I agree with you, but I wonder if the 35 years of living under the boot heel of a ruthless dictator makes people pretty shy about such things. Even so, they need to wake up and realize this is their country now and they need to be responsible for it. Failure to do this will guarantee that Iran will run Iraq; and then our blood will have been spilled for nothing.

I would think that 35 years under the boot heel of a tyrant would make me yearn to kill the remnants of the regime. And, unlike the American soldiers, the Iraqis know who the Baathist thugs are, and they know who the outsiders are, and they know what needs to be done. If they ever have the courage to do it, Iraq will be free and peaceful.

Ah, but "they're our thugs". Besides, the Americans might up and disappear as they did after the first campaign in this war back in 1991.

It'll take awhile. A new generation at least. One raised under a democracy.

At the worst, we may have to stay there permanently. Is the United States ready to expand to Eurasia?

Islamofascists? The bad guys? Well, sure, they incinerated schoolchildren. Slaughtering defenseless non-combatants is their means of self-expression. It's the essence of their character. And as Michael Moore describes the view from the Left, Islamic death-cult child-murderers are no different from our own Revoltionary War heroes:

"The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win."

Car wrecks are the leading cause of death for children in the US.
Literally thousands of kids die year in and year out on the roads and highways.
Not all of them get burned to death, but hey.
Dead kids are dead kids.
You guys don't seem to mind it that much.
As long as nobody forces you to look at it, anyway.

Car wrecks are the leading cause of death for children in the US.
Literally thousands of kids die year in and year out on the roads and highways.
Not all of them get burned to death, but hey.
Dead kids are dead kids.
You guys don't seem to mind it that much.
As long as nobody forces you to look at it, anyway.

Posted by: msg at April 22, 2004 12:49 AM
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Anyone who PLANS a car wreck and kills chidren needs to be drug down an interstate behind a semi.

You equate ACCIDENTS with planned slaughter of the innocent?

Just desperate to have some comeback aren't you?

Pathetic

I was almost ill after reading that Michael Moore quote. If he'd said that publicly about Germany during WWII, would he still be a free man?

La Shawn,

I can't answer that, but I'm pretty sure that in a nobler time he would not have made the NYT bestseller list, been invited to Cannes, or been embraced by FDR's Democratic Party.

I agree with Alan on this. We screwed up *badly* 10 years ago when we started a revolution then left. Look at the drained swamps, the slaughtering of the Shiites, etc. We knew it was going on, we let it go on. It's not difficult to see why Iraqis still don't trust us.

Pulling out in '91 was worse than the bay of pigs in my mind. And Vietnam was just as bad... leaving the lambs to their slaughter.

GW will hold strong though... we can only hope the voting public does as well.

As to the main post... excellent Bill.

Fear not...for I bring tidings of great joy...an ambassador has been named...and he shall be called Negroponte...which means "angle of death" to the Islamofascists.

We will see another Phoenix Program happen after the 30th of June. American Special Ops in Iraqi uniforms...basically another El Salvador.

My general take...is that we gave them "free speech" for a year so they would expose themselves as to who each individual really was and their fitness to go on living in our world. Now, after June 30th when we will no longer be "responsible" for what happens to anti-Iraq forces, those who exposed themselves voluntarily will die unvoluntarily if their attitudes were not conducive to a free and open society in the Arab world.

An interesting question will be what will happen to the 9000 prisoners. Will they be released or just handed over to a new Iraqi government that wouldn't mind putting some of them to death? Remember that Spartacus' men were all crucified along the road from Rome to Capua.

Our Wild West was predicated on a huge number of people who took it upon themselves to strike out on their own and make it ON THEIR OWN. The rot of victimization has become too pervasive for that to happen. Heaven help us if we were to need anything like this today. Look at the language used to fight CCW. Anyone who tried to step up would be branded as vigilantes, or worse.

Like any other 12-step self-improvement program, the bleeding won't stop until they hit bottom and ask for mercy and help. Unfortunately, it appears we are still quite a ways away from the worst elements actually being defeated to this extent.

Magnanimity can only come after total defeat. The people of Iraq are no more able to bootstrap themselves out of their cultural dead end than the people of Germany and Japan were in the middle of the last century.

It's going to be a long, long war.