Iraq, as you know, is a big country. Lots of diverse POVs. You want to find pro-American views, you can find them. You want to find anti-American views, you can find them. You want to find people who hated Saddam but who also hate this "incursion" (to try to find a vaguely neutral word for it), you can find them.
The hard part of this thing has barely begun, and will last far longer than the easy part, the military part. Whether we'll be around for it all, we'll have to wait and see.
If you watched Bernard Lewis on C-Span recently, you'd know that a good deal of this mess can be laid at the feet of the British and French dismantling the Ottoman Empire after WWI, even after a special study commissioned by the British govt recommended that it be allowed to remain intact and warned of dire consequences if it was overturned. The govts screwed up. But they had their "day in the sun" as they ruled their mandates and gave out goodies in the form of "countries" to their favored allies and subjects. No one blames them today. Or not many do. Only those who study and seek out true causes.
We'll have to see how things go. It can implode. It can explode. It can simmer awhile and something entirely new can be cooked up. Or it can simmer awhile and something familiar can result, just with new faces and new padded accounts.
As you probably can guess, my opinion is it's a mess. Not necessarily a completely irretrievable mess (though parts of it are irretrievable--the looting has consumed and destroyed far more than the "vase" that Rumsfeld so humorously referred to in his press conference last week, and not just museum pieces, but legal records and bank accounts), but a mess nonetheless.
While people in this country may celebrate for the moment, anyone who has a mind and can see farther than the edge of their nose is not celebrating. It's a mess.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I look at the "dark" side of things. I have to be more optimistic. Right.
AI
