Nate,

Saddam was a Soviet client state.

During the Iran/Iraq War, we provided Iraq with aid such as satilite intelligence, to prevent Iran from winning, and we provided Iran with TOW missles to prevent Iraq from winning. It would have been disaster if either side had a clear victory, and the Reagan administration helped prevent that as part of our Cold War effort.

It makes zero sense to say that America won’t liberate Iraq because it has oil. That’s actually a reason to occupy and liberate Iraq. Free market oil from free democracies are priced less than OPEC oil from oligarchies and monarchies.

Again, when the peaceniks were smoking wish holes, Bush actually liberated Iraq. It’s called guilt tripping for the peacenikkers to now say that it doesn’t count because “oil was the reason”. Smoking blunts is the reason the Left didn’t do jack about Iraq.

Nate’s second argument is ostensibly that a free Iraq will always side with Iran, in a sort of Sunni always hate Shia kind of Leftist caricature of reality. And just about as accurate. The Left likes identity politics, if you identity yourself as A, then you obviously ally with other As and hate Bs. Duh. People who are wiser and with a higher education, know better. We’re going to remold Iraq so that free Iraqis are going to go out on a jihad to ANNIHILATE terrorism. It’s called divide and conquer, it’s called convert the enemy.

The US is so powerful we can change human fate, and that’s why we will liberate Iraq while the Left peaceniks won’t. The Left will just say “if we liberate Iraq, they will just go with Iran, so let’s not”. ANd they did not.

“The problem is generated by the friction between the modern world and Islam”

Islam came to occupy center stage in these countries only because (and after) the secular, liberal-nationalist forces in these places (such as Nasser in Egypt, or Mossadegh in Iran) were wiped out and suppressed in the 1950s and 1960s with active US support. This created a power vacuum in which the Islamists were able to step in.

This process, in somewhat similar ways, is still continuing, in fact. Look at how the relatively much more secular Fatah of Arafat and then Abbas were left out to dry by Israel and the US after they had stuck out their neck by recognizing Israel and negotiating with Israel. This marginalization of Fatah naturally created a power vacuum in which the Islamist group Hamas was able to step in. (The Palestinians saw that they were still getting shafted even after they elected Fatah, which was prepared to negotiate with Israel, so they decided to vote for Hamas, since they figured that they’re going to get shafted no matter who they vote for — i.e. a clear example of how US and Israeli policies drove a people towards extremism in a matter of a few years).

The one smoking a joint here seems to be Ymar.

“The doctrine, to oversimplify, is that we have to believe the United States would have so-called “liberated” Iraq even if its main products were lettuce and pickles and [the] main energy resource of the world were in central Africa. Anyone who doesn’t accept that is dismissed as a conspiracy theorist or a lunatic or something. But anyone with a functioning brain knows that that’s not true. The United States invaded Iraq because its major resource is oil. And it gives the United States, to quote [Zbigniew] Brezinski, “critical leverage” over its competitors, Europe and Japan. That’s a policy that goes way back to the second world war. That’s the fundamental reason for invading Iraq, not anything else.

“Once we recognize that, we’re able to begin talking about where Iraq is going. For example, there’s a lot of talk about the United States bringing [about] a sovereign independent Iraq. That can’t possibly be true. All you have to do is ask yourself what the policies would be in a more-or-less democratic Iraq. We know what they’re likely to be. A democratic Iraq will have a Shiite majority, [with] close links to Iran. Furthermore, it’s right across the border from Saudi Arabia, where there’s a Shiite population which has been brutally repressed by the U.S.-backed fundamentalist tyranny. If there are any moves toward sovereignty in Shiite Iraq, or at least some sort of freedom, there are going to be effects across the border. That happens to be where most of Saudi Arabia’s oil is. So you can see the ultimate nightmare developing from Washington’s point of view.” — Noam Chomsky in Newsweek interview, January 9, 2006. For full text of interview, click here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10682403/site/newsweek/

Great, Derek — and so what have you smart or at least sensible people been doing about it? Hmm? See, thumb sucking doesn’t really count for much. You did have a march, I see, which is one thing you lefties can do — ah, but it was a march against doing something, wasn’t it? Other than marching, sounds like you’re a fan of the non-proactive approach — i.e., let’s NOT take the fight to the enemy; NOT establish democracy in place of tyranny; take a hands-OFF approach, be INdecisive, dole out MORE appeasement, and just leave the job UNdone. That about sum up the position of you “sensible” guys?

