I agree - intervention, even with the best intentions, isn't good policy. And yet we've seen human rights and liberty imposed on peoples from Europe to Asia by force of arms. It is possible if a significant percentage of the population actually wants it. I'm just not sure there are that many people in the region who really do want it. Wanting a change in leadership is not the same thing as embracing democracy.

From Iraq I to Libya today, the biggest impediment to Arab democracy hasn't been the Great Satan or even Arab dictators, but the Arab people themselves. Time after time, when their dictators have been at their weakest, ordinary Arabs have stepped up to defend them and kill other Arabs. And when the West actually did all the hard work and deposed a genocidal Arab dictator, instead of embracing democracy and human rights as the Germans did after the Second World War, individual Arabs in great numbers rose up at significant personal risk to attempt to sabotage the creation of a democratic state and return the nation to chaos and strongman oppression.


The US never promised or even suggested that it would aid such a rebellion, as it was against the UN resolution. The propagation of such myths is part of the reason why many Americans felt a special responsibility for liberating the country.

In any event, we were a little busy assessing the scale of the Iraqi Arab atrocities committed against other Arabs in Kuwait.

Here's a tougher question. Where were the Iraqis? Saddam didn't jump in a helicopter himself and quell those uprisings.

The Coalition had just obliterated a good portion of the Iraqi military and they still couldn't topple the regime? Why? The sad truth is that the uprisings were pathetically small and Saddam still enjoyed a significant level popular support throughout most of the country. Sound familiar?


Why was it our job to lay siege to Baghdad? We acted in defense of the rest of the Arabian Peninsula and crippled the Iraqi military - couldn't the Iraqis have carried a little bit of the weight themselves?

And we all saw what happened when they were belatedly delivered a chance for freedom and democracy on a silver platter - a rare chance peoples in dozens of third world crapholes would love to get. You'll note that the initial toppling of the regime was remarkably bloodless for the average Iraqi and the nation's infrastructure. America was ready and enthusiastic to help the Iraqis create a democratic state and rebuild their nation after years of rot under Saddam. Unlike the Japanese who faced a similar situation decades before, the Iraqis chose the path of the petulant child, and their temper tantrum led to untold levels of death and destruction. Fun stuff.


No valid reasons, yes. If you're trying to create the impression that Iraqi insurgents fought due to bitterness over sanctions, then they were fighting the wrong people. When the effects of the sanctions on the Iraqi people became clear, the UN, specifically prodded by the US and British, took steps to address the situation. There wasn't much that could be done to help the Iraqis under regime control except...




9/11 had everything to do with the First Gulf War and nothing to do with Saddam. It seems if you act in defense of some Arabs, you get blown up by other Arabs.


Cause and effect, my friend, cause and effect. The German who has an argument with his wife and storms out of the room, slamming the door and triggering an American bomb lodged under the floor to blow her up doesn't hate the US - he hates Hitler. Iraq invaded and ruthlessly pillaged an Arab neighbor and was bombed accordingly. The deaths of teh childrenz sucks, but they lie at the feet of Saddam and the ordinary Iraqis who gleefully raped and killed the people of Kuwait.

A little more than a decade later, America took the extraordinary step of removing the regime and instead of thinking "wow, I'm grateful the Americans finally removed this horrible person who has caused us so much grief and want to help us establish a free state", the average Iraqi thought to himself "let's blow some up!"

I've become more and more convinced that the Arab Street just isn't ready for democracy. They may want a change in leadership, but their culture is structured in such a way that they are not capable of establishing a modern civil society.


Oh but they did. There were constant calls by Iraqis to liberate the country. It was, after all, our duty after mercilessly betraying them in 1991 and imposing a child-killing humantarian crisis on them thereafter. Freeing Iraq became our responsibility, and a moral imperative that could not be ignored any longer.

That's another element of the Iraq saga that gets conveniently left out of the current narrative. Look up Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. I would suggest Aram Roston's The Man Who Pushed America to War; The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, And Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi.

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And I'd suggest Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation.

Then don't instigate a rebellion. Whether or not it was intended, the Shi'ites in the south-east of the country and the Kurds up north were under the impression that the United States would offer military assistance when they'd rise up in rebellion.

Interesting to note is that UNSCR 687 was adopted the 3rd of April. Radio Voice for Free Iraq called for a revolution against the Ba'ath party on the evening of February the 24th. Whether or not they had promised military assistance, it had been expected by the revolutionaries. This was not a fight they could win on their own. This was the message coming from Al-Ali of Radio Voice Free Iraq:

"...you have no option in order to survive and to defend the homeland but to put an end to the dictator and his criminal gang"

Apparently, it was either liberty or death. No middle ground. Perhaps we should've been more fair to the Iraqis who suffered daily under the Ba'athist oppression.

It may not have been the job of the West to free Iraq and lay siege to Baghdad, but that was the idea everyone listening to the clandestine CIA-operated radio expected. The Iraqi rebels were first told to rise up, but when the moment was at its most critical, we decided to pull back. Basically we told them "go and get 'em, we'll be right behind you". Only we really weren't.

