From mystery's post above:
[[ President warns deepening sectarian violence between Shia & Sunni could be difficult to stamp out "We cannot do it for them" ]]
I'm a conservative. And a very cold-hearted realist.
Told ya that to tell ya this...
I agree with him.
There's nothing more we (of The West) can do for the Iraqis.
We did all we could, and then passed the baton to them.
What is happening now is the result that was all-but inevitable. Inevitable precisely because of WHAT WE DID when we were there. And "what we did" while we were there did nothing to stop the spread of militant islam -- or islam, period.
Anything -more- we do now -- even a repeat invasion -- is just going to be another "wash, rinse, repeat" when the time comes for us to leave a second time.
What is happening now should have been expected, after observing how events transpired not long after Saddam was overthrown.
Further, roughly the same thing would happen in ANY islamic country in which we chose to intervene.
There is a bitter reality here, and I know it's hard for many to get their minds wrapped around it. But one -must- come to grips with it, if one is to understand who "the enemy" we faced in Iraq really is.
The "enemy" is not any particular leader (such as Saddam), nor is it any particular government (such as that of Iran), nor even any terrorist organization per se (such as the taliban).
That enemy is the same throughout the islamic world.
We can't kill its leader -- he's already been dead for 1400+ years.
But he lives on, with more than a billion people living "under his instructions" as if they were held in the thrall of a modern-day "Mein Kampf".
There is no government that we can overthrow that will end this. The next government will adopt the same set of operating instructions.
(Aside: this is EXACTLY what the -new- U.S.-supported government of Iraq did when it wrote into its new constitution that islam was to be the state religion.)
When we defeated Germany in 1945, we didn't just accept the Nazis surrender. We literally deconstructed their political (and almost religiously fanactical) belief system amongst the German people. "De-Nazification", wasn't it?
When we defeated Japan, not only did we force the emperor to renounce his "divinity", we literally wrote and handed them a new constitution that TOLD THEM how they would behave in a postwar world.
We didn't go into Germany, order the Nazis to put down their weapons and then..... let them go on governing. Nor did we do this in Japan.
But this is EXACTLY what we have done in Afghanistan and Iraq, in a part of the world where religion and government are all-but one and the same.
There's that old saying attributed to Einstein that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.
Turn that around 180 degrees, if you will. What we did back in 1945 after the bloodiest conflict in human history WORKED.
How can we do something completely different today that ignores reality (which we recognized in 1945), yet expect the results today to be as they were back then?
The only answer is that we are no longer serious about our own survival, and no longer willing to "do what it takes" to defeat the enemy that is eventually going to dhimmify us.
Until we are, it's not worth wasting another drop of American blood in the Middle East.
Unless we are willing to confront the reality of what the struggle there is about, that fight is over...
