Rob Mitchell wrote:
Dan White wrote:

"Rob Mitchell" wrote in message
...

I don't believe that you can 'jumpstart' a democracy in the kind of
environment you have in Iraq, at least not one that is favourable to the
US. I think you will be tied down in Iraq for many years, and in the
end another dictator, as bad as Saddam will be brought in, and all the
while, N. Korea will be making 8 A-bombs/year, or so I've heard.
(according to Professor Graham Allison of Harvard -the number may not be
accurate, who really knows.)



History may not support your guess. Look at Italy, Germany and Japan
after
WW2. People said the exact same thing about those places, and look at
them
now. I think we were in Japan for 7 years, and people said they were
basically unable to support a democracy. I don't see a reason for your
extremely negative spin on the potential outcome in Iraq other than sour
grapes. If some form of democracy and real peace comes out of Iraq the
skeptics will have nothing left to complain about. I'd say that so
far Iraq
is on track. I don't know the final outcome, either, but I see no
reason to
conclude that the effort is sure to fail. But, you are entitled to your
opinion of course.

dwhite


I'd love to be proven wrong. As for fighting insurgencies, perhaps
Vietnam would be a better example.

Mercifully the situation in Iraq has very little in common with Vietnam.
Most of what we were fighting in Vietnam, especially after Tet, was the
North Vietnamese army, with heavy outside support from the Soviet Union
and China. It was not actually an 'insurgency' in the usual sense of the
term.

The Iraqi insurgents don't have the outside lines of supply and they
have only very limited support bases in other countries. Militarily,
it's a much simpler proposition.

Japan might be a reasonable
comparison, I don't know enough about it other than it was bombed pretty
heavily at the end.

Actually Japan isn't a very good example either. The Japanese remained
under the control of their government, and especially the Emperor, up to
the end of the war and beyond. When the Emperor told the Japanese to
stop fighting, they stopped. There hasn't been a figure in Iraq with
that kind of power and prestige for hundreds of years.

Germany is a much closer example, or perhaps Greece or Italy. In all
cases the countries were able to establish working democracies. This is
in spite of a Communist-backed insurgency/civil war in Greece.

One encouragement that I have seen is that in order to win this kind of
fight you have to build alliances with the factions.

Well, someone has to build alliances. In this case I think that's the
job of the Iraqi government. It's worth noting that the Iraqi government
is working hard to do exactly that.

The US seems to
have a good alliance with the Kurds, and possibly with the Shia. Other
than that, I haven't heard or read much that is promising.

Actually one the best things that happened along those lines is the
outcome of the election. The Shia parties won a strong majority, but not
enough to govern. They're going to have to form a coalition, probably
with the Kurds (who are Sunni Muslims) and that means that an awful lot
of stuff is going to have to be negotiated between the various parties
in the assembly.

It's reason to be a little more optimistic, but not euphoric.

Rob