Should we end the occupation of Iraq?

OK I daren't ask Sal to split the original thread up (on Parties and Protests) so here's a cut and paste of the debate around the issue.

Feel free to carry it on if you wish... Love Clairexxxx

p.s. Oh just realised Paul and Showmet are at the End the Occupation March this weekend ... So we may have to wait a while

 

Democracy and freedom in Iraq?! Yes that's looking likely isn't it! Just in order to have a show of elections in January the US is having to resume major combat operations against the populations of large Iraqi cities because the people there will not accept what is in essence if not in law still an ongoing hostile occupation by a foreign imperialist army. It makes no sense to say that this level of resistance is explained by "Baathist remnants" and terrorists. Particularly since it's also happening in the Shiite areas of the country; a section of the population generally repressed by and opposed to Saddam. This is insurgency: a popular uprising. This is civil war. Will we allow genuine democracy in Iraq? The majority of the population is Shiite; we won't let it become another Iran. This is nation-building in Amerika's image. As Henry Ford once said, you can choose any colour as long as it's black...

I think you're missing my point a bit on the Saddam thing. It's possible to be happy that Saddam is no longer in power and will be brought to account and also to recognise that this particular war at this particular time was not the best way to go about achieving this, in fact that it has made a lot of other things worse. It's not enough that something good might eventually come about as a side effect of this whole sorry debacle. Sometimes the end does not justify the means. And in this case the end is itself pretty catastrophic for the average Iraqi. They are less safe and secure now than they were under a despicable tyrant like Saddam. They are no more free, and they won't see themselves as being free as long as American troops are there. Which, judging by the number of permanent military bases being built, is probably forever. This is imperialism in action.

I would wholeheartedly agree with this. Britain and America have illegally invaded and occupied a sovereign state, caused Iraq to become a breeding ground for terrorism, taken charge of the puppet politics of the country, and tendered its structural and industrial rebuilding to the highest (American) bidder. All of this being the very definition of colonialism. It's simply the same old story of the powerful exploiting the weak. It has nothing to do with concern for the wellbeing of the Iraqi people or concern that Saddam should be brought to account. That's nothing more than a convenient figleaf.

We have made the situation in the middle east worse. This is our fault. We cannot simply leave them to their own devices having ruined their country for the second time in thirteen years. We need a UN resolution calling for the withdrawal of American and British troops to be replaced by a genuinely international UN peacekeeping force. But since the US has a stranglehold on the UN security council this will never happen. It serves the United States' long term strategic and economic interests in Eurasia to be in control of Iraq. That's what the whole thing was about, and that's why it's something I cannot ever condone. Why can people still not see this?

George Bush, Tony Blair and Saddam Hussein should be tried for their war crimes and crimes against humanity.

 

It's a sticky situation. The goal should be to get the country back on its feet as soon as possible, but the fact that the dictator was deposed on such deceitful terms (let's not forget that we lied to Iraq as well as each other about the reason for doing it) that the Iraqis are not going to trust us to do this. Many plans were put to the US government that suggested ways to remove Saddam and maintain/rebuild the country's infrastructure as quickly as possible. These weren't used.

There's too much to say on this topic so I'll leave it at that and let someone else have a go.

 

I agree that withdrawl is an impossible option at this stage. I doubt the international community would have the stomach to support a UN force in Iraq.

 

I think (and this prolly goes with out saying) that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. But now we are, i think it has to be seen through, so that the iraqi people get the system of government that THEY want, and that means elections where anybody is free to stand. Not banning people that the west doesn't want to stand like the muslim cleric (that i cant remember the exact name of) ending in Al Saddir.

 

I don't see how true democracy can be brought to the Iraqi people under the conditions of occupation. Firstly, the values instilled into the puppet government are American values. Corruption and unaccountability are rife, and the Iraqi 'government' is propped up only by western military might. The eminent sociologist Max Weber said that what constituted a nation state was a monopoly of power, or violence. The Iraqi government does not have that, America has that. The war is not over and neither is the occupation. Iraq is not a sovereign nation by any stretch of the imagination, and true democracy cannot, I feel, be formed as a result of this. Secondly, the conditions that instigated and now fan the flames of insurgency are the conditions of occupation. The presence of western troops in Iraq is in no way pacifying the country, violent attacks have recently consistently risen with each month of occupation. There are of course arguments against ending the occupation from people who opposed the war, and I accept and respect these. For me, however, the occupation is gaining neither us nor the Iraqi people anything, and that a withdrawl of troops is necessary....

