The Development of Democratic Institutions in Arab Culture

[PanzerJaeger]

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.

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

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.

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.

Yeah, but did you know to what lengths the West went to deny what was happening in 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.

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.

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

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Bin Laden's offer was rebuffed, and after the American offer to help repel Iraq from Kuwait was accepted, involving deploying U.S. troops in Saudi territory,[57] he publicly denounced Saudi Arabia's dependence on the U.S. military, as he believed the presence of foreign troops in the "land of the two mosques" (Mecca and Medina) profaned sacred soil. Bin Laden's criticism of the Saudi monarchy led that government to attempt to silence him.

Shortly after Saudi Arabia permitted U.S. troops on Saudi soil, bin Laden turned his attention to attacks on the west. On November 8, 1990, the FBI raided the New Jersey home of El Sayyid Nosair, an associate of al Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed, discovering a great deal of evidence of terrorist plots, including plans to blow up New York City skyscrapers, marking the earliest uncovering of al Qaeda plans for such activities outside of Muslim countries.[58] Nosair was eventually convicted in connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane on November 5, 1990.

Bin Laden continued to speak publicly against the Saudi government for harboring American troops, for which the Saudis banished him. He went to live in exile in Sudan, in 1992, in a deal brokered by Ali Mohamed.[59]

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 of betrayal...

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.