Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Wednesday, June 15, 2005 Grim forbodings The effectiveness of what must now be called Sunni terrorism in Iraq as the death toll and daily bombings mount up is leading a few to conclude that the situation is hopeless in terms of a military solution. Whether the American officers cited in the above link are too pessimistic remains to be seen, but I know that I am infuriated everyday when I read about fresh atrocities in Iraq by the Sunnis, and keep wondering what can be done, only to realize that what used to be done would lead to charges of war crimes and inhumanity. The Romans and ancient Persians and such would have reduced the towns and cities and sold the people into slavery or have removed them from their land to some other place as was done with the Jews to Babylonia. Or they would have killed every male of a population and sold the women and girls. The Germans practiced annihilation while the Russians and Chinese resort to labor camps and executions. Our situation is such that what we can only do is to try and pen people into certain boundaries and then let them kill each other in civil wars while supplying one side or another, until the world starts crying about human rights and inhumanity and demands America make them stop. I still have some hope that the Iraqis will develop a government and national security forces which can be effective at creating a civil society, but I don't know how much longer our support is necessasry or tenable. I would guess that the Iraqis have two years to pacify their country before more and more Americans abandon all hope. Certainly, the situation must get better by the 2008 election here. My instinct is to believe that Iraq is doomed as a nation and will be partitioned by civil war. I do not believe that one group can wreak this kind of havoc without other groups irreconcilably retaliating. Compounding the problem is that Arab or Middle Eastern societies are rife with corruption, incompetence, laziness, nepotism, and tribalism. I read stories of millions spent for sewage plants or water treatment which go bad because the Iraqis won't do the maintenance since there is no one to make them do any work now that Saddam and his subtle forms of persuasion are no longer a threat. Then there is the lack of discipline in police and army units, bribe taking, infiltration by terrorists and Sunnis, and an inability to screen candidates effectively. The problems are not simply a lack of organization, but cultural design. Maybe I just deceive myself too easily. I wanted to believe that in Kosovo, our intervention was the best thing we could do. Yet, I come to learn that perhaps the Kosovars did not deserve as much sympathy as we thought. I also wanted to believe that we might be able to establish functional democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, if not to our standards, perhaps to that of Turkey. I also thought that our adventure in Somalia was a worthy cause, just as many now think we ought to intervene in the Sudan. But the grim fact I keep coming up against is that so-called humanitarian actions never really seem to work. It is not that lives aren't saved, but that those lives are no more suited towards peace and tolerance than they were before. Usually less so. In Iraq we have captured thousands of "insurgents" yet we have not seen one execution. Why not? We ought to have seen thousands of executions. I suspect we do not see them because the government wants to use prisoners as bargaining chips, and the Sunni prisoners fully expect to be released at some future time. It is impossible for America not to act in the world to protect itself and its interests. It was necessary to destroy Saddam's Iraq just as we ought to destroy Syria and Iran and N. Korea, but our best strategy might have been to simply destroy their governments and then leave, and let nature take its course, destroying any monster it happens to throw up if the survivors can't organize themselves into some kind of stable and halfway positive condition. There are methods of counter-insurgency, though, that do work. We know all about them, but we aren't doing them and it appears that Iraqis won't either. They are brutal methods and fall far short of the ancient methods or nazi/communist ones, but the MSM would never allow it to occur without publicizing every action and demanding war crime trials against our soldiers. A truly effective military can now only occur in the absence of the media, or in the destruction of the Left and its hold on certain institutions like the Press and the Courts. Update This article at Frontpage illustrates how deceived we were by the MSM into believing the Serbs were the bad guys and the Bosnians the good guys and the Albanians in Kosovo were innocent victims. This was before the blogosphere when we could have learned more of the truth from a number of perspectives. It turns out that the International Criminal Court can't convict Milosevic because they can't find any actual evidence of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Amazing. posted by Mark Butterworth | 11:15 AM | |
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