OT: Eating Crow....

Now, Kim, that's not a very leftist, touchy-feely sort of thing to say; is it.

My home page:

" In walks the village idiot and his face is all aglow; he's been up all night listening to Mohammad's radio" W. Zevon

Oh, then it's OK. They were just a bunch of ragheads. Our God is bigger than their God and all that...Kim M

Move to Massachusetts? Kim M

Didn't Rumsfeld say the troops would be home by November 2003?

Kim M

I thought that was OUR current plan.

The region known today as Iraq was three separate provinces under the Ottoman Empire, corresponding roughly to the Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni regions of today.

1. Say What? The three empires governments collapsed before November 11, and the successor states declared their independance and were all fighting border wars with each other long before Versailles. Kim M

"Bill Woodier" wrote

Bill - he was mocking the original quote.

KL

Actually, that works for me but I don't think the Turks would put up with it and the Sunnis would probably object to being cut out of the oil revenues.....

Yeah - brunettes rule!

except for christina. (that a angry bird chirp i hear?)

Hssss. Does the prey hear the hawk?

pray he don't

Am I the only one who would like to know the truth about how Clint Foster's body ended up in a car on the BW Parkway??

Bill Shuey

As a portion of the Turkish Empire, with Turkish troops who would lop off heads at the drop of a fez keeping order

The Empires of Germany, Austria and Turkey were broken up by the Victorious European Powers as essentially booty for the victors. If you look at the First World War, Empires and land acquisitions were the basic cause of the War. The idea that the war was to make the World "Safe for Democracy' was simply bullshit used to conn the dumb Americans into getting into the War on the side of the British/French?Belgians. Hell, there was no more undemocratic country in Europe than post-Victorian England. You either belonged to the classes or the masses and there was little chance of crossing the class barrier. We made our biggest mistake of the 20th Century in April of 1917 when we got into that war. We upset the balance of power in Europe with that move and all that followed in the next 80 years was after effect.

Bill Shuey retired D.o.D.

and the royal navy boarded, shot at and actually sunk u.s. ships. they did more pre u.s entry than the germans. and 20 odd years later, churchill tried to get us in by a lot of dirty tricks.

To a large extent, assuming the worst from the Iraqis will probably get you the worst.

First point: the Iraqi Shiites have little in common culturally with the Iranians apart from the flavor of Islam they practice. Granted, this is not trivial, but they are mostly of Arabic extraction, not Persian, and most are not cut of the same cloth as this fanatic Al Sadr. Indeed, they span the spectrum from the fundamentalist to the secular. Being afraid to trust them with the reins of democracy is a serious error.

Second point: the Sunnis, like the Shiites, are weary of war. The realistic ones will recognize that they are not going to dominate politics in Iraq from here on. Their advantage is that they can call on the support of other Sunni Arab states for the betterment of all Iraq. Will they? Who the heck knows?--there are a lot of unreconstructed Baathists, not to mention newly-introduced foreign terrorists, to foul the brew.

Third point: the Kurds are a fractious lot, but at least they've been practicing something resembling democracy for a few years now. Yeah, they want a lot of autonomy, and yeah, the Turks are unthrilled about Kurdish power, but the Turkish record as not exactly pristeen. For the sake of larger democratic reforms, I'm not sure I care that much about Turkish sensibilities.

So that's the scenario under which democracy is plausible for Iraq. I don't know if it could be made to work, but trying to 'give' them what we think democracy is is likely to fail. Oh, by the way, if any of you forgot, I'm not a neocon--I'm an unalloyed liberal. Given that we have brought the situation to what it is now, the Iraqis deserve a shot at democracy on their terms.

Mark Schynert

deserve a shot at democracy on their >terms.

That is the first bit of sense to appear on this group for some time.

England. You either >belonged to the classes or the masses

A rather sweeping statement there. Do you mean England was less democratic that Scotland, Ireland and Wales? Was it more democratic during Victorias reign?

It was post Victoria that women got to vote.

(By the way we have never disenfranchised any> >