Shahter wrote:
imortal wrote:
The point is, what do you think the US is doing in Iraq at this point? For the last few years, the point of operations in Iraq was to form a stable nation and government that would be easy for USA to manipulate, so we can get out.
fixed it for you - and THAT is the whole point of "spreading democracy". c'mon, dude, you can't really be that naive - your beloved democracy doesn't even work in your own country (the last president election, where you had a choise between a clown and a zombie, clearly shows that): how the fuck do you expect it to work in a shithole like iraq (without falling completely under foreign influence that is)?
the whole point in iraq war was to topple saddam who refused to bend over to usa - all the "wmd's", "opression" and "ties to terrorists" crap is nothing but exuses. and all the stuff marine posted in this thread about those who spoke aganst the invasion - and i mostly agree with him re the reasons for that - only confirms it.
imortal wrote:
I laugh at those who still say this was a war for oil. The oil 'crisis' we had a couple years back should have proven the lie to that argument. The US has spent billions and billions of dollars rebuilding Iraq, while taking nothing in return. We have been trying to rebuild that which we had destroyed. The 'Iraqi' insurgents, on the other hand, have been destroying all they can and killing Iraqis who are trying to make the nation a peaceful and stable place.
And yet we are still the bad guys of this piece.
you laugh, heh? well, all that you mentioned could easily be fixed: stop pretending you are selfless jedi - nobody with even half a mind buys that crap - and finish what you started. once usa establish control over the region (and, hence, its resources) your troops can go home. oh, i forgot, you can't really do that yet - too much insurgency. that's exactly the reason why usa don't leave - because the objective haven't been reached yet. and as i said numerous times, nobody fights a war because it's the right thing to do. nobody travels all the way to the other side of the globe and "fights gallantly" there to "form a stable nation and government"... and simply leaves in the end - it's preposterous. but no, you aren't after the recourses, eh? - well, halle-fucking-luiah, but wtf are you doing there then?
Iraq would have been much easier for the US to control if we went the routes the Russians did, and violate the Oil-for-Food program and trade guns and ammunition into Iraq during the sanctions. Oh, did you think that Russia opposed the US invasion into Iraq on moral grounds? Iraq was a cash cow for France, Russia and Germany during between the two Gulf Wars.
I did not make any excuses for
why the US went into Iraq in the first place. All I did was explain the purpose of our continued presense there. I was in the army for during that time. I was in Iraq back in 2003. Yes, "I laugh" about the whole war-for-oil argument, because the US is not profiting from Iraq's oil! During 2003, the US was paying to have gasoline shipped from Turkey to provide fuel to the civilian population of Iraq. The Iraqi insurgent response was to shoot at and attack the fuel convoys.
The insurgents in Iraq (who, for the most part, are not Iraqi) are pursuing their own agenda which does
not include the US leaving the area. They are not trying to kick the US out; they are trying to establish their own control in Iraq. They torture (and I mean
real, old-school torture- whips, knives, pulling out fingernails and breaking bones) and behead opponents to make thier point. They terrorize locals who live in an area to keep them from talking. Yet, no one ever questions what they are doing or why. They bomb marketplaces and lines of Iraqi citizens trying to get on with their lives. Are these the people you would rather be in charge of the country?
Yes, and government the US supports will tend to be friendly to the US. It is one of those no-brainers. However, "easy for the US to manipulate" is not true, since from its inception, the Iraqi government has made operations in their country more difficult; that is hardly the act of a lackey government.
Democracy doesn't work; it just works better than any other form of government to date. Actually, I am nostalgic and think of
my government as a representative republic, not a democracy (just another fallacy thrown around by America's most loved socialist, FDR). We could have just installed another dictator, except the last one didn't turn out so well. You say that our government is not working for us, but we have not had a coo, revolution, or major change in government in 140 years; we have only had a single civil war since the inception of our relatively young nation. In that respect, our government seems ok. We do have strange things happen for our elected offices, but we have not had widescale riots or uprisings.
My personal justification for the war in Iraq was to get rid of Saddam. After all, the US helped get him in power (to counter Iran, which had just kicked us out), but the man was nuts. We put him in place, so it was up to us to clean it up. As I said, that was my personal justification. During the cold war the US had done a whole lot of unsavory things in order to fight the perceived aggression of the USSR. A lot of those unsavory things were the 'lesser of two evils.' Looking at the Cold War historically, those actions have set up a lot of the problems now faced in the world; I am not proud of that. But we have to deal with the world as it is.
As to your idea of the US coming into a nation, changing the government, and then leaving peacefully being proposterous, I am not going to devolve this into an argument about
why the US went in initially, but as for the rest... isn't that pretty much what is happening? We aren't leaving all at once, since we want to make sure the government won't fall if we do, but we are distancing ourselves. The Iraqi government makes its own decisions regarding its policies.
So far, Iraq has been a bottomless pit that the US has tossed money down. There has been no economic payoff for it, and the 'resources' you claim the US wants is still firmly in the hands of the Iraqis. Perhaps it is enough that those resources are available for the US to purchase (just like the rest of the world), and not in the hands of a nutjob.
Ok. I may have said this a few times before, but I will do so again in the hopes you will understand. To your question "but wtf are you doing there then?" The US has found a war and has been battling an 'insurgancy' in Iraq for years now. This is the second time the US has been treading this ground since 1990. As we learned in Germany and Japan after WW2, if you fix things
right, you don't have to keep coming back. So, we are attempting to create a stable government in the hopes that we don't have to come back a third time. Yes, the area is only important beause of the resourses in the area. But that also shows us that instability in the Middle East can have a destabalizing effect in other parts of the world, as well. But the US doesn't want to be directly involved in Iraq indefinately; it is too expensive for us, for one thing.
