All of our dreams have vanished," Can there be no more damning statement of the results of our Iraqi experiment?

More bitter tears to harvest. Let there be no debate that American values have been so tremendously diminished that we have approached pariah status. Ashamed to be an American? If not, what can make you ashamed? What more than this?

All of our dreams have vanished,"

The troops of the USA and Iraq attacked together to a city in western Iraq and took the city from the partisans. They told that it showed the efficiency of training the Iraq army and they fight very well. The fact that the whole city have to conquer after three years of occupation did not tell the power of occupier, it told the power of insurgents! Surely Tal Afar does not remain calm long time. Iraq army is mainly tribe soldiers of Kurds and Shiites who have changed the uniform. For them punishing Sunnis was a pleasure.
It is difficult to create a national army without national feeling of togetherness and without credible national government. There are not such things in Iraq. The gap between different groups is not lessen it is widening. If a division of one group is distinguishing against another group, the result does not prove the power of a national army.
There is at least a political agenda. Maybe after elections Iraq can be called a constitutional democracy - even without security. The achievement can be a torso. The constitution is a compromise of Shiites and Kurds. Sunnis will not feel it as their constitution. The rebellious movement will not weaken.
People and politicians who are frustrated to the bloody dead end have started to demand withdrawing from Iraq without caring of consequences. If the support of people will collapse totally it is one option too. It would not be easy and the consequences will be unexpected. By withdrawing president Bush simply would announce that his whole policy in Iraq has been only one big irresponsible mistake. Withdrawing could start a civil war and the USA would carry the moral responsibility. The most important oil area in the world would be under anarchy.
You don't have to believe that the oil was the only reason to attack to Iraq to understand how difficult the oil makes to accept the defeat and leave. Besides of Iraq there is in the game also oil assets of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The ownership of oil is not a hot strategic issue. The stable availability of oil to the markets is one.
The cruel fact is that there is no adequate strategy to solve the crisis in Iraq. The USA is in the trap of its own shortsighted policy. It is incapable to restore security to Iraq and unable to leave.

Actually, this all working well, according to the Bush plan for victory in Iraq. Once democracy has been established, enough US-friendly puppets in place, enough oil contracts signed, suddenly-sovereign Iraq will be capable of requesting a US withdrawal. America will respect her request, pull out most of her forces, keep a few airbases, and leave the clean-up to the Iraqis. Exeunt omnes smiling.

One Iraqi voter said 'But before casting our votes, we need to make sure those we select will not deceive us again. Otherwise there is no point in voting'! Poor guy doesn't know that there are no such guarantees. First of all, those selected or voted in office will not have much power. Will they be able to tell Americans to pack their bags and leave? I don't think so. Second, once the new people have power, they will forget all about common people. Third, even if elected representatives want to be honest, their number will be small and they will be taken over or rolled over by majority who would not share their views. Fourth, there are way too many divisions within, strings are being pulled from Iran and Saudi Arabia, American-imposed 'no-fly' zones have created ground realities that can not be wished away and religion, the religion has become a biggest obstacle to Iraqi unity.

As AZZAMAN reported, Iraqi institutions, sovereignty and credibility are destroyed and there is nothing left but for Iraq to commit 'harakiri' which is coming. Sure US news media will paint a rosy election scenario, success of democracy etc. etc. but in the final analysis, writing is on the wall. Domestic political compulsions will force US to cut and run. Iraq will be left to the tender mercies of Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia. When a super power or a super military force wants to ruin you, nothing or nobody can help you. Afterall Iraq and other Islamic countries beginning in eighth century did just that to a divided India.

Let me get this straight. One Iraqi columnist writes one despairing comment and I'm supposed to feel ashamed to be American? Please. Get a grip. Check back in 10 years for his dreams.

I do hope I'm wrong, but I do believe Iraq is spiralling towards civil war. Maybe a strong democracy will emerge, though with Iran growing stronger and influencing events while we were busy attacking the wrong country I can't see it happening. I really hope I'm wrong.

So it does not shame you to invade and largely destroy a country based on a false pretext? Then I repeat, what would? Or to try to get to your humanity in a different way, if a dispassionate description of the events leading up to now were put to a G Washington, an Abe, a Jefferson would they be ashamed at what was done? I think so!