Maybe, as Ymar says, we’re not really on the same page after all.

That, at least, is probably about right, for now. If whatever version of islamist killers is current ever manage to perpetrate another atrocity on American soil — and remember that there were 8 years between their first try at taking down the World Trade Center and their second, successful one — then we’ll see, but otherwise it’s looking like the very Western politics that the islamists count on will undermine any attempt to deal with them on a strategic level. So the despised, hated Bush will have been thwarted, at whatever cost. “It is fun to beat your chests and bay at the moon, though, isn’t it?”

Oh well. Maybe without Bush the nasties’ll just go away, hmm? Not too likely, is it? Nor is treating them as though they were isolated, identifiable, criminal or even lunatic gangs going to do much to treat the problem (it’s been successful at preventing another attack in America, but only so far). Buy them off somehow? Throw Israel to them? Pull out of the region altogether? As far as we pull back, it would never be enough. The problem is generated by the friction between the modern world and Islam, and hugely exacerbated by the anomalous oil wealth of an otherwise premodern region that sits at the heart of Islam. Until that problem is faced and confronted — in Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia, etc. — it will continue to fester, and we’ll all just sit waiting for the next major eruption.

And after that? Well. The task certainly won’t be easier.

Maybe if the UK had 2500 soldiers dead, they might think twice about

No matter, we are all, well most of us anyway, on the same page now. That’s a start. OK so how do we counter this threat? How about a proactive approach. Let’s take the fight to the enemy, establish democracy in place of tyranny

Do these people think any other nation except America could have taken a proactive approach and not had the casualties in the hundreds of thousands, in attempting to establish democracy in place of tyranny? What are these people talking about, they’re talking about how America failed because we got 2500 fatalities, both combat and accidental, both in iraq and out of Iraq.

They just want a magical wand waved and democracy would flourish where tyrannies had lived before, is that it?

We’re definitely not on the same page.

Whatever they were, they were right to say “Don’t Attack Iraq”.

While the peaceniks were sitting on their arse smoking joints and talking about how righteous it is to institute democracy in Iraq, Bush actually did something about it, he actually sent people to fight for it, that would die for it. And the peaceniks are still sitting there smoking blunts and joints, and talking about how they would have done it better than Bush by “not attacking Iraq”. Total BS, and not ecstasy hallucination bs either. The real kind.

No matter, we are all, well most of us anyway, on the same page now. That’s a start. OK so how do we counter this threat? How about a proactive approach. Let’s take the fight to the enemy, establish democracy in place of tyranny, take an interventionist approach. Be decisive. No more appeasement, just get the job done. Great, sounds good. So, how are we doing?

1. Iran. Nuclear programme back on. Situation worsening.

2. Korea. Dialogue pursued by the Clinton administration replaced by a more robust approach. Provocative missile launch just undertaken. Threat growing.

3. Palestine. Continued radicalisation of the people as evidenced by the election of Hamas. The roadmap in tatters.

4. Lebanon. Israeli troops back in the south of the country for the first time in years.

5. Afghanistan. Record opmium production. Osama bin Ladan not found. Incredibly, the wretched Taleban still active.

6. Iraq. 2500 US soldiers dead. A secular tyranny replaced by the world’s biggest training camp for terrorrists. Iranian influence growing. Islamism growing.

We can all mull over the nature of extreme Islam (or communism in the case of N. Korea) and I, for one, think that terrorist attrocities are to be blamed on, well, terrorists.

But may I suggest that, based on the above alone, the so-called war on terror is going nowhere. That is not what depresses me. Its the fact that all sensible people knew it would achieve nothing. To neo-cons, the largest ever political march in the history of the UK (and that’s a long history) was all lefties/liberals or whatever else you want to dismiss the non-neo-con majority as. Whatever they were, they were right to say “Don’t Attack Iraq”.