Post War Iraq

[onthebottom]

Interesting opinion from the Houston Chronicle:


http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/2608445

Some highlights:

"Today the guns are silent. ... The entire world is quietly at peace." So said Douglas MacArthur in September 1945. Last week, seeing that quotation, now inscribed in stone at the new World War II Memorial in Washington, I was struck, touched, by its optimism.

...............

A few days after my encounter with that MacArthur quotation, I read a brilliant and impassioned article by the eminent British military historian, John Keegan, skewering the commonplace and ahistorical idea — claiming World War II as a model — that wars end cleanly, neatly and completely. Keegan's article (London Daily Telegraph, June 1) detailed the bloody aftermath that continued for years after MacArthur's words on the battleship Missouri.

..............

As of this week, we have an interim Iraqi government, remarkably balanced in terms of ethnicity, region and tribe. Such encouraging developments, however, are apparently not to be permitted to puncture the current defeatism.

......................

Then comes my favorite: the new government has no legitimacy because it is composed of so many exiles. What kind of political leadership does one expect in a country that endured three decades of Stalinist tyranny in which any expression of opposition met with torture and death? Strange. I do not remember any of these critics complaining about the universally hailed Oslo peace accords that imposed upon the Palestinians a PLO government flown in from Tunisia composed nearly entirely of political exiles.

Ah, but Yasser Arafat, thug and terrorist, instantly wins legitimacy in the eyes of Western intelligentsia because he is a self-proclaimed revolutionary, while Iraq's interim prime minister, who was nearly axed to death by Saddam's agents in London, is dismissed as an "exile."

OTB

 

[danmand]

Charles Krauthammers opinion is featured in today's National Post.
He has never met a military solution he did not like.

 

[oldjones]

I suspect the presence of a hugely powerful occupying army has more than a little to do with any difficulties the 'interim' Iraqi government may be having. Difficult to see the legitimacy thru all the battle dress and HumVees.
After three or four decades, Arafat can at least claim that he's not 'interim', though the Israelis, and a few others have certainly tried to make him so. But it's been a long time since anyone intelligent thought he was anything but an ugly means to a just-might-be-possible good end.
"Stalinist tyranny" ? Aren't you getting your brutal, mustached, genocidal, ex-American-ally tyrants mixed up?

 

[xarir]

Wars start where and when you will, but they will never stop where and when you want.

Although we like to think that WWII ended in August of 1945 when Japan surrendered, we find that almost immediately afterward the Cold War started. WWII itself was arguably an outgrowth of the post-war conditions of WWI. Iraq of course is the modern example of a war with no end.

You'd think that after all this, our politicians would learn that war is only the final option and that all other avenues of peaceful resolution need to be exhausted first.