our own bias. We don't understand cultural grudges held between ethnic groups and nurtured and ritualized for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. It is not in our cultural capacity as westerners to address it, imposing instead our own western values of what "should be" on what "is".

We need to leave, but we need to do it responsibly and humbly, not with ridiculous fanfare about accomplishing missions and bringing the light of democracy and all that other horseshit. We need to walk out with a standard for human decency that says we will not tolerate human rights atrocities, but other than that they are on their own.

What we fear in walking out is that Iraq will sell their oil to whomever they feel like to do whatever they wish, including not selling their oil to us.

We fear their true sovereignty over themselves, and so we will never truly let go.