This wont make me any friends... I dont agree with this article at all. Nobody is better off living under tyranny. I do not support the nihilistic notion that that its better to suffer oppression than it is to fight for freedom. This attitude comes with the shame and guilt that comes with all this killing being on our hands. The world is better off with Saddam dead, and so is Iraq. It has had its own civil war, now it faces an existential threat from ISIS, but it has had the opportunity of freedom and the story is not yet over. What we did see from US intervention was a civil war, but when you look at Syria and how their war will clocked up more deaths in three years than the whole Iraq intervention, and when you look at how Kurdistan is becoming more autonomous, but still working with Baghdad, within the framework of the constitution, still attempting to keep Iraq together, it starts to look there is a political will to finish what the US started, held back mainly by Malikis incompetence. If Iraq can meet the threat of ISIS, there is still scope for a free Iraq. Moreover, what did anyone seriously expect was going to happen in just ten years? A new Switzerland? The Lebanon civil war raged for fifteen years and even now is always on a knife edge. The next year or so will prove to be pivotal, with much depending on what happens in Syria, but there does come a point where what happens to Iraq becomes the responsibility of Iraq and how they step up to the opportunity afforded them. Then when the Syrian war is over and we count the dead and deal with whatever replaces Assad without a US style constitutional framework, the world might then regret the lack of US intervention - and so might Iraq. Whats done is done, but there is a possibility that history will look upon the US invasion more favourably than we do. And some might stop to question what the Iraq body count would look like had we not bothered. That is not to say I am suddenly pro-intervention, nor indeed am I saying that the Iraq invasion was a good idea as I once did long ago, but one can imagine how much worse it all could have been, in any case, the opportunity of freedom is always better than sustained tyranny, even if that sustained tyranny and the status quo is easier to ignore and less disruptive. Westerners it seems dont care how many die or how long these wars rage, just so long as we dont get the blame and the deaths are not on our conscience. What sort of stunted world-view is that? There is much to argue in the case I have made, but many are determined only to see the very worst and blame everything on the West. We do have a lot to answer for, but ultimately its in their hands now, and we might ask why other power-brokers in the region such as Turkey have sat back and done nothing, happy to let our efforts fail, when they ultimately the consequences of failure will be felt by them most acutely. dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2711464/STEPHEN-GLOVER-I-m-afraid-bitter-truth-Iraq-Libya-better-tyrants-toppled-arrogant-naive-West.html
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 08:10:35 +0000
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