Reply #186: That's not what I said at all

[Jack Rabbit]

And if you think it is, it only shows that you haven't understood a thing I've said for six months on this thread.

The theses, which you have failed to disprove, are:

• The US would have done better to leave Iraq alone Yes, that would have meant leaving Saddam where he was. Yes, that is a unpleasant choice.
• Saddam did not have ties to terrorists, therefore the invasion of Iraq is unrelated to the war on terrorism. Corollaries:
  • Resources used to invade Iraq (138,000 American troops) would have been better used to find and capture or kill Osama and his lieutenants. They, not Saddam, are the immediate threat to our security.
  • By neglecting the real war on al Qaida for this misadventure in Iraq, the Bushies have allowed al Qaida time to regroup.
  • Therefore, in terms of US security goals, the invasion of Iraq was a waste of time, resources, money and (least we forget) human lives; it was a monumental blunder.
  • The Bush doctrine is not designed to to fight terrorism; it is designed to build empire. It is nothing less than a pretext to invade any sovereign state any time for any reason or no reason at all.
• Democracy is not on the table in Iraq. It never was.
  • Bush is no more interested in promoting democracy in Iraq than was Saddam.
  • Bush is no more interested in promoting free and fair elections in Iraq than he is interested in free and fair elections in Florida.
  
  
  • Bush is interested in opening business opportunities for his cronies at the expense of the Iraqi people.
  • Bush needs a government in power in Baghdad that is responsible to the US embassy, not to the Iraqi people.
  • If any Iraqi government that had any responsibility whatsoever to the Iraqi people came to power, it would ask US troops to leave and take the transnational corporations with them.
• It follows from the above that US troops are needed in Iraq to assure compliance of the Iraqi government with the US will. As long as that is the case:
  • Iraq is not a sovereign state but, in contradiction of democratic principle, a colony of a foreign power.
  • The interests of the Iraqi people are subordinate to the interests of the imperial power.
  • The Iraqi people will resist colonial domination and brutality is required to subdue the resistance.
• Whether within a democratic framework or not, the interests of the Iraqi people are better served by taking responsibility for their own destiny without meddling from the Bushies.

Restated simply:

While the overthrow of Saddam should have been an occasion of unreserved celebration, it was carried out in the worst possible manner and made a bad situation worse in two ways: first, by neglecting the terrorist threat and allowing al Qaida to regroup; second, by introducing a corrupt colonial system to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq and wasting money with very little to show for it except fattened corporate coffers (see Naomi Klein's piece, post 166); notwithstanding the purely anecdotal evidence presented post 178, the post-war effort has earned the US the distrust of the Arab peoples and most of the rest of the world simply because it has been for the benefit of the occupiers rather than for the Iraqi people. In this, the occupation has been a disaster because, while often sold as an occupation in the sense of America's efforts to rebuild defeated foes after World War II, it in fact more closely resembles the British Imperial Raj in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India.