Tuesday the 16th January 2007 was another bloody day in Iraq. This time the bloodshed was of female students in Almostansiriyah University in Baghdad. The terrorists used the same barbaric strategy by using several and different types of blasts in the same time.
More than 200 students have been killed and wounded after a suicidal attack and two car bombs. Most of the students were females in the University main entrance and some were waiting in the bus stop to go home. In addition to this ongoing attacks unrelenting in Baghdad and other cities that claimed hundreds of lives.
On the other hand the number of the US soldiers killed in Iraq reached above 3000 this week.
The new US policy in Iraq will fail if it ignores that the security issue in Iraq needs strong Iraqi army and police with better equipments. Increasing few thousands of the US soldiers in Iraq will not solve the most complicated matter.
On the other hand any US conflict with Iran will complicate the problem in the Middle East to an extent that the first one may regret it will be the USA. If the USA attacked Iran the latter may transfer the war inside Iraq against the US troops and will attack the US war ships in the Gulf. Hormoz Strait will close and oil will not go from there. Attacks may extend to include the US bases in Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait. The outcome will be devastating to the region and certainly to the USA which may pull its troops after Iran declares victory and became the only superpower of the region.
Any one who did a mistake should bear its own consequences. In 1980s Iraq was an equal force to Iran. Once the 8 year war finished in 1988 the USA implemented with its allies a policy after Kuwait war to destroy Iraq during the 12 years sanction. Iran was progressing while Iraq was regressing rapidly. It was much better at that time after the liberation of Kuwait to topple Saddam regime and preserve the Iraqi force while advancing the peace process in the Middle East. However the US took the advice of the Saudis to leave Saddam over a destroyed country and even destroy it more by sanctions and it was wrong. Indeed the Iraqis will never forget the years of sanctions which killed more than one million children while kept Saddam prosperous. The worst time in Iraq was not the second Gulf war but the time during the sanction and Saddam in power. Now the USA is paying for its mistake of not toppling Saddam at that easer time. Iran is going to be the superpower of the region with nuclear arms whether the US accepted this or not. However it is better to accept this sooner rather than latter and better without massive bloodshed and sever[e] damages.
We think that all of what is going on now and the attacks of the 11 September 2001 in NY could not have been happened if the war in Kuwait was avoided or at least if Saddam was toppled after that war and of no doubts that was much easier and better than the present situation. The mistake was that GWB the senior accepted the advice of the Saudis who themselves fed the ideology and strategy of September the 11th attacks and much more and seems to be more to come and may be so soon.
I don't agree with everything in Hammorabi's analysis, but his points about GWB Senior's mistake get to the heart of the matter. When I first learned about the effects of the sanctions on Iraq, in college, it made me sick and ashamed of my country. When the statue fell on April 9, 2003, my patriotism was restored. For me, the Iraq War had nothing to do with national security or 9/11. It was a penitential act.
(I wrote a previous post with this title.)
In retrospect it seems clear - given the subsequent events of which we are aware, living 15 years later as we do - that other actions would have been better in 1991. Even in 1991 Bush should perhaps have known better, but of course he had many different things on his plate and was trying to manage probabilities. He didn't know, as we do, that Rabin would be assassinated and peacemaking between Isaelis and Palestinians would fail. He didn't know that Saddam would be able to retain power essentially indefinately even without a patron like the Soviet Union. He should probably have known that the Iraqi Shia overthrowing Saddam probably wouldn't have been pawns of Iran, but even we now don't quite know he was wrong to listen to the Saudis about that.
ReplyDeleteAll in all, I have a hard time criticizing Bush senior's choices very harshly.