 

Completely withdrawing troops now would condemn the country to full-blown civil war, but the presence of American military might is fanning the flames of resistance. I think TreeHouse's suggestion of a UN peacekeeping force with troops drawn from Asian countries as well as Western ones would be the best solution. Surely you don't mean completely withdrawing and leaving Iraq on its own?

 

I would agree entirely with this if I thought the international community had the will to make such a plan work. But there's no chance. As soon as the death toll started mounting, countries would be pulling outta there at a rate of knots.

 

I would advocate a peace keeping force without a political agenda. The trouble is, not only is this difficult to do, considering the UN is no more than a sum of its parts - that being a bunch of governments for whom corruption is simply a sliding scale, and also because, as Dok said, governments would rapidly lose the will to keep their forces in Iraq. Not only this, but a UN force in Iraq, given Kofi Annan's declaration that the war was illegal, would only confer further legitimacy on the American imperialist agenda. The structures simply do not exist for human co-operation, or the regulation of the power of nation states to take a unilateralist approach in the world. I feel the Iraq war and America have done a lot to expose the weakness of the UN and the failure of this project. We need something more, something more ethical, more accountable. But in the present situation, we do not have this. So what is my solution? I don't know. It's a bloody mess....

 

This is the worst crime of the UK/US invasion as far as I'm concerned. They've taken a bad situation and not only made it worse, but driven it to the point where there's no longer an apparent solution.

Under the previous Iraqi administration, it was quite plausible that once Saddam died, there'd eventually be a transition to democracy - without bloodshed and violence. The chance was there for Iraq to be coaxed back into the international community, and for the situation to evolve naturally. That's now been blown to shit. If Iraq survives with its present borders in tact, it'll be a fucking miracle.

 

Not if a resolution was passed condemning the illegal invasion of Iraq by Britain and the US and sending in UN peacekeepers to restore order and sovereignty ... yes I'm being ironic!

We know exactly what's going to happen... The United States will stay, and will use Iraq as its long-term base of operations in the middle east, moving its troops out of Saudi Arabia. Britain will eventually pull out. A puppet democracy will be installed backed up by US military force.

This war was and is a fucking disgrace... the imperialist agenda behind it is so blatantly obvious that I can hardly believe anyone still actually believes that it was a good idea.

 

it seems that iraq is going to be forever in the hands of the U.S. even after the elections, they won't pull out.. as soon as they go there will be some kind of uprising surely.. so they will just saty there forever, sucking all the oil out and then when iraq has no more use for them they will then withdraw and leave iraq with no government, no order, and no possible way to gain a reasonable economic structure. then they may just wait a bit. and then claim that they have to take it over fully as part of the U.S to give it some chance of survival.. they will probably do this to the rest of the world as well in time.

 

It goes so much further than oil, it's about the neo-conservative agenda to shape the world in America's image with Iraq as a convenient "forward base" against Iran. Another name for this is imperialism.

Here's an illuminating quote from the Project for the New American Century, from a policy document written by them called "rebuilding america's defenses", published while Clinton was still in power. A lot of the people behind this ultra-conservative thinktank are now prominent members of the Bush administration.

"In the Persian Gulf region, the presence of American forces, along with British and French units, has become a semipermanent fact of life. Though the immediate mission of those forces is to enforce the no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq, they represent the long-term commitment of the United States and its major allies to a region of vital importance. Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

http://www.newamericancentury.org

 

I'm not so sure America will ever do, or be able to do that. They may come close to succeeding, but nothing lasts forever. All empires overstretch themselves. Cracks appear. They fall apart. The American Empire will fall, it's only a matter of time. And something else will take its place. This will continue, I feel, until either the human race has destroyed itself, or the capitalist system has imploded and we find new ways to exist and relate to one another....

 

And al Quaeda knew that all along, hence their justification for September 11th....

 

Long before 9/11 I worked in a company that employed a lot of Arabic people from all over the Middle East. The general consensus then was that Saddam Hussein was only ever kept in power to justify an American presence in the region. Whether this was true or not doesn't matter as much as the fact that it was accepted to be true.

 

Wasn't there a suggestion made recently of replacing the coalition troops with an Arab only peace keeping force? Obviously for this to work properly it would have to be free of any religious agenda ... something I can't see happening.

I think that pretty much sums it all up.

 

Infact it is! That is once the Islamic extremists have been defeated. For example the Kurds in the north of Iraq have not risen up and have been working with allied forces to rebuild the country. Incidently the Kurds society flourished thanks to the no-fly zone in the north which protected them for Saddam's forces. The Kurds are non othordox muslims who are very open to the idea of democracy and libertarian ideas like ours.

Just because some parts of Iraq like Bagdad and Falluja are currently experiencing massive turmoil doesn't mean there isn't any hope for the future. President Allawi is also hardly an American puppet, when America was supportting Saddam he was a strong critic of him. So much so that he was imprisoned, tortured and eventually fled Iraq only to survive an assasination attempt on him by Iraqi agents at his new home in London. He was Iraq's equivlent of Leon Trotsky who strongly oppossed the tyranny of Stalin and who is now revered by the left as a hero. When Allawi originally joined the Baath party in 1960 it was then a socialist party which was later hijacked by the egomaniac Saddam Hussein.

President Allawi is commited to building a democratic Iraq and ensuring that there are free and fair elections. That is why he supports the security role of allied troops. He is also building up Iraq's own security forces so allied troops will eventually no longer be needed. OK so most Iraqis distrust the presence of American troops and they have been responsible for some atrocities. The solution there is simple, replace them with UN troops from neighbouring arab countries who the majority of Iraqis can trust.

 

This is wrong, Allawi came to London by choice to study neurology in 1971 and allegedly worked as an agent for the Baath Party in Europe until leaving the party in 1975. The man seems to have blood on his hands in the name of Saddam's rise to power. When he fell out of favour with Saddam in the late seventies he switched sides. Not a Western puppet? He became an employee of the CIA in 1992, organising terrorist attacks within Iraq.

Allawi was an active supporter of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party in its early days when it was still banned. In 1971, he moved to London in order to continue his medical education. Some have reported this as an exile, but some of Allawi's old counterparts have claimed that he continued to serve the Baath Party, and the Iraqi secret police, searching out enemies of the regime. During this time he was president of the Iraqi Student Union in Europe. Seymour Hersh quotes former CIA officer Vincent Cannistraro: "[...] Allawi has blood on his hands from his days in London [...] he was a paid Mukhabarat agent for the Iraqis, and he was involved in dirty stuff." A Middle Eastern diplomat confirmed that Allawi was involved with a Mukhabarat "hit team" that killed Baath Party dissenters in Europe. However, he resigned from the Baath party for undisclosed reasons in 1975.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iyad_Allawi

The White House has yet to deal with Allawi’s past. His credentials as a neurologist, and his involvement during the past two decades in anti-Saddam activities, as the founder of the British-based Iraqi National Accord, have been widely reported. But his role as a Baath Party operative while Saddam struggled for control in the nineteen-sixties and seventies—Saddam became President in 1979—is much less well known. “Allawi helped Saddam get to power,” an American intelligence officer told me. “He was a very effective operator and a true believer.” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. case officer who served in the Middle East, added, “Two facts stand out about Allawi. One, he likes to think of himself as a man of ideas; and, two, his strongest virtue is that he’s a thug.”
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040628fa_fact

Your optimism astounds me! You're repeating Republican party mantras as if they mean something...

 

That's either optimism or naivity. You're also assuming that politicians are inherently incorruptable. Add the element of the American puppet strings, and where does that leave them? If it's the American model of democrashite you're looking for, then maybe you're right. But the idea that America is a democratic country is laughable to say the least....