Yeah, but did you know to what lengths the West went to deny what was happening in Iraq. When the aforementioned Robert Fisk first reported on the detrimental effects of depleted uranium to the public health, especially in the cases of child cancer, Lord Gilbert from the ministry of Defence wrote: "coming from anyone other than Robert Fisk, this would be regarded as a wilful perversion of reality". Nice.

In 1991, Paddy Bartholomew of the UK Atomic Energy Agency wrote: "[Depleted Uranium] can become a long-term problem if not dealt with in peacetime and are a risk to both the military and civilian population[...] if the tank category of DU was inhaled, the latest Internatioanl Committee of Radiological Protection risk factor . . . calculates 500,000 potential deaths.". Of course, the AEA made a deal with the Kuwaiti government (and rightly so) to clean up the mess of DU in Kuwait, but not in Iraq, where many, many people were dying. Infant mortality rate went up from [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_sanctions#Infant_and_child_death_rates]47 per 1,000 pre-invasion to 108 per 1,000 post-invasion]. Child mortality rate was even worse.

I will have to be fair here, though, the UN did not ban medicine imports, that was one of Saddam's own doings.

As for UN support, let's get serious here. The British newspaper The Independent launched an appeal, raising $250,000 to buy cancer drugs and medical equipment. The British government was quite lethargic in its handling of the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. It called for eh "peer-reviewed epidemiological research data" to confirm the abysmal state of living in Iraq, which of course, never happened.

Okay, maybe Bin Laden was bitter over the fact that the Saudi government didn't want him to fight in Iraq. But now you're sweeping over a whole different discussion and suggest that the primary reason for 9/11 was the Gulf War. That's plain denial.

Ah yes, the gleeful rape of Kuwaitis by vile ordinary Iraqis. Those same vile ordinary Iraqis who were dumped in mass graves by American soldiers whose general couldn't be bothered to hold on the Geneva Conventions that were oh-so-very-important to count the exact amount of bodies. American deaths were tragedies. Iraqi deaths were statistics. Intriguing issue.

Thos same vile Iraqis who were threatened with execution if they tried to desert. Those ordinary Iraqis? Those who suffered perhaps even more under Saddam than the Kuwaitis? Just to make sure we're on the same line here, those Iraqis whose children were shot to death if they were supposedly working against Saddam?

Not to justify that what the Iraqis did in Kuwait was okay, of course it wasn't. But now you're pretending that there was some sort of general pro-Ba'athist consensus of the Iraqi people, so much that any mistreatment of the Kuwaitis was jusitified. That's scornful. And if the Iraqis think that all Americans think like you do, maybe, just maybe they've got some reason to dislike Americans.

Again, those were the same Iraqis whose families were raped to death in the subterranean prisons of the Ba'ath party. Those Iraqis whose suffering was ignored by the West, probably even extended by (indirect) western support for Saddam's government. Only when it started to get inconvenient for us that we decided to stop Saddam, with some pathetic excuse about weapons of mass destruction or something like that.

Okay, good for you. But lets leave this to the Arabs okay? Because when Iran, a non-Arab country, was ready for democracy, we decided to interrupt. Your argument of culture reeks of 19th century colonialist filth. Don't forget that we kept Bouteflika, Ben Ali, Gaddafi, Mubarak, Assad and Saleh in power. So don't give me this "not ready for democracy" nonsense. We never wanted them to be ready for democracy.

When you don't have anything to eat, when your 13-year old daughters have to prostitute themselves to truckers, you try rebelling against the government. There was one thing that Saddam understood about staying in power that Mubarak didn't; either you have to give your people the illusion of freedom, or you have to take so much freedom away that anyone trying to rebel is immediately eliminated, and anyone seeing him is immediately eliminated as well. See what happened to the Marsh Arabs, for example.

Speaking about betrayal.

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I see that you've gone back to the source material and discovered that no military assistance was proffered or even suggested.

Or maybe not...

We never told them "we'll be right behind you". That is where fact becomes fiction. We said that the quickest way to end the fighting was to overthrow the regime, which was true. The West has a long history of attempting to shape public opinion among the populace of its enemies. However, such efforts are never accompanied by promises of military assistance.

Of course, that brings up the tricky issue of actually trying to prove the extent to which the broadcasts had anything to do with the revolts, which has not at all been conclusively determined. It is largely believed that the revolt started within the Shia elements of the military - people who wouldn't have had access to the Voice of Free Iraq.

Considering the fact that Oil-for-Food was first adopted by the UN 6 months after the end of the Gulf War (and only finally accepted by Iraq in 1996), I wouldn't say they went to any particularly extraordinary lengths to hide what was happening. Obviously the Western governments weren't interested in the type of hysterics some activists engaged in, but they worked diligently from the end of the war up until the invasion to help the Iraqi people. The main deterrent was of course the Iraqi government.

The primary reason for 9/11 was the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia.



Actually, it is far more base than that. There were so many Iraqi dead that their rotting corpses sometimes presented a health hazard. I would like to see some evidence of the extent of the practice, as my understanding is that it was an exceedingly rare event.

Now, back to what the Iraqis were doing with their living captives...

They may have been threatened with execution if they tried to desert, but they weren't if they refrained from raping Kuwaiti women and shooting civilians in the streets for fun. For those acts, they needed neither orders nor fears of reprisal. In fact, the scale and brutality of atrocities helped George H. W. Bush cement the broad coalition that put an end to them.

This comes all the way back to my initial point - Arab apologists seek to blame everyone but the Arab people themselves. The deaths of Iraqi children were the fault of the United States and the West, and if an accomplice must be named, Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi people were but pawns in the power play between these various entities.

The truth is - from Hitler and Stalin to Saddam and Gadaffi - no dictatorship can stand without a level of popular support. For every tortured Iraqi soul, there was an Iraqi willing to profit at the former's expense. It is time for the Arabs to take some accountability in their troubles.

I'm certain Mr. Sarkozy - a proper Westerner raised in the birthplace of human rights and republicanism - cannot possibly comprehend why so many ordinary Libyans are fighting so hard to keep a tyrant in power.

What would you have us do about the subterranean rapestravaganzas? It has already been established earlier in the post - and acknowledged by you - that the suffering was not ignored by the West. In fact, significant breaches of the Iraqi sanctions via corruption in the Oil-for-Food program were ignored in hopes that at least some of the aid was making it to the Iraqis.

Amazing! You've dedicated an entire post toward chastising the West for ignoring the Iraqi people, and then when a Western politician topples the regime with the intent on setting up a democratic state, for whatever reason, it's pathetic! You just can't win with some people.

Lies and more victimhood, pure and simple. We did not keep any of those people in power. They were not put in power by the West and no Western troops fought to keep them there. This oft-propagated myth of the evil Westerners plotting to keep the region oppressed is pure bunk. The Arabs oppressed themselves, and the West only dealt with those leaders because they were the only viable governments that existed.

And by the way, direct aid to various regimes, and Mubarak in particular, wasn't for torture chambers and professional rapists, but to buy regional peace and stability, which has been quite successful. So the next time you rail against the West's influence in the region, keep in mind it has prevented the kind of devestating regional conflicts that once characterized the Arabian Peninsula.

Life sucked for a lot of people under Saddam. It is not the West's fault that life sucked for a lot of people under Saddam, no matter how much you want to believe it is.

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Oops...for a second I thought you were talking about Blackwater in Iraq...

No, but it could be argued that it is the West's fault for how bad life sucks after Saddam. I know a family of Turkmen Iraqi ex-patriots, most of their family is back in Iraq...the head of the family here was imprisoned under Saddam for trying to dodge the draft. This guy, who has every reason to hate Saddam, actually says that he wishes the US never attacked, and that things are far worse now than they ever were under Saddam. Sure, it is just one account, but it is valid just the same.

I do hear though, that the Shi'ites allied to Iran are still very happy that the US came and deposed Saddam...


(Well, I think I just filled my ****-disturbing quota for the week...now that I dropped the hand grenade I think I'll run for the hills )

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Pure racist emotional drivel, you probably don't realise it yet, but yes they can and do. You make very sweeping, and false generalizations, yet back nothing up. Their Culture which one sweety? the tunisian? or the egyptian? or the other 20 other arab countries?

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Jaguara - I will be the first to acknowledge that mistakes were made in the Iraqi intervention - many, many mistakes. That goes without saying. However, I also believe that many of those mistakes were based on the assumption that the Iraqis would step up and act in a reasonable, responsible, and civilized manner.

My only point throughout the exchange with Hax is that the Arabs should be held accountable for at least a portion of their problems. The victim mentality first eluded to by Louis masks deeper societal problems that have little to do with the West.

As I said before, the Eastern Libyans have somehow managed the impossible and garnered not only complete international support for their insurrection but also Western military backing. The only thing standing in their way are their own countrymen, who, amazingly, are willing to stand up to some of the most advanced militaries in the world to keep Gadaffi in power. This is nothing new to students of the Arab world.


Hello Leet Eriksson. The emotional hyperbole seems to be coming strictly from your keyboard.

Culture can be scaled up and down the throughout full spectrum of human subsets, from one family to the entire race. Arab culture has been identified as having specific elements that distinguish it from others. The fact that there are subcultures within the larger Arab culture does not render it useless as an identifier.

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No it doesn't, you have yet to back your ridiculous claim by the way, since even the wikipedia article isn't certain Arab Culture is "incapable of having a civil society" whatever that means.

There is no single Arab culture or society: the Arab world is full of rich and diverse communities, groups and cultures. Differences exist not only among countries, but within countries. While there are many different regions in these areas and different factors that distinguish each of them, there are also many factors unifying them into a single Arab nation. this is like literally the first paragraph in wikipedia.

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