Quote:
Originally posted by ajuhdg
Due to these recent events, I have changed my perspective on this.
Those people don't care about anything.
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I understand your anguish, although I'm not comfortable stereotyping all Iraqis or all Muslims as bad.
Here are some
opinions, though.
I said both recently and early on that there were spectres of Vietnam in this for me.
In both, we seem to have decided that a nation and its people need "freedom" whether they want it -- or even understand it -- or not. Getting rid of Saddam was a worthwhile thing to do. Trying to force feed a kind of government on a people who don't ask for it has been disasterous in the past and may be this time.
To us this is a war for some principle, to them it is a religions conflict. I don't know that the right people understand that religion and how it operates. In any event, fighting for ones religion brings a lot of passion to bear.
After the initial spectacular success of our armed forces, we are now forced into a conflict of attrition with groups who don't respect the rules of "civilized" warfare. (Kind of like what we did to the British in the American Revolution, by the way). You can't really fight a special operations war of this type with bombs and planes and tanks as you do big "set piece" battles in the desert. The majority of our forces aren't trained in house to house fighting.
We're fighting on their turf and damaging their country.
The bad guys are very comfortable with killing a few of us at a time through ambush and eating away at morale (national and armed forces). They really don't have to "win" anything -- just wait for us to give up (lose).
But to just pull out would be signing the death warrants of a lot of Iraqis and others -- very much like happened in Vietnam.
There seem to be huge amounts of corruption on both sides.
There is no real cohesive leadership -- and especially any leadership with any idea of how to run a democracy.
And, finally, and most importantly, the average citizen of Iraq probably is happy to see Saddam gone, but now just wants to be left alone. The longer this is prolonged, the less they will want us there.
But it's too late for that.