We are fighting an undeclared WAR (shame on us and on flimsy constitution) on a country based on lies and preemption. there is nothing to be ashamed of here?

Its not one colunmist, its 100,000 plus dead Iraqis. And in 10 years those Iraqis will (and how many more?) still be dead. A grip???? We have all lost a collective grip on our government and are damned for it. You and me. YOU!

If anyone thinks that US will still be in Iraq 10 years from now, trying to force unity and democracy down the throats of the Iraqi people, they are sadly mistaken on every count. take a look at Egypt for instance, decades of financial and other support from US and what do we see, government troops opening fire at polling stations at those who might vote against that government. not exactly a beacon of democracy is it? No this has been Bush's fools errand. what would have been the outcome of staying in the Vietnam war another ten years? Exactly the same, with more dead. and so it is in Iraq, all the phony elections are going to put this together again. will Bush ever be held responsible for his errors and lies?

And unlike 20 years of previous administrations, President Bush acted differently. Even though the basic risk AFTER 9/11 that Iraq had posed had not changed. Where does this leave us? By President Bush's own definition, he has made a decision to cut and run. He made many promises to the US citizens, his foreign policy team, and the world. Namely, to remake the middle-east via Iraq, and to use Iraq's assets to rebuild it from neglect and damage done via the war. The President's current line of reasoning is essentially a cut and run strategy with a false claim that we can win the war with the military. Here's why, You do the math...in Iraq
* ~2000 US dead.... ~18,000 hurt.. 10/1 ratio
* ~20-30,000 Iraq people dead ratio 10/1... 200,000 Iraq people hurt

The US has already lost. That's why the Bush Administration is backing away from their earlier promises. They are cutting and running. And leaving a country that will continue to have to fight. Not what it was like before the occupation.

As Bush says, "Our goal is to train enough Iraqi forces so they can carry the fight." WE CAN ONLY PRAY THAT THE STORMS CAUSED BY PRESIDENT BUSH'S DECISIONS CAN BE FIXED. John Cook

IRAN and Iraq AND PEACE.

President Bush not only relives Saddam but cooperate Iran and Iraq,

Now two oil producing nations will become one.

In Middle East now new power is coming .with much resources.

Atom and heavy Water is no problem, you can purchase it from any where
.
IS IT THE Justice to keep the item which they do not want other to posses?

UNO ARE HELPLESS, no doubt they are trying and working for those who posses Atoms.

The Media is so fast now, before CNN was For USA and Israel.

BBC was for Britain & Europe; Al Jazzier a Product of ex BBC staff now is known Middle East Voice.

What next and who will make the advances difficult to know.

History repeats its own course, I WAR was in Europe, and II WAR was half the Globe.

The III WAR IT IS PRESUME WILLTAKE VERY LARGE AREA AND POUPLATION.

Who will survives or who will be wipe out no body knows.

Request to Media and Leaders of the World, please prevail peace and avoid force.

Almighty is one, Jewish the oldest, Christian, Muslim and all other religion of the world believe in One God. Its time to solve this problem peacefully.

.

.

IRAN and Iraq AND PEACE.

President Bush not only relives Saddam but cooperate Iran and Iraq,

Now two oil producing nations will become one.

In Middle East now new power is coming .with much resources.

Atom and heavy Water is no problem, you can purchase it from any where
.
IS IT THE Justice to keep the item which they do not want other to posses?

UNO ARE HELPLESS, no doubt they are trying and working for those who posses Atoms.

The Media is so fast now, before CNN was For USA and Israel.

BBC was for Britain & Europe; Al Jazzier a Product of ex BBC staff now is known Middle East Voice.

What next and who will make the advances difficult to know.

History repeats its own course, I WAR was in Europe, and II WAR was half the Globe.

The III WAR IT IS PRESUME WILLTAKE VERY LARGE AREA AND POUPLATION.

Who will survives or who will be wipe out no body knows.

Request to Media and Leaders of the World, please prevail peace and avoid force.

Almighty is one, Jewish the oldest, Christian, Muslim and all other religion of the world believe in One God. Its time to solve this problem peacefully.

.

.

I think that Afghanistan will serve as a pretty good model, for Iraq's future. A veneer of democracy, a series of cynical alliances with local warlords, and a nice new oil pipeline, all in all, a pretty good round of "the Great Game". Mission Accomplished.

The US bought off Afghanistan's main destabilizing threat, Pakistan, but Iran's not exactly toeing the line. Which makes for some awkwardness, in Bush's quest for a backdrop of "Victory in Iraq" that will stay up long enough for him to give a triumphant speech and pull the troops out.

Once that happens (my money's on Chalabi swinging some deal with the Iranians), any subsequent civil warfare in Iraq will be branded as simply part of the painful process of nascent democracy. The attention of the media and the american public will dwindle to a trickle. Close curtain.

The iraqi people should not "vote" as they are being made fools of.There can be no elections under foreign military occupation. Where whole iraqi cities are destroyed to prevent any opposition to the puppet regime. In Bush's warped logic, you kill and maim thousands of iraqis to give them "freedom and democracy". What a load of twaddle. The last thing on his evil mind is to give real democracy. To him the word means subservience to the puppets who bow to the US enabling it to plunder iraq's resourcres at will. Bush is the terrorist. The iraqis should demand the kicking out of all us snakes in iraq so that real freedom and democracy can take place. Then that devil bush should stand for war crimes against humanity and made to pay reparations for the rape of Iraq. And all his accomplices, including the wretched poodle b-liar, CNN (fantasy channel), BBC, and all other media accomplices.

Praise be to Saddam Hussien- the real president of Iraq.

fed-up-

obviously you are trying to get someone's goat with that last statement, but that is just sick.

Staying in Iraq for 10 years, at far lower troop levels, is assured. We are still in Germany and Japan (60 years), Korea (50 years) and the Balkans (10 years).
The Iraqis want us gone, but not yet. And Iraqis overwhelmingly believe that their lives are better without Saddam, and will be better still in the future. The choice, as Sen. McCain has said, was not between war and a benign status quo. Where are marches to bring back saddam? Not even the Sunnis want that.
We already had a debate on this, and Bush won. Elections matter, here and in Iraq, though true representative government will take decades to develop there, as in did in many places (Korea, for one).
WOW grieves for Iraqi dead, as do I, but I grieve for the hundreds of thousands that saddam raped, totured and murdered, too, and am happy he is gone.

US military troops are still in the Philippines after ONE HUNDRED YEARS PLUS. Under US tutelage, Filipinos are bought and sold all over the globe like slaves and cattle. This year, one million Filipinos were exported out of the country to work in 168 countries, mostly as maids and servants. Their earnings pay interest on loans from the IMF/WB to corrupt puppet Philippine governments. The US managed to create this "democracy" by killing one million Filipinos from 1898-1910 and thus breaking the will of the original insurgents. Iraqis, beware; this fate is what's in store for you under the US.

Well jazmine, we still have troops in Germany and Japan too, but those countries seem to be doing quite well, even though we brought them democracy at the point of our bayonets--and even nuclear bombs. They now have the freedom to hate the U.S. and oppose it if they wish--just as the Phillipines did when their government kicked the U.S. out of military bases like Subic Base.

Democracy isn't necessarily neat and clean and freedom isn't free, but the majority of Iraqis will be far better off without Saddam in the long term. Keep in mind that between Saddam's brutal internal rule, his invasion of Iran and Kuwait, his war against the Kurds and his suppression of the Shiite uprising in 1991 the death toll easily exceeds one million--5,000 Kurds in a single day with chemical weapons at Halabja. I, for one, am proud to be American.

The long term presence of American Forces in Europe was only an occupation for a short period of time after the war. The Soviet Union and its army scared Germany and Western Europe, and we were there to prevent or oppose an invasion. Our long term presence in Europe, as in Japan and South Korea, were products of the Cold War. Their fear of Communist invasions quicky turned foes into "friends".
In 1950, these fears were given life when North Korea invaded South Korea. North Korea was a client state of the Soviet Union. After the end of WWII, the Soviet Union had occupied the North and the U.S. moved into the South.
However, to make a long story short, the invasion pushed us back to Busan (Pusan) and MacArthur attacked their flank with the Inchon landing. U.S. along South Korean forces pushed them back to the Yalu River. China felt threatened and jumped into the war and we ended the fighting near the 38th parallel with a truce. We have been sitting in South Korea and Japan ever since 1950 because of that continuing threat to those country.
We didn't invade China because they were still closely associate with the Soviet Union who by that time had nuclear weapons. No one was interested in a nuclear war. As North Vietnam was allied with China and the Soviet Union during that conflict, we didn't go into North Vietnam because of the danger of a nuclear conflict with both of those powers.
As to the Middle East, during the Cold War, our "Friendship" or "oppositon" to countries in that region had more to do with which side they were on in the Cold War. Of course, Saudi Arabia was a special case. Because of the oil business, they have been our oldest allies in the Middle East. We have had conservative governments and their conservative opposition to Communism made us natural allies. They had a part of Iran/Contra.
Until this stupidity in Iraq, we never occupied any part of the Middle East. We were offered mandate there by the British after WWI, but Woodrow Wilson, bless him, turned them down.

It is my hope that the new Iraqi Government will asks us to leave. The American people would not stand for the occupation of a country with a freely elected government.

By the way, the assertion Bush keeps making that the political developments in Iraq will influence the rest of the Middle East is ridiculous to anyone who actually talks to anyone from the region. Arabs mostly believe that Iraq is laboring under an oppressive foreign military occupation.

You can't bring up Iraq without them saying, "The Americans are doing such horrible things there."

They think of Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, and of the Ministry of Interior's secret torture cells, not of parliamentary debates.

Few think the Iraqi elections are aboveboard, and few are very interested in them.

In Beirut, the newspapers have been putting a short article on the elections below the fold every day since Wednesday, and that is about it. It isn't even really positioned as important news; the New York Times puts it higher on the page than most Arab newspapers.

An American living in Egypt who was teaching out in the provinces in a major city told me about recently witnessing a student demonstration that included a skit.

Thousands of students had come out, and some grade schoolers were there in the front row. On the steps of an academic hall, Islamist students enacted a play about an Iraqi suicide bomber blowing up US troops, to enormous glee and applause.

That's what most Arabs think about Iraq, on the outside. They don't want to emulate an American-occupied country. Bush's naive conviction that his project is exemplary reminds me of the way the Communists in Russia initially thought that all the factory workers in the West would want immediately to imitate their worker's paradise. Of course, few wanted to give up their unions and consumer lifestyle so as to become the wards of a one-party state.

Likewise, American Imperial "democracy" strikes most Arabs as paternalistic and hypocritical, masking a police state of a sort they are all too familiar with.

http://juancole.com/

"...his war against the Kurds and his suppression of the Shiite uprising in 1991 the death toll easily exceeds one million--5,000 Kurds in a single day with chemical weapons at Halabja. I, for one, am proud to be American."

Your information about Halabja is false. Go check the actual history and you will find that Halabja was actually a battle in the Iran-Iraq War.

Halabja was occupied by Iranian forces on March 15 1988. The gas attack came the following day, during an Iraqi counterattack.

I'm not saying this to defend Saddam, who deserves everything that's coming to him. I'm saying it because it's the historical truth. And I'm tired of seeing history rewritten by the US govt and its supporters.

As a matter of fact, at the time, the US was backing Saddam, and the State Dept therefore blamed the Halabja gas attack on the Iranians. A certain Sen John McCain was still repeating that claim a year later, as was the Pentagon intelligence establishment. Look it up. The State Dept spokesman's name then was Charles Redman.

It was only in 1990, when Saddam irritated the US govt by invading Kuwait, that they suddenly realised Halabja had been a purely Iraqi gas attack.
Moral of the story: Don't get your history from the US Govt.

PS KB, no doubt back in 1988, when the US government was covering for Saddam's atrocities and giving him satellite photos to better target his chemical bombardments, you were also "proud to be an American."

Same pride, different reason presumably.

Some people are just looking for an excuse to feel proud, to feel superior. It's called nationalism.