Posted by SleepingHare on 2/1/2003, 1:10 am, in reply to "Re: And then?" 1) The Radical Fundamentalists are doomed to The Dustbin of History The fundamentalists are probably as popular now as they will ever be. They are not the answer to the Arab worlds problems. The people of Iran already know this. More Muslim states may try to follow the same route, but I am confident they will end up dissatisfied with the results. The long-term trend will be towards democracy, which is in no way incompatible with being Arab. 2) Bush's desire to control the Iraqi oilfields is a version of the Big Lie It is fashionable, especially among left-wing intellectuals, to point to oil as the sole explanation of US actions in the Middle East. It is also false. I would say the US wants a peaceful, stable, and pro-American Middle East. A reliable oil supply is one of many reasons for this, not the only one. 3) Iraq is a modern, western-style fascist police state, perfectly amenable to democratization of the type we enforced in Germany and Japan after WWII This is where we disagree. A brutal dictatorship can hold anything together, even a mess like Yugoslavia. Democracies are a different story. It is not enough for a democracy to be a state. A democracy must also be a nation. Iraq is a state, but not a nation. It is at least three separate nations in an artificially created relic of colonialism. Iraqi is only a legal term. Most Iraqi's still see themselves as Sunni or Shite, Kurd or Arab. Proof of this tribalism is the fact that Iraq's entire leadership is drawn exclusively from Saddam's own small tribe. Remove this tight control and the country may well spin apart. This is where democracy would be squashed. An independent Kurdistan in northern Iraq would be totally unacceptable to Iran and Turkey. Iran can be ignored, but Turkey is too solid an ally to discard. We have turned a blind eye to Turkey's repression of its Armenian and Kurdish separatist movements and we will turn to blind eye to any repression necessary to prevent a Kurdish state from emerging from Iraq, even after a successful American defeat of Saddam. Japan and Germany were two very nationalistic states with largely homogenous populations. They had accepted leadership that was largely allowed to survive defeat. By my estimation they were near perfect candidates to transition from dictatorship to stable democracy. Saddam's leadership has weak control in many regions of Iraq that would probably fall apart pretty fast if his defeat seemed imminent. His tribal cronies would probably have to be removed from government along with him to secure the American victory, leaving a huge power vaccuum. Waving the Iraqi flag isn't going to get a big response at that point. Money and good intentions will not be enough from the US. To create a stable democracy that can survive long-term they would have to commit themselves to rethinking the map of the Mid-East. Borders should reflect nationalist aspirations rather than colonial mistakes and short-term political convenience. I know this is a radical position that many, if not most, would disagree with. But give a little thought to recent history. What drove the conflicts in Yugoslavia, East Timor, Eritria, the Sudan, Quebec, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Chechnya, Tibet, Kashmere, and any number of other places? It would be nice if politics wasn't driven so much by identity, but ignoring this reality will not make it go away. We need to address the problem as it exists despite the political costs because in the long-term it is the only solution that will work.
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You forward 3 main arguments, all of which have been crossing my mind recently:
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