Reply #30: I gotta argue with you on this one:

[Plaid Adder]

Iraqis may like the idea of a democracy, but they have no concept of how to make it function in their society...

I hear this a lot, and I just have to say: we don't know whether democracy would ever work in Iraq or not. It has never really been tried. Democracy is not something that we could ever have "spread" to Iraq; something being imposed upon you by an invading army is by definition not a government chosen by the people being governed. It is easy enough, as we have proved in Iraq, to remove a dictator, but that's not the same thing as creating a democracy--as we have also proved in Iraq. Despite all the "elections," the basic fact that the system they were part of was devised by an invading power in cooperation with its handpicked Iraqi "leaders" meant that even if everything went according to plan, it wouldn't really have been a democracy--at least not until the US army had withdrawn, a couple generations' worth of time had passed, and people had forgotten that government's origins.

Plus, and this is not a direct response to your comment, it's just a rant that has been bottled up inside me for quite some time:

It pisses me off when I hear people complaining about how basically, the mess Iraq is in is somehow the result of "the Iraqi people" just not wanting democracy enough. IMHO, you could go to any country in the world and poll the entire population about their preferred form of government and about 70-80% of the population would tell you that what they really care about is being able to get to work in the morning. Civil wars and revolutions are typically fought by self-appointed elites who have decided that they--and everyone around them--need to pay the price in order to get the desired form of government. These elites may constitute only 10-20% of the total population, but if they're heavily armed and committed, they can still do a lot of damage. I listen to our politicians talk about this, and I just wonder if any of them have any idea of how the minds of ordinary people work. The reason most people put up with being governed is that they believe they get some benefit out of it. One of those benefits is protection from violence and crime. In our own society, there are some populations who are clearly much better protected than others, but if you're white and middle class you can be more or less confident that until you anger it, the state will more or less be able to prevent you from being killed, raped, robbed, attacked, rortured, etc. in the streets or in your own home. Nobody in Iraq has that kind of confidence in their government--because nobody in Iraq is actually safe from that kind of violence. They don't have a government right now, they have total bloody anarchy. "The Iraqi people", at least the portion of them that haven't actually taken up arms yet, can't turn Iraq into a democracy just by getting together and believing in it really hard. The militias would have to be decommissioned first, and neither the government nor the US Army is able to do that.

The fact that the state cannot protect the citizens loyal to it is how we know that the state has ALREADY FAILED. Unless you are a highly principled or highly fanatical person, you are not going to support a government if that government cannot stop its enemies from killing you because you support the government. That's really what it comes down to, and I don't see that sending 21,000 troops to Baghdad is going to improve that situation. Since we clearly do not know how to improve it, it doesn't matter how many troops we have with which to make it worse.

:argh: :argh: :argh:

The Plaid